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View Full Version : Tactical Combat Positioning Without the Grid, PEACH



Stubbazubba
2014-08-19, 12:15 AM
I've just finished a blog post describing a gridless tactical positioning system for use in D&D-like RPGs (http://criticalinsignificance.wordpress.com/2014/08/18/the-noise-before-defeat/). I wanted it to fairly replicate D&D's tactical positioning considerations formally, primarily for online play, though I couldn't help but throw in a few tactical tweaks that I think add some flare.

Let me know what you think; this is just the initial framework, I'm looking to improve it. Would this be useful in your game? What would make it more useful for you?

Eldan
2014-08-19, 03:59 AM
Love it. Will implement.

Interrupt and evade sound fine. I'm not so sure about Defend. Just simply taking attacks for an ally sounds, perhaps, a bit too absolute, you know? The enemy should have a way to get around you.

Proposed change:
Cover: You cover an ally. Enemies trying to close with that ally must first evade you or take an attack of opportunity from you. The ally also gains cover against ranged attacks.


Others:
Flanking I'd just put something like this: "When two or more allied creatures have closed with the same enemy, one of them may spend a move action to move into flanking position, the enemy is then flanked until they successfully evade either flanker."

More reactions: the ability to cover a specific pathway would be nice. Just something like "Standing in a doorway, preventing the enemy from exiting the current zone that way" or "Shoot anyone who enters the zone from that direction with a readied arrow."

Area attacks: this simplifies things like fireballs too. I don't think you mention it, but just saying "burst attacks hit everyone in the area" is quite nice. You'd have to change a few of the finer points, perhaps, for things like burning hands that have small areas intended to hit several people but not necessarily everyone in the area. Maybe a "formation" or "positioning" action?

This also opens the door for interesting warrior abilities, by the way. Interrupt only, well, interrupts actions, but you mention it not dealing damage. There could be a feat or a class ability or whatever "Improved interrupt", so you also deal damage. Or trip or disarm the enemy. Or whatever.

tarkisflux
2014-08-19, 11:35 PM
I'm for it, really really for it. Part of that is because I'm over grids, and part of it is that I wrote up a similar system two years ago and then never did anything with it (I had actually forgotten I'd written it until I read this). I could dump the whole thing here, but instead I think I'll just kick a few ideas your way for fleshing it out.
The reactions are a great touch that I didn't consider at all though. Well done there, really.

Comments!

It is unclear if melee engagement is a mutual thing, or if you still have to engage someone after they have engaged you. I suspect that anyone you engage becomes engaged to you as well, but it's written up only from the engager perspective.
Melee non-reach engagement could use a hard limit. I like 6 creatures of your same size with larger counting as more and smaller counting as less against that total, but the exact numbers could be 8 or 12 instead really (though that makes engagement tracking potentially harder). Call it surrounded perhaps.
You have both offensive engagement and defensive attachment, and that could lead to engagement chains. For example, Bad1 is engaged with Good1, who is attached to Good2, who is engaged with Bad2. It is unclear whether Bad2 can attach to Bad1 without disengaging, or Good2 can engage Bad1 without disengaging.
Flanking as a reaction sounds extremely weird, because you'd have to be engaged to do it. Might be better to just let people flank on engagement if their target is 1) already engaged, and 2) fails a save like they get when they avoid in general. Or spend a move action trying to flank someone they're already engaged with, prompting the same save from the target. Flanking a target should disallow being attached to your flank buddy, unless the target is surrounded.
Getting mobbed should just auto flank, like it already does. An easy way to do it is to say that any creature that is half surrounded by targets of their same size (or equivalent, min 2 probably for super huge things) is automatically flanked.
AoEs that target the entire zone are easy to deal with as Eldan points out. Since positioning isn't being tracking too clearly you should probably not allow people to intentionally exclude targets without a special ability that just lets them. Or let them pick a target, and give everyone not engage chained to that target a save bonus, maybe.
AoEs that don't target the entire zone are harder. I don't know that an action is necessary for them, but you could lean on the engage chain a bit. The target is hit, as is everyone within 1 engage chain step away from them per 5' of spell radius. Everyone else in the zone gets a potentially substantial save bonus based on coverage percentage. This sort of works for short cones as well, if you lose 5-10' of the range if you're not engaged with the target.
Line AoEs are just hard to deal with in this setup. You might want to just declare a number of targets you can hit per zone with a line attack, and let people line up a few more by spending a move action while outside the zone. I dunno, lines are hard.
I support Eldan's Cover suggestion, since it's a bit unlimited right now. I'd be fine with a Defend action that used up AoOs instead though. It just needs to be overcome at some point unless you build for it.
Evade is fun, and I feel like it supports the archetypes who would have high reflex saves. I don't have any productive comments here, I just like that you included it.
I'm not sure why you want to limit action canceling on a successful AoO to 1 per round (and action cancelling as it relates to Full-Attack actions is unclear), unless you're proposing limiting AoOs to 1 per round more generally. The removal of damage is similarly confusing. Justifications please?

