I personally don't see the attraction of or need for an abstract system. I think it's based on an idea that miniatures == grid. For clarity I draw a sketch of the location on a roll of that plastic you use for covering exercise books, and use counters or minis or lego people or whatever's to hand to mark where people are. It only takes a second and everyone can visualise the situation. You could just as well use a sketch map on paper or using a chalk board. There's no rules linked to it, other than it's useful to determine distance. Often we start off the combat as "theatre of the mind" and then switch to this when it's needed.

Quote from: GeekEclectic;858932So abstract for the win.

Which is fine, more power to you.

Any non-abstract system can be made abstract very easily, you just assign distances based on agreement and common sense, and if players don't have a problem with it, there isn't one.

The issue comes when a new school designer decides to force the issue on everyone by coming up with some alternate system that is playable one way only, without any mechanical support at all for a simple measurement system.  

Since abstracting distance to provide tactical options doesn't really make sense unless you turn it into a minigame, then these types of systems usually turn to abstract to either simplify 100% Theater of the Mind play, or to support a more narrative structure where everything is based on Time, Speed, and Distance of Plot,

I don't have a problem with designers including an optional abstract system, it makes sense.  I have a problem with designers who remove simple measurements that have been ingrained into people since childhood and take fractions of a second to compare and analyze due to life experience and replace it with an abstract system only, forcing you to create a simple system that really, should be baseline assumed.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;858956
(from: Ancient Kingdoms - Reasure Awaits!)

This is similar to what I use in my head, not a formalized system I present to the players. If the rogue is sneaking, he's generally flanking the fight, or maybe in the fight, but on the edge. People in the brawl are engaged, people not in the brawl are at range and can use ranged weapons or ranged spells. Maybe the closest of the ranged can use polearms.

So Ranged > Engaged < Ranged
...............Flanking..........................

I'm also very generous to Rouges in their sneaking and backstabbing. If they can make a sneak roll, they can get a backstab that round. If they fail the sneak, it's bad enough, but giving them only one backstab per fight, or multiple rounds to set it up, seems to penalize it too much. That's how I ran DCC and it worked out good enough.

Hum. Maybe I should try formalizing the system like that. It's vaguely similar to the Gears of War boardgame. I'll have to ponder that.

Quote from: CRKrueger;858920Clash's games have ranges and movement in meters.  At the table, you could just estimate the actual distances but doing that as opposed to breaking out a tape measure and grid isn't what I think of as "abstract movement".

Y'know how I always say I've never played a game RAW, even my own? This is one of those bits. As a designer, I am aware that many people prefer a more concrete set up than I do, so I designed a workable compromise. I answered the original question as a GM, not as a designer. My own games are run *very* abstractly.

I've been playing 40k since Rogue Trader so I enjoy rulers and figs, but outside of tourney play, I have seen most players handwaive movement and shooting ranges at home to just move the game along.

And that's competitive play.

I forget which edition or which White Dwarf, but it discussed roll 1D6 to determine 1-3 the figs 1 inch away were really just in moshing in melee in order to move the game along.

In RPG play, I play Theater of the Mind, Abstract Maps with Figs and RPGs with 5 foot square maps. I don't find one form of play superior to the other, but certain styles work better for certain genres and certain players.

In RPGs, I am phenomenally concerned with speed of play. However, movement/ranged is done, I want RPG combat to proceed with excitement. I don't believe "that orc is 30 feet away" is superior to "that orc is in short range" because both convey the same info.

And why is that damn orc never 24 or 31 feet away?

And amazing how the PCs, in the middle of swirling brutal combat, always have exact range finders to know how many feet away everyone may be at all times.

Quote from: Nexus;858889Some rpgs use a very abstracted movement and positioning. There aren't exact measurement but distance is subsumed into "ranges" like Close, Medium, Far, etc. It considered a simplification that reduces or eliminates the need for maps and miniatures.

But I seem to have a mental block when it comes to these rules. I find them more confusing that just keeping the distances in my head especially when multiple characters and important items of scenery and other items come into play. I find a vastly prefer even simple measurements.

Well, Nexus, it is a simplification, and makes the game closer to the in-game reality, as experienced by the characters:). Now, let me use a fighting analogy.
We all know that in martial arts, there are three ranges: the range where you need to step forward in order to deploy your longest attack to maximum effect, the range where you can hit without stepping, and the range where you need a more short-range attack.

With all that, assuming you're exactly 6 feet tall, is a man staying at precisely 5 feet from you in your longest range, just right for hitting, or too close?
Record your own answer if you wish.


The real answer is: It depends on whether your longest weapon is a kick or a spear thrust;)!
And then we add manoeuvres and terrain, which can change the length of your steps, or allow using long-range weapons from closer than usual.

So, my point is, with Near, Far, and Very Far, or whatever, you're not using exact measurements...but you're using exactly the thought process that your character would be using. "Can I hit him? No? I need to close to do that. Do I want to try closing? It's going to be harder to disengage if I do."

In short, range is relative, and we're using relative range in our daily lives. You're only hitting a block because you're used to playing games differently. And yes, I know the feeling:D!
If you keep playing in this way, it will pass, is all I'm going to say.

Quote from: AsenRG;859008Well, Nexus, it is a simplification, and makes the game closer to the in-game reality, as experienced by the characters.

Its like "shaky cam" fight scenes. They're actually much more like being in a real fight (hectic, confusing and disorganized), IME, but allot of people don't like them. Organized orderly initiative and actions per "turn" (where turn is some arbitrary amount of time) aren't "realistic" either but it facilitates enjoyable game play (IME. IMO, YMMV, etc).

Quote from: Spinachcat;859001I don't believe "that orc is 30 feet away" is superior to "that orc is in short range" because both convey the same info.

Except that they don't convey the same information. We all know how far 30’ is (we being in the USA for you other folks, pretend it is 10 meters or 9 meters if you want to be more anal about it). And if you don’t know then get out a tape measure or look at the floor plans of your house and figure out how far it is. But we don’t all know what “short range” is. It may mean “in melee range” to one person; “close enough to hit with a thrown chair” for another person; and in reasonable range for my 9mm pistol to a third person.

This is why abstract ranges seem more complicated to me than actual ranges. An abstract range substitutes an unknown distance, that we then need to discuss to know if we agree on a single meaning, for a known distance that doesn’t require any discussion to reach uniform agreement.

Also, by actual range, I mean an approximation of the actual range. I may give ranges in nice divisible by five (or 3 or 4 or whatever is convenient) increments. But unless the character actually has a range finder (which may be the case in a Sci-Fi game), this is only an approximation of the exact distance. While the difference seldom matters in practice, it might matter. And treating distances or ranges as approximations avoids getting worried about why no one is ever 23.24 feet away from the target. I just tell the player the distance is 20 feet or 25 feet and we move on. If it actually matters whether it is 20 or 25 feet, then I figure that out (either by looking more closely at a map, rolling a die to get low/high, or very rarely by direct measurement.)

Quote from: AsenRG;859008We all know that in martial arts, there are three ranges: the range where you need to step forward in order to deploy your longest attack to maximum effect, the range where you can hit without stepping, and the range where you need a more short-range attack.

No we don't all think in those terms. Yet another reason that approximations of actual distances are better than vague terms that we each interpret in our own way.

Quote from: Bren;859017We all know how far 30' is

People (players, GMs, designers) are TERRIBLE at judging distances!

I did an extra credit assignment with friends in high school by taking AD&D