The thing is, a chase is never a flat-out race. You have to look to the danger. Find the danger, and you'll find the challenge. Often these will require Defy Danger to overcome, but not always.

The thing is, sometimes a chase is a flat-out race. :D In the example which cropped up in our game, it was exactly that: there was no danger of getting lost, getting hurt, or getting bogged down; we simply needed to determine whether the PCs were able to catch up with the orcs (and maybe force a fight) before they alerted the giants. As simple as that. It literally was a very long corridor with a door at the end, and the PCs chasing the orcs. The chase *was* the challenge.

Sure, I could have tried throw lots of other stuff at them, split them up, had bad guys turn up, have the orcs turn and fight instead of run away, trying to turn the fiction into something else which I knew the rules coped with, but that felt really bogus, like I was rewriting the scenario and the locations and not allowing a certain set of events to occur because the rules had a blind spot. Saying, "no, we can't narrate it that way, the rules don't support it" is not my preferred way to play an RPG. ;-)

Now, as I said, I *could* have re-phrased the fiction so that the PCs were trying to stop the orcs before the giants saw them. That *kind of* works, although it's a bit funky and feels like I'm fudging the narrative to fit the rules. That would have been a straight Defy Danger roll, although at the time it felt a bit too meta: the danger was the giants finding out they were there because the orcs had told them because the PCs hadn't been able to stop them... ;-)

So, I don't think the DW rules do have a blind spot; I just think the kind of action where the PCs are stopping the NPCs from doing something isn't explicit in the current rules book, unless you zoom out so much to find an eventual Danger to Defy that the action you wanted to handle becomes somewhat irrelevant anyway - *except* of course for physical combat and class moves such as magic, etc - and, like HyveMynd says, when it's the other way round (PCs escaping from NPCs), Defy Danger works fine anyway. It's a bit like how there's a thief move for *detecting and disabling* traps, but not setting them ("attacking" using a trap - although there is a thief move for creating poisons...) Those areas where the rules are explicit clearly use dice rolls to resolve; so why not those areas where they're not explicit? Hell, I don't think it's even a custom move - it's simply something currently not explicitly covered but which is implied. Jeremy's "Race against Time" and "Pursue Your Quarry" moves cover the same ground as the notional, top-level "Stop the NPCs' Move" I was wondering about being "behind" Volley, Hack & Slash, etc, so it's clearly something that's cropped up in other games. I think it's a useful Move to have in the GM arsenal for instances like this, rather than forcing the fiction to be something else.

Cheers,

Sarah

Hi folks,

I'm a new member of the forums and a Dungeon World n00b - I've played two sessions so far. Last session we had a scene where the PCs were chasing a bunch of fleeing, non-fighty orcs to prevent them from warning a bunch of giants about their presence, and I got a bit stumped for how to run a chase scene using the DW rules. I was looking for something a bit crunchy, but the only move which seemed even remotely applicable was Defy Danger, with the "danger" being the giants got warned. That seemed a bit lame - I ended up allowing the PCs do each do damage once before the orcs got to the giants, taking out as many as they could in a single move.

Still didn't feel right. How do you run chases in DW?

Cheers,

Sarah