Soarel
2014-08-19, 11:44 PM
Well, you've just solved the biggest problem my group has had playing gridless. Thanks.

Eldan
2014-08-20, 02:26 AM
Lines are a problem, yes. Short cones work very well with engagement-chaining, though.


Another thing: ranged weapons and attacks. I'd still like to keep the foot-ranges for out of-combat/utility applications ("Can I shoot that orc at the other side the crater wall?" "I try to sink that other ship with my fireball"), but in combat?

For spells:
Short range: same zone.
Medium range: neighbouring zones.
Long range: line of sight?

For ranged weapons:
No penalty: same zone, see also ranged sneak attack, point blanc shot.
Small penalty: neighboring zone. (-2, perhaps?)
Large penalty: non-neighbouring zones.

For thrown weapons:
No penalty: targets in same engagement chain.
Small penalty: targets in different engagement chain.
Large penalty: targets in neighboring zone.

tarkisflux
2014-08-20, 01:10 PM
Another thing: ranged weapons and attacks. I'd still like to keep the foot-ranges for out of-combat/utility applications ("Can I shoot that orc at the other side the crater wall?" "I try to sink that other ship with my fireball"), but in combat?

For spells:
Short range: same zone.
Medium range: neighbouring zones.
Long range: line of sight?

For ranged weapons:
No penalty: same zone, see also ranged sneak attack, point blanc shot.
Small penalty: neighboring zone. (-2, perhaps?)
Large penalty: non-neighbouring zones.

For thrown weapons:
No penalty: targets in same engagement chain.
Small penalty: targets in different engagement chain.
Large penalty: targets in neighboring zone.

I think your ranges are a bit tighter than they need to be, and drop a lot of the finer points of range differences between weapons and spells. Medium range spells start off at 100+ feet, and that can easily skip an intervening zone. If you want to keep those more generally for out of combat stuff, why not lean on engagement chaining for stuff in zone and zone distances for stuff out of zone? For example:

Within your zone, a foe that is engage-chained to you is treated as being at a distance equal to the number of intervening targets, but never more distant than half of the zone size. A foe that is not engage-chained to you is treated as being at a distance equal to half of the zone size.
Outside of your zone, a foe is treated as being at a distance equal to the distance between the center of your zone and the zone it occupies.
Range limitations or penalties are assessed based on these distances per standard rules.

Now you've got a setup that can handle zones of various sizes, or zones that move over the course of a really big fight. And it interacts with weapon and spell range nuance in expected ways (ranged weapons could probably use less range increment based nuance and spell ranges could certainly be redone in this sort of system, but that's a different discussion I think since you'd probably want them to work the same way on a grid).

Stubbazubba
2014-08-20, 09:42 PM
Love it. Will implement.

Interrupt and evade sound fine. I'm not so sure about Defend. Just simply taking attacks for an ally sounds, perhaps, a bit too absolute, you know? The enemy should have a way to get around you.

Proposed change:
Cover: You cover an ally. Enemies trying to close with that ally must first evade you or take an attack of opportunity from you. The ally also gains cover against ranged attacks.

Yeah, Defend went through several versions before I just settled on one. I like both your suggestions; if it's an inverse Evade, then the attacker makes a check against his target's evasion defense (if the target is evading) and the defender's. If the check does not beat the defender's, then the attacker is engaged only with the defender and not the target. If it beats the defender's but not the target's, then he is engaged with no one, and only if it beats both the defender's and the target's evasion defense is he engaged directly with the target. That brings up an interesting question: if you are attached to an ally who is engaged with an enemy that you are not, is it any easier for you to engage that target? Perhaps you gain a +2 bonus to your engage attempt if your target is already engaged with an ally?

