Something that I’ve never liked about d20/D&D is the fact that the Speed attribute is essentially static. It works well for tactical combat, insofar as most people know they can move 6 squares on the grid (30 feet) during any given turn. However, for cinematic events such as chase sequences, static speeds don’t really work. If, for example, the heroes are being chased through the woods by a ravening werewolf, and the werewolf has a higher speed, it’ll catch them eventually. It’s not much fun to know that the PCs basically have no mechanical way to win that chace sequence. Enter: the Speed check.

Speed checks follow the same basic mechanics as most other rolls in d20: you roll a twenty-sided die and add any relevant bonuses, comparing it either to a static DC, or to an opponent’s roll. The ‘relevent bonus’, in this case, would be your Speed bonus, which you get by dividing your Speed by 5; the results for most common Speeds are summarized in the table below.

So, if that werewolf is chasing the party through the woods, and it has a Speed of, say, 40, that means that it has a +8 Speed bonus, compared to the party’s bonuses of +3 to +6, generally. Now, the werewolf still has an advantage in this chase, but the party can get away, if they’re lucky.

You can add further variation to this system via circumstance modifiers. If they’re running through heavy underbrush, you could give the party a -2 penalty, except for the druid, whose class abilities allow him to ignore such things. If you’re using the favored environment variant of the ranger’s favored enemy ability (see Unearthed Arcana), you might allow the Ranger to add his favored environment bonus to his Speed bonus while in that environment.

Chases are not the only application for this varient rule, either. Some traps might seem to require a little more than a simple Reflex save. Say a player has to outrun a rolling boulder, like Indiana Jones. You might require the player to succeed in a DC 15 speed check, possibly with his Reflex save modifier added, in order to outrun the boulder. Maybe, instead of a single check, you rule that the player must run for five rounds in order to get to a location where he can step aside and allow the boulder to roll past him; in this case, the Reflex bonus would probably only apply to the first roll, and the DC might get higher with each successive round as the boulder gains momentum. You might, however, allow a bonus to successive rolls if the PC beat the previous roll by a significant margin, allowing him to gain a lead gradually.

In the end, this is basically just a way to add a little variation to static speeds, in order to make the game a little more cinematic.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 31st, 2004 at 4:23 pm and is filed under House Rules. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.