Whether it’s Captain America pursuing Bucky while fending off Black Panther or the Hawkeyes getting caught in a car chase with the mob, chase scenes make an exciting set piece for our heroes to play through. While not as ubiquitous in superhero stories as they are in other action stories, chase sequences are an important part of action storytelling. They can be utilitarian by moving the heroes from one important location to another, a capstone to a scene’s action, or even the inciting incident of the story.

Before designing a chase sequence you must decide what type of chase it will be. There are four archetypical chase types:
Catch: The heroes are chasing after an escaping target.
Countdown: The heroes have to get to a location before a certain amount of time passes.
Escape: The heroes have to get away from someone chasing them.
Race: Multiple parties, including the heroes, try to get to a location first.

Once you know what type of chase you’re running you can now start building the sequence. A sequence is made out of the different obstacles the heroes will have to bypass during the chase.

Here’s an example sequence: Star-Lord is in his ship chasing Dar-Benn’s ship to catch her.
Obstacle 1. Dar-Benn flys through an astroid belt trying to lose Star-Lord.
Obstacle 2. She flies past a black hole, hoping to escape long enough to jump.
Obstacle 3. A space octopus attacks both ships and damaging Dar-Benn’s.
Obstacle 4. Finally, the ship flies low near an alien city before crashing.

Now that you have a sequence you need to decide how the heroes can overcome each obstacle. First, decide on a target number for each obstacle, usually 10 + the hero’s rank. Next make a list of three possible solutions to each obstacle and decide which one is hardest, which is easiest, and which is of average difficulty and assign them each a different Ability score. Hard solutions increase the TN by +2, while easy solutions lower the TN by -2. For example, for Star-Lord is rank 5 so his base TN for the obstacle is 15. To get through the astroid field he could try flying through trusting his own piloting skills (hard – TN 17 Agility check), calculate a route through the field and follow it (easy – TN 13 Vigilance check), or program the computer to jump to the other side of the field (average – TN 15 Logic check).
NOTE. These three solutions are not, and should not be, the only ones players can use. They are only a rough guideline to help you at the table and quick options you can give your players if they seem lost.

With the sequence decided you must now decide what the requirements for ending the sequence is. There are two primary ways of doing this. The simplest is to have the heroes suffer health or focus damage whenever they fail a check, and have them continue to the next obstacle.
The second is to create a total number of successes that they need to reach before a certain number of failures finish the chase, with fantastic successes counting as two successes. For example, Star-Lord needs to get 3 successes before he gets 2 failures otherwise Dar-Benn escapes. He succeeds his check to navigate the astroid field but fails to control his ship in the black hole putting him behind again. He now has 1 success and 1 failure. When the space octopus attacks he fails his check, which means Dar-Benn escapes, he decides to spend a point of Karma to reroll a dice and gets a fantastic success instead. He now has 3 successes meaning he evades the octopus and catches Dar-Benn’s ship.

Finally, when designing the ending to a chase sequence we need to answer two questions.

1. What happens if/when the players break the expected sequence of play?
For example, if one players Daredevil is chasing Bullseye through a dense back alley. How does the sequence change when the other players Nightcrawler teleports in front of him.
The easy answer to this is, congratulate them. They used their powers in a useful way. But what if Bullseye was supposed to escape into the mutant trafficing warehouse our heroes are searching for. Creating an answer, even one as simple as Bullseye receiving a text message on his phone with a reminder of the address, is an important final step. Remember, it is almost always better to reward players for using their abilities in intelligent ways then force them into the exact sequence you created.

2. What happens if/when the players fail?
For example, Spider-Man (Peter Parker) is racing against Venom to the hospital where Aunt May is staying. How does the sequence change when Spider-Man fails every check?
The easy answer is to have the bad thing happen, in this case Venom eats Aunt May before Spider-Man arrives. Alternatively, nothing changes and everyone arrives at the same time as expected. Either of these options are rather boring. One immediately ends the tension, since the worst outcome has happened. In the other example, the chase has no meaning. Having their be a consequence for failure is important but it should increase the tension of a situation, never decrease it. In this example maybe Venom has infected some of the orderlies so now there is a second or third symbiote for present. This means that any threat to civilians is increased and Aunt May has to be protected from an increased number of threats.