If it's an inverse Intercept, then the attacker rolls their defense against the defender's attack score like usual, except it counts for melee attacks against the defender's ward as well as ranged attacks, spells, etc. If the defender misses, the attacker then still engages with their target (unless the target was evading, in which case he then has to beat that, as well).

I think I prefer the inverse Evade; it only ever necessitates one roll from the attacker even if the target is evading, while the latter could require both a defense roll as well as a roll to engage the target if the target is evading. I also like it better because allowing a defender to Interrupt someone that they weren't already engaged would be an exception to how things are set up to work, and I'd like to avoid those if possible.

Others:

Flanking I'd just put something like this: "When two or more allied creatures have closed with the same enemy, one of them may spend a move action to move into flanking position, the enemy is then flanked until they successfully evade either flanker."

I like this one a lot. It gives you a reason to evade when you're already in melee, and gives you a reason to move when you're in it, as well.


More reactions: the ability to cover a specific pathway would be nice. Just something like "Standing in a doorway, preventing the enemy from exiting the current zone that way" or "Shoot anyone who enters the zone from that direction with a readied arrow."

The line between interrupts and readied actions is a thin one. Abolishing it altogether might be healthy. Some kind of gatekeeping, though, is definitely a good, even a critical, reaction idea.


I'm for it, really really for it. Part of that is because I'm over grids, and part of it is that I wrote up a similar system two years ago and then never did anything with it (I had actually forgotten I'd written it until I read this). I could dump the whole thing here, but instead I think I'll just kick a few ideas your way for fleshing it out.
The reactions are a great touch that I didn't consider at all though. Well done there, really.

Reactions make off-turn actions playable in PbP, that was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to publish this and get it out. People have made abstract Big Fat Squares systems before, but I felt like setting a reaction on your turn that triggered on someone else's who would then resolve it without you needing to be involved would be a boon for a lot of groups. It does necessitate interchangeability between attacks and defenses, though, so someone else can always roll against your pre-selected passive action.





It is unclear if melee engagement is a mutual thing, or if you still have to engage someone after they have engaged you. I suspect that anyone you engage becomes engaged to you as well, but it's written up only from the engager perspective.

You're right, I meant it to be mutual.




Melee non-reach engagement could use a hard limit. I like 6 creatures of your same size with larger counting as more and smaller counting as less against that total, but the exact numbers could be 8 or 12 instead really (though that makes engagement tracking potentially harder). Call it surrounded perhaps.

Yep, in my notes I was playing with as little as 4 before all attackers get disadvantage/penalty, +/- 2 per size category (so 6 Halflings on one Orc or 6 Humans on one Centaur). Then there would be a feat that makes you not count towards that and ignore the penalty even if besides you there are still more than allowed. Call it something like "Squad Tactics."




You have both offensive engagement and defensive attachment, and that could lead to engagement chains. For example, Bad1 is engaged with Good1, who is attached to Good2, who is engaged with Bad2. It is unclear whether Bad2 can attach to Bad1 without disengaging, or Good2 can engage Bad1 without disengaging.

A very interesting scenario. Perhaps by default any of that would be possible (for simplicity's sake), but the attached allies can use up both their move actions on the earlier initiative to move into some kind of formation that disallows the bad guys from maneuvering around without disengaging, while also not allowing themselves to engage the other's target w/o disengaging. Something like "Back to Back." It seems like it would be opposed by interrupt, not evade, though that means in the above situation the enemies don't have much ability to intervene. Maybe that's fine. Or maybe Back to Back should be a reaction? An Improved Tactics feat could relax the restrictions on a bunch of such formations, allowing you to attack any other enemy engaged by someone you are in Back to Back with.




Flanking as a reaction sounds extremely weird, because you'd have to be engaged to do it. Might be better to just let people flank on engagement if their target is 1) already engaged, and 2) fails a save like they get when they avoid in general. Or spend a move action trying to flank someone they're already engaged with, prompting the same save from the target. Flanking a target should disallow being attached to your flank buddy, unless the target is surrounded.

