Non-Standard grids for battles in 'dreams'

[Genth]

Hi, in one of my campaigns dreams are going to be having an important role, and I wanted to use a different grid to the square one in order to represent the.. odd geometry of dreams. I was thinking a hex grid, but then that was boring.

So I'm thinking of using something like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhombitrihexagonal_tiling with the rule that you can only move, like a hex grid, between shapes with shared faces.

Thoughts? Pitfalls? The hope is that it makes the encounters appreciably different to what they normally would get, and dreams are supposed to be weird.

[NichG]

What about something where you can grow your own grid? Basically the valid moves (for each 5ft you could normally move) are:

- Attach your current space to another existing space
- Create a new space attached to your previous space
- Traverse a link between two spaces
- Remove a link between your current space and a connected space

So this makes ranged attacks very weird - you have to spend a 5ft step to make them not ranged, or have some connected path already existing, but arrows can fly around corners and things like that if you do in fact have a connected path.

[Genth]

That is an awesome idea and I am stealing it. But it might be somewhat difficult to do... maybe if I got a set of tokens that you could place down on the grid to 'actualize' it. I'd need a lot of tokens though!

[Mastikator]

Why not just randomize the position of each player at the beginning of a round? Or do a corridor with rooms and everyone who isn't in a room by the end of their turn is moved to a random location in a random room? Or just do away with the positioning, everyone is both adjacent to everyone and also in archery appropriate range.

[Calen]

Depending on the game format you use you could simply take a dry erase marker and whiteboard and draw a circle/square for each space and a line for each connection.

[AttilaTheGeek]

Space doesn't always work right in dreams. Sometimes, directions are not what you think they are, and the shortest distance between two points is not a straight line. There is a tiling that I think would perfectly capture what you're going for: uniform square tiling (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/31/Uniform_tiling_45-t0.png) on the hyperbolic plane! Every one of those lines is defined to be straight, but I think it would do a great job capturing the dreamlike quality of space being irregular. It's also just asking for you to put the macguffin or the BBEG right in the middle if it's powerful enough to literally bend space around it.

There's also (6,4,2) tetrahexagonal tiling (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/Uniform_tiling_3.4.4.4.4.png), good for if the encounter takes place mostly in a single direction, for example, if the enemies are on one side and the PCs on
the other. Remember that all those lines are still straight lines, which you can use to really mess with your players' heads.

[Socksy]

I once ran a fight on a dream plane attached to Limbo. CHA was used instead of STR to attack, and you could make a Will save to disbelieve the attack for lots less damage. WIS was there instead of DEX to AC, too. Fortunately there were no monks, or things may have got a little confusing.

Alienists, Allips, and various other 'special cases' got to use their Charisma instead of their Wisdom for most things.

[erikun]

Are you looking for something simply unusual-looking, or do you want some kind of unusual mechanics to represent movement inside the dream?

Snub square tiling (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snub_square_tiling) is probably what I would go for if you want a functionally simple yet unusual looking grid. It's really not much different from a standard square grid, although it certainly looks quite bizarre.

If you are looking for some unusual mechanics, then you could allow mental variables to create unusual movement or even attacks around the grid. You could also compose the grid of individual squares (rather than a full playmat) and allow characters to, say, add squares (shoving others aside to make room) or move squares around as part of "manipulating the dream."

[Jay R]

Whatever you do, make sure you've worked out a plan for area effects - cones, cubes, spheres, lines, whatever might come up.

[Geostationary]

You could do something similar to the set-up in singularity chess (https://lh3.ggpht.com/_fPSqkgrOu6o/TLH7L9vMcyI/AAAAAAAARis/TTnaaILrj84/s1600/P1010900.JPG). Certainly twisty that way.

[OldTrees1]

I made a map that mixed pentagons and hexagons. I used it for caves since it made irregular rooms quite easily.

[Science Officer]

What about bizarre topologies? Say, on the surface of a sphere, or a torus?

[Mono Vertigo]

What about bizarre topologies? Say, on the surface of a sphere, or a torus?

Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com/news/post/2010/06/28/dd-in-the-elemental-chaos-part-1) did that. You can find the logistics behind the link! It looks pretty cool.

[Knaight]

Polar graphing paper could work quite nicely, particularly if you set whoever is having the dream in the center, and have their movements move everyone else.

[Genth]

Thanks! All of these ideas are awesome, though some more difficult to accomplish than others, heh. I also thought about using one of those old MU* maps, with the rooms and links? So quite limited movement across well. I'll be keeping all of these ideas to use! Especially the Hyperbolic regular tilings. I just need to find a way to get it on paper.

Another thought I had, but for fighting on the distance-is-wonky shadow plane - Hex grid, assign numbers to the six directions, then roll 2 d6s, and whatever numbers come up, those directions are 'hard', and take two movements to get across.

Actually, there's a LOT of fun stuff you can do with this :D