Taking a break from some #DnD design work to talk about designing 'moving encounters.' This is an encounter that occurs in motion, such as on top of a speeding train.

My main example of this kind of design in action comes from a part in Wranglers of Westhallow. The players, driving/riding a wagon, are pursued by several wagons of enemies pulled by giant hogs.

The players (and NPCs) have the ability to jump between wagons during the fight. VVV

"But Alex, you handsome fiend," you say probably, "How do you account for failed ability checks to leap from place to place? What happens if they fall off the wagon and onto the ground?"

Yep, this is the big problem with moving encounters.

The second you hit the ground in a moving encounter, you're suddenly 60+ feet back because the vehicle(s) of motion have continued onward.

So how did I account for people hitting the ground in this #DnD encounter?

It's real simple: they can't.

The adventure includes two short tables to account for two likely outcomes: trying to leap to a location and failing, or falling in general.

In either case, the results are not good--not terrible, but not what the player wanted when they tried to avoid falling or tried to jump.

In PbtA/Dungeon World terms, consequences can be 'hard moves' or 'soft moves.' "You fall to the ground and the wagons leave you behind" is a pretty hard move. These tables are basically just examples of soft moves.

Think about really good, fun movie scenes that embrace the concept of "No hard moves."

Here's a good one: the barrel-riding scene from The Hobbit. In fact, the first and second Hobbit movies both contain master-class moving/chase sequences for #DnD reference.

In a moving encounter (and this can be applied to good chases too) there are no failures, only complications. Complications, especially prepared ones, create tension and action that pushes a scene a lot further than the base game rules normally do.

Falling off a train sucks. Instead:
-Grab onto one of whatever the heck those swing-arm posts are and end up right back on top of the train, though further away.
-You get knocked around and end up going through the window into the fine dining car, to the shock of the nobles.

You can get the wind knocked out of you, land prone, get repositioned, get turned around, get a tea kettle on your head for all I know--but you're not going to whoopsy your way off the side of that train in a permanent way.

You may have guessed, but there's a name for the kind of moving scenes where the heroes aren't going to hard-fail the basic act of existing in the scene:

It's called pulp action, baybeeee

Did you hate Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Because if one of your #DnD players did this it would be the highlight of their goddamn MONTH

One of #DnD's deepest flaws is an atmosphere of binary pass/fail. We're much too conditioned to treat a missed ability check as Bad Thing Happens. A good action scene, a cinematic action scene, doesn't have Bad Things, they have Less Than Ideal Things.

Decouple your ideas about pass/fail states from how you're running movement and action in encounters. Start embracing complications, twists, and other narrative tools to keep players in the thick of it.

There WILL be moments where it seems narratively impossible for someone to not fall off the back of a truck. That's okay. Somehow, impossibly, there's a bunch of friendly monkeys with vines and let's not worry about relative speeds; you catch back up.

How many times have you done/heard this at the #DnD table:
-X thing happens, someone begins to fall/fail
-The DM: "Uh, quick, make a Dex save to catch the edge!"
-The player fails.

Hey-pesto abracadabra, just don't do this

When you're used to hard-moves as a DM, your "oh shit" recovery method will often be "Uh, try another binary pass/fail! Hope you make this one!" Compounding failures will frustrate the player and make you feel more 'painted into a corner' from a narrative standpoint.

If you planned this encounter, plan some little bullet points for soft/hard fail states.

If the wagons are careening down a winding mountain road, the player who fell off can ride a rattling handcart straight down the terrain before getting launched right back to the fray.

They fell off a cliff? A springy tree branch catches them and yeets them back up the side.

The more you prepare and practice and embrace this approach, the more you'll be able to improvise really bonkers and varied fail states.

Final point: some moving encounters should be fail-able.

"You sick sexy bastard," you definitely just shouted, "What did I read this thread for?"

Well hang on a second, let me explain.

And uh, thank you for the compliment

Remember how we've been talking about narrative tools? Well objective failure is also a narrative tool, and you (meaning you as a DM and you as a broad D&D group) should learn to employ it.

Opening chase scene in Casino Royale? Bonkers. Love it. 10/10 "Strength (Athletics) pursues Dexterity (Acrobatics)."

Best part about it? Bond fails.

It's like a 10 minute chase scene! They bust through construction site walls! They jump off cranes!

And the dude gets away. Now, Bond sees where he goes (an embassy), but he can't just continue the Chase Scene at that moment. There's a hard line in the action, a scene reset.

The dice might make it seem mechanically preordained that your players are gonna get forced off the train, or the bad guy is going to get away. At first blush, the players have hard-failed their immediate objective (the encounter/the chase).

Again, you apply fail-forward ideas to a seemingly hard-fail state.

As the PC grabs fruitlessly for a handhold, they rip clothing from one of their opponents. Something in the pocket or about the item itself is a clear clue to their next destination.

One of the lackeys knocked off the train groans nearby. They're just some hired goon, but they eavesdropped a conversation about where that convoy is headed next.

As you get more comfortable with these kinds of scenes, you'll start to identify places where you can plant those fail-forward seeds in the middle of the action. A piece of paper flies out and a player snatches it, or you note the enemy's soft landing in the ditch.

These won't just provide fail-forward 'outs' for encounters you planned to have hard fail-states. If an encounter is dragging on or it suddenly becomes more interesting from a story perspective, you can shift a soft-fail encounter like this into a harder one.

A 'soft-move hard-fail' is "He gets away but you see him run into the embassy" a la Casino Royale. A "hard-move hard-fail" should still have those clues and seeds that point players in the right direction, even if they can't resume the action RIGHT NOW.

I'm bad at ending threads so

Sigh I'll do a plug I guess

I can come on your podcast and sound a lot dumber than this thread while talking about D&D stuff

A random group on Tabletop Simulator once said "You have the voice of someone with an economics show on NPR" so that's kind of a ringing endorsement