As above, I think I like the latter, though with Improved Tactics you can choose to flank on the original engagement if the enemy is already engaged by an ally. I like the restriction on attachment; if you're flanking, you're generally not attached.




Getting mobbed should just auto flank, like it already does. An easy way to do it is to say that any creature that is half surrounded by targets of their same size (or equivalent, min 2 probably for super huge things) is automatically flanked.

This is a good argument for keeping the "surrounded" threshold at 6.




AoEs that target the entire zone are easy to deal with as Eldan points out. Since positioning isn't being tracking too clearly you should probably not allow people to intentionally exclude targets without a special ability that just lets them. Or let them pick a target, and give everyone not engage chained to that target a save bonus, maybe.
AoEs that don't target the entire zone are harder. I don't know that an action is necessary for them, but you could lean on the engage chain a bit. The target is hit, as is everyone within 1 engage chain step away from them per 5' of spell radius. Everyone else in the zone gets a potentially substantial save bonus based on coverage percentage. This sort of works for short cones as well, if you lose 5-10' of the range if you're not engaged with the target.
Line AoEs are just hard to deal with in this setup. You might want to just declare a number of targets you can hit per zone with a line attack, and let people line up a few more by spending a move action while outside the zone. I dunno, lines are hard.

Yeah, AoEs: I was planning on just changing the areas affected into single, chained up to N, a single chain, up to N chains in a zone, up to N chains in adjacent zones, a single zone, or up to N adjacent zones. That's a bit more substantial of a change, though.




I'm not sure why you want to limit action canceling on a successful AoO to 1 per round (and action cancelling as it relates to Full-Attack actions is unclear), unless you're proposing limiting AoOs to 1 per round more generally. The removal of damage is similarly confusing. Justifications please?



I included the numerical restriction because action denial is potentially a bigger deal than just an AoO, and I wanted to keep parity with Immediate Actions. However, it's also abusable; if the boss monster only gets one evade, then the party will strategize around that, allowing the guy with the best save to attack on the evade, then have everyone else attack after him, and suddenly the evasive monster (or PC) is very not. It might make more sense to tie them to AoOs than Immediate Actions, now that you mention it.

The damage thing is my own miscommunication; Interrupt is action denial in addition to damage, not instead of it. I think I left out an 'also' in that sentence.



Another thing: ranged weapons and attacks. I'd still like to keep the foot-ranges for out of-combat/utility applications ("Can I shoot that orc at the other side the crater wall?" "I try to sink that other ship with my fireball"), but in combat?

For spells:
Short range: same zone.
Medium range: neighbouring zones.
Long range: line of sight?

For ranged weapons:
No penalty: same zone, see also ranged sneak attack, point blanc shot.
Small penalty: neighboring zone. (-2, perhaps?)
Large penalty: non-neighbouring zones.

For thrown weapons:
No penalty: targets in same engagement chain.
Small penalty: targets in different engagement chain.
Large penalty: targets in neighboring zone.

I thought about adapting ranges, then decided people could estimate with the listed ranges well enough. Under 30' would just be within the same zone, under 60' is within 1 adjacent zone, under 90' within 3, etc., etc. More or less than that and I'm not really sure the differences come up often enough to complicate the system.



Within your zone, a foe that is engage-chained to you is treated as being at a distance equal to the number of intervening targets, but never more distant than half of the zone size. A foe that is not engage-chained to you is treated as being at a distance equal to half of the zone size.
Outside of your zone, a foe is treated as being at a distance equal to the distance between the center of your zone and the zone it occupies.
Range limitations or penalties are assessed based on these distances per standard rules.

Now you've got a setup that can handle zones of various sizes, or zones that move over the course of a really big fight. And it interacts with weapon and spell range nuance in expected ways (ranged weapons could probably use less range increment based nuance and spell ranges could certainly be redone in this sort of system, but that's a different discussion I think since you'd probably want them to work the same way on a grid).

I like this, other than the need to calculate distance based on chained targets. Chained targets probably aren't all in a straight line, so calculating distances to them as such seems more fiddly than it is beneficial. You could just make the lowest range "chained," equivalent to roughly 10-15', then within the zone, up to 1 away, 2, etc.

DMMike
2014-08-21, 01:33 AM
Would this be useful in your game? What would make it more useful for you?

