What has people's experience been of running (or playing in) race style adventures. You know the manner of thing - race against other parties to get to the Thing, race to get to the safe place whilst being pursued by thing, race to get somewhere before thing happens. All that stuff.
There are a whole lot of movies like that. Everything from It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World and Rat Race starring Mr. Bean, to Run Lola Run and even ones that kind of weirdly fit like Spielberg's Duel. Note I'm not including things like The Fugitive where it's about hiding and uncertainty where you're going. I'm specifically talking about the idea of a fixed, probably known, destination and usually a time component to get there.
I ask because it's a trope and every now and then somebody tries it but I've never been able to make it work well. And it's been long enough since my last failure that the lesson has become unlearned and I'm tempted to run a race style adventure. Something along the lines of "get to this thing you know roughly where it is before your competitors get to it" plotline. The weaknesses of the approach are, I think, fairly obvious. It lacks player decision making as you hand out the next planned event on the straight line, dice are rolled, continue along the line. And it can be hard to generate the sense of urgency and risk that movies deploy to make it work when people are sitting around a table joking and wanting to deliberate plans all night long.
Anybody got any thoughts or experience with this. I kind of like a challenge as a GM. I can make a mystery or a dungeon crawl or the ever-recurrent "you're going to a ball" adventure, that's no problem. Making a fun siege scenario or a fun race scenario or a fun one-room adventure. These are challenges. I've never got this to click and I want to. I want excitement and comedy and tension and a ticking clock. The genre is sci-fi for what it's worth but I'm interested in any ideas someone can come up with for structuring it, for introducing player agency into a fixed destination, for at-the-table tricks and techniques. Whatever stops it feeling feeling predictable and lacking in meaningful choices.
