Quote from: talysman;547189You may work in a career where "actual value" has a highly specific meaning, and this may be confusing things, since the way you are using the term is the opposite of its common meaning. Since you contrast 1.4 with an irrational number, maybe you mean "rational value"? That would make sense, since 1.4 is an estimated value or approximate value of √2, not the actual value.

Which is what prompted Premier's crazed tirade.

Quote from: John Morrow;547196Going for coming across as a grating little twerp, then?

Do you really think the distance of a miniature moved one diagonal square on a map board has an "actual value" of √2 using the highly specific meaning that you are using it?  If so, I recommend trying a career in manufacturing, which deals with the dimensions and positioning of real world objects, rather than mathematics or theoretical physics.

Hey, I gave you an "out" so that you could save face and the only one who would look bad would be Premier. Do you really want to rant about how stupid people are for using "actual value" to mean "what the value really is"?

Just accept that what you are talking about is the approximate value, and that approximate values are all that we need to play a game. It will help the thread move on.

Quote from: talysman;547197Hey, I gave you an "out" so that you could save face and the only one who would look bad would be Premier. Do you really want to rant about how stupid people are for using "actual value" to mean "what the value really is"?

That's not what I'm ranting about.  The use of the word "actual" in my original quote did refer to "what the value really is" as compared to the value of 1.5 produced by alternating values of 1 and 2 squares for diagonal movement.  I provided the value 1.4 parenthetically for convenience of comparison between the two values because nobody evaluating the difference between those to values was going to do so to more than a few digits of precision, anyway.  I think my point was clear to anyone not deliberately looking for something to be pedantic about and accurate in a normal vernacular sense.

Quote from: talysman;547197Just accept that what you are talking about is the approximate value, and that approximate values are all that we need to play a game. It will help the thread move on.

How about pointing out that my use of the word "actual" for an approximation of √2 without being carefully identified as an approximation should have been good enough for a casual conversation on an Internet message board about measuring distances when pushing toy soldiers around on a game board?

Quote from: trollock;547034How many orcs can stand around you beating the shit out of you? I'd say it's way less then eight or even six.

Stand in the middle of a 15' x 15' room. How many people could easily stand in a circle around you? 6 to 8 wouldn't be an unreasonable number by any stretch of the imagination.

For example, here's a video of one guy fighting a gang of people. Notice particularly around the 0:25-0:30 mark where he gets surrounded by seven people. Notice that all of them fit comfortably into the width of a single lane of traffic (which places that distance at somewhere between 9 and 15 feet).

Positioning on a grid is still an abstraction of actual positioning. If I'm looking at a battlemap in which a single figure is surrounded by 8 guys, then he's being completely mobbed: Probably ducking back and forth between them if he's not just getting pummeled. But that whole melee is taking up a space 15' x 15'. And that's a significantly large space.

Quote from: daniel_ream;547082Alternately, it would be how the Roman heavy infantry fought for centuries.  There's an old Roman maxim that "a few inches of point is worth any amount of edge" because in a close melee, you just aren't going to have room to swing anything.

Oh, sure, in real life.    To clarify, then:  It would be unusual in a dungeon to be mobbed like that.  Kobolds or goblins, maybe; most humanoids tend to show up in numbers roughly equivalent or slightly higher than the party.

The Romans did tend to box things up a bit, though, so part of the lack of space was their own fault.  Of course, they did that because it was a devastatingly effective tactic.  I guess it evens out.

QuoteFantasy games tend to gloss over the fact that a lot of medieval weaponry was context-dependent, and a great number of weapons that have become standard for fantasy adventurers were originally cavalry weapons and are quite inefficient when you're on foot.

I have not studied it exhaustively, but I would bet there are some numbers in the AD&D 1st Edition Weapons vs AC charts that support your contention here.

Quote from: StormBringer;547212I have not studied it exhaustively, but I would bet there are some numbers in the AD&D 1st Edition Weapons vs AC charts that support your contention here.

I do seem to recall there's some stuff on how much space you need to use a particular weapon, but I know of no one who ever used those rules, and several of the values were nonsensical anyway - there's at least one polearm that only requires a 1' clearance to use.  Perhaps it's a typo.

There is another good reason why hexes are used in wargame and combat - measuring distance. It is much easier and more intuitive to say "range 8 hexes" (or whatever) rather than fiddle around with tape measures and whatnot.

You can't do the same thing with squares because of the diagonals - at least, not as easily as with hexes.

I would also say that, hexes probably provide the optimal level of freedom and ease of representation. You want a shape with as many sides as possible, so you can represent many directions of movement, but you also want shapes that fit snugly together on a page. The only one that meets both requirements is a hexagon.

Quote from: trollock;547856You didn't really get what I was saying. Sure hexes are less inacurrate when fit on a nice looking map, but any game that uses grid movement is inherently removed so far from reality this becomes a non issue.

So...  You do understand why hexes are more popular than squares.

Also hexes can be used to gauge what a cross-country group of PCs can see as well. I use 3-mile hexes, and a party standing at the center of the hex can, depending on terrain and weather, see approximately to the edge of the hex and could perhaps get an glimpse of what might await in the next hex over. Other than that... what others have said about movement is also where I'm at. Of course square grids are better for building interiors IMO.

Quote from: talysman;547016I think you mean "can be the game board..." Some people, including me, never used hex maps that way; for us, it was never more than a way to measure distances. I never used numbered hexes, instead relying on named locales for keying encounters in the wilderness.

Your explanation does, however, explain why a lot of people seem to like the more abstract "one terrain per hex" style of hex map, which I always thought were ugly or useless. I could never understand the enthusiasm, until now; it turns out other people were using hex maps in a different way.

I completely agree. The Tao of D&D's maps being among the ugliest I have ever seen.

http://tao-dnd.blogspot.ie/2012/05/some-of-you-may-already-be-aware-that-i.html

Quote from: John Morrow;547187I believe I mentioned that earlier, but I don't think anyone has a ruler precise enough to capture the precision of an irrational number, an actual value is more useful for making a comparison of accuracy, and given that √2 is an irrational number, I doubt that a real physical diagonal move is ever actually √2 in anything but theory, either, in the sense you want to use the word.

Were you going for irony when, after being this pedantic, you decided to lecture someone else about "coming across as a grating little twerp"?

LOL.

Yeah Premier is one of those guys who has known-it-all for a number of years now.

Quote from: noisms;547250There is another good reason why hexes are used in wargame and combat - measuring distance. It is much easier and more intuitive to say "range 8 hexes" (or whatever) rather than fiddle around with tape measures and whatnot.

You can't do the same thing with squares because of the diagonals - at least, not as easily as with hexes.

I would also say that, hexes probably provide the optimal level of freedom and ease of representation. You want a shape with as many sides as possible, so you can represent many directions of movement, but you also want shapes that fit snugly together on a page. The only one that meets both requirements is a hexagon.

I like the look of heaxgons but offset sqaures give you the same "roughly equal distance in any direction" layout useful for movement but at the same time don't make mapping a room or building much harder.  Good luck finding graph paper though.

I honestly can't give a good answer to the question. I just think they are groovy.

Quote from: Xanther;551262I like the look of heaxgons but offset sqaures give you the same "roughly equal distance in any direction" layout useful for movement but at the same time don't make mapping a room or building much harder.  Good luck finding graph paper though.

Incompetech to the rescue.  Set the horizontal and vertical grid to the same and there you have it.