Good post, great ideas. I probably would not use it in my D&D game, because it removes the problems involved with using a grid for online combat, and replaces them with more systems and rules which, while functional, might add to the complexity that you were trying to avoid.

Try this as a starting point:
There are only two positions in combat: front and back row. Each party has its own rows, and melee weapons are only effective against your opponents' front row. One movement action changes your row. Back row characters are all considered to have cover. Charges can only be made if you start them in your back row. Flanking can be done if your opponents have only one row (all in front or all in back), and you're able to Stealth or Tumble or what-have-you better than your opponents. Then, your opponents lose their ability to move to the back row (since they're flanked).

The simplicity here makes a big assumption: all combatants are constantly moving, and trying to support their comrades.

Regarding spell effects: line effects hit one front row opponent and one back row opponent of your choice. Cones affect one front row opponent and two (or three) back row opponents. Bursts hit two fronts, and two backs.

I could go on, but I should've stopped a while back! I hope I've offered some food for thought!

Stubbazubba
2014-08-21, 09:45 PM
Good post, great ideas. I probably would not use it in my D&D game, because it removes the problems involved with using a grid for online combat, and replaces them with more systems and rules which, while functional, might add to the complexity that you were trying to avoid.

That's fair. What I was trying to do, and this may not have come across clearly in the post, was to make a system that left most of the tactical options of the grid in tact, including movement, distance, AoO, and similar positioning, so that you could plug this into an existing game without cheapening all the movement abilities you have. Grid combat is really complex, but when you actually have a grid and minis, all that information is communicated directly to your eyeballs. It's just that when you take away the concrete aspects that do the heavy lifting of communication and try to just imagine it in the same level of detail, well, it takes much, much more brainpower just to follow precisely what's going on. The act of moving a mini 6 squares in a certain path around certain obstacles is extremely difficult to conceive, describe, and act on with no actual minis or squares. So I decided to simply formalize the relevant interactions there, make them actual things you announce, and leave everything below that level of relevance unmentioned. That is precisely what abstraction is supposed to do; represent some relevant or distinctive facets of the concrete subject without recreating it entirely.


Try this as a starting point:
There are only two positions in combat: front and back row. Each party has its own rows, and melee weapons are only effective against your opponents' front row. One movement action changes your row. Back row characters are all considered to have cover. Charges can only be made if you start them in your back row. Flanking can be done if your opponents have only one row (all in front or all in back), and you're able to Stealth or Tumble or what-have-you better than your opponents. Then, your opponents lose their ability to move to the back row (since they're flanked).

The simplicity here makes a big assumption: all combatants are constantly moving, and trying to support their comrades.

Regarding spell effects: line effects hit one front row opponent and one back row opponent of your choice. Cones affect one front row opponent and two (or three) back row opponents. Bursts hit two fronts, and two backs.

I could go on, but I should've stopped a while back! I hope I've offered some food for thought!

This is something I ran across as I was considering just how far to abstract it. There are games like The One Ring and others that work on just such a more abstract combat positioning system; there is no real location, no real movement being tracked, just abstract relationships to be manipulated. And really, considering how abstract (or at least free-form) every other system in D&D is, such a simplification would really make a lot of sense and possibly bring a sense of harmony between combat and non-combat, instead of the skewed distribution of rules and playtime it is now.

But for my purposes, that wouldn't be D&D. D&D lives or dies based on its combat, IMO. It is the central system, the central aspect the play is focused on, at least for the broadest overlap of groups. To make it feel like D&D, the combat really has to have some depth, some tactics, and lots of options. It requires at least some complexity; not for complexity's sake, but to give you a wide variety of meaningful options to achieve various combat ends. No other system in the game has that depth, for better or worse. I enjoy simplified combat schemes, they are great for more narrative-focused games, many of which I enjoy. But at least for the present, D&D is still a product of its war-gaming roots, and can't really walk so far away from its rules-heavy combat.

That being said, I like your basic framework and might follow up with an even more streamlined combat framework that takes cues from it in the future. Again, D&D's combat rules are disproportionately many and complex, and many might really enjoy a rules-lite combat system. I might even find it is better than the traditional D&D experience if I gave it a real shot. I don't have time to flesh out any ideas right now, but hopefully soon I can come back and put something up.

tarkisflux
2014-08-25, 05:57 PM
Were you going to post a more complete, updated version of this Stubbazubba?

Eldan
2014-08-27, 04:13 AM
If he's not doing it, I'm tempted to do it myself, now. I was working on a completely overhauled combat system for a while now and if I took this and my own disorganized scribblings, maybe I could turn it into something.

Eldan
2014-08-28, 02:53 AM
I was thinking about this a bit more, when I was looking on how to formalize some of the changes we had suggested here and another thing occured to me that I'm not quite sure how to solve: movement speeds.

We more or less assumed that everyone can cross a zone in one move action. But what if oen creature is very slow? Say, a tiny creature, a slowed creature, a creature moving at half speed over difficult terrain. How does one implement that? And going from that, how would one implement one creature using its superior speed to run away from another, or perhaps run circles around it?

One idea I had was to make a roll to close with another creature, that's modified by speed and perhaps initiative. Does that sound like something that would make sense? It would, perhaps, also give a bit more power back to nimble characters. Say, a Swashbuckler has a class bonus to resist being closed in on, so the enemy guards have problems surrounding them.

CinuzIta
2014-08-28, 03:03 AM
I also have a question about this system (and I beg your pardon if it is already covered somewhere and I missed it!)

How does different sized creatures interact with areas? You explained how to gang up against creatures bigger than the standard characters (6 on 1 if I understood correctly) but what if there is a gargantuan creature on a zone? Does it occupy the whole zone or just a part? In the latter case, how many different creatures can occupy the said zone along with that creature? Or how many Huge creatures can occupy a zone in the same time?

I think one could handle this with common sense but I wanted to know if there are specific solutions to it!


Very very nice work anyway!

Philemonite
2014-08-28, 02:43 PM
That's a lot of comments I will probably read one day.

It's a very interesting idea. Have you ever played 13th Age? It's a gridless game that has similar engagement mechanics.

RedWarlock
2014-08-28, 05:38 PM
I'm going to be seeing if my players are willing to go gridless (some of them are from tabletop roots that might have trouble divorcing from grids) but I might give this a try for my game.

Stubbazubba
2014-08-29, 12:00 PM
Were you going to post a more complete, updated version of this Stubbazubba?

I plan to, but I need to go through and figure out all the edge cases, and decide at what point I have to start rewriting spells, and if I'm willing to do that. IOW, I'm not sure how totally complete it will be, but yes, I will make an updated, more complete version.


I was thinking about this a bit more, when I was looking on how to formalize some of the changes we had suggested here and another thing occured to me that I'm not quite sure how to solve: movement speeds.

We more or less assumed that everyone can cross a zone in one move action. But what if oen creature is very slow? Say, a tiny creature, a slowed creature, a creature moving at half speed over difficult terrain. How does one implement that? And going from that, how would one implement one creature using its superior speed to run away from another, or perhaps run circles around it?

One idea I had was to make a roll to close with another creature, that's modified by speed and perhaps initiative. Does that sound like something that would make sense? It would, perhaps, also give a bit more power back to nimble characters. Say, a Swashbuckler has a class bonus to resist being closed in on, so the enemy guards have problems surrounding them.

Re: Movement speeds

Movement bonuses would come in two flavors: You can move farther, or you can move faster. I know those are kind of two sides of the same coin, so here's what I mean: farther means you can move more than one zone with your move action, while faster means you get a bonus on rolls to close (or your static defense against closing enemies). I won't call them farther and faster in the final text because that is confusing language, but those are the axes on which your movement ability can slide. While these two often coincide (your speed/distance rise and fall together because you're Quicksilver), they also can be separate (your combat training allows you to close quickly but not dash farther, or your size allows you to move farther but not close any faster).

I don't have a problem with allowing Small creatures to move from one zone to another using just their Move Action, because while they could be moving more than 20 ft., they could also be moving 20 ft. or less; this system doesn't care precisely how much it is. This is technically true for Medium creatures, as well; you could be moving about 30 ft., but you could also be moving more or less. I don't think it's worth worrying about, since you can't engage an enemy afterwards either way. We'll throw in Large movement speed, as well. We're abstracting all of that. Creatures smaller than Small probably need to take a Full Round Action to move between zones, but otherwise act like normal within a zone. Creatures larger than Large, then, can move more than one zone on their Move, and can attempt to engage with enemies in an adjacent zone as if they were in the same zone. If they successfully engage, then they have moved to that zone.

Re: Difficult terrain

If the size of the terrain is smaller than one zone, it is an object within that zone that people can interact with, either standing in or pushing people into, etc. Difficult terrain gives a penalty to closing into melee. To leave it requires a move action. If it is larger than one zone, then leaving that zone requires a Full Round Action instead of a Move Action, and every attempt to engage in melee in the zone takes that penalty.

You don't always have to roll to close in on an enemy, though. If they have set their Reaction to anything other than Evade, you can simply declare that you use your Move Action to engage them and you do so, no rolling required. It's only when the target's Reaction is set to Evade that you have to roll to close. If we require a roll every time anyone tries to close with someone else, we've slowed combat down significantly by adding die rolls on a significant number of turns without removing any anywhere else. I didn't want to do that, so I limited the circumstances in which you had to roll to close. If it's important to the target not to enter melee combat, then it's worth rolling for. If it's not that important (because their Reaction is set to something else), then we don't waste time rolling it.


I also have a question about this system (and I beg your pardon if it is already covered somewhere and I missed it!)

How does different sized creatures interact with areas? You explained how to gang up against creatures bigger than the standard characters (6 on 1 if I understood correctly) but what if there is a gargantuan creature on a zone? Does it occupy the whole zone or just a part? In the latter case, how many different creatures can occupy the said zone along with that creature? Or how many Huge creatures can occupy a zone in the same time?

I think one could handle this with common sense but I wanted to know if there are specific solutions to it!


Very very nice work anyway!

Thank you. These are just the questions I was hoping people would ask so I can flesh out the system and make sure it covers all the major use cases, so I'm glad you bring this up.

A Huge creature still occupies less than one zone (though they probably have natural Reach), but a Gargantuan creature occupies/threatens a whole zone, while a Colossal creature occupies/threatens 2. To attack a Gargantuan or Colossal creature, you have to be in (one of) the zone(s) it occupies, and you are considered within the creature's Reach range if you are, even if they haven't taken an action to engage you (so a dragon can attack anyone attacking it and doesn't have to try to "close to melee" when they're so close). This is in addition to their ability to attempt to engage anyone in an adjacent zone (see Re: Movement speeds in my reply to Eldan above).

How many creatures can you squeeze into a zone? By my understanding of the SRD, a Medium creature = 1x1 5 ft. squares, a Large creature = 2x2, Huge = 3x3, Gargantuan = 4x4, and Colossal = 6x6. If a zone is 6x6, then you can fit 36 Medium creatures, 9 Large, 4 Huge, only 1 Gargantuan (because the zone is only about 6x6, you can't fit a second 4x4 creature in it), and just barely 1 Colossal, maybe. Now zone sizes aren't strictly 30 sq. ft., but since we're all just approximating, I think it's fine to keep these numbers. There's no compelling reason to abandon them, and backwards-compatibility that doesn't mess anything up is worthwhile.


That's a lot of comments I will probably read one day.

It's a very interesting idea. Have you ever played 13th Age? It's a gridless game that has similar engagement mechanics.

I have not. How does its engagement mechanics work?

Philemonite
2014-08-29, 12:53 PM
I have not. How does its engagement mechanics work?

You can find the SRD here (http://www.13thagesrd.com/combat-rules), it is quite an interesting read.

Stubbazubba
2014-08-30, 11:09 AM
You can find the SRD here (http://www.13thagesrd.com/combat-rules), it is quite an interesting read.

Thanks.

This is interesting; it seems like it still needs minis and a map, just not a grid? Or at least it needs you to visualize who is moving past who without formal mechanics for determining it. Is that correct?

Philemonite
2014-08-30, 11:36 AM
Thanks.

This is interesting; it seems like it still needs minis and a map, just not a grid? Or at least it needs you to visualize who is moving past who without formal mechanics for determining it. Is that correct?

Movement and positioning is descriptive. You can use a map, but you can just say A is engaged with B, close to C and far from D and E. I never actually got to play it, since every game I applied to never started or died before first battle, so I can't really say how it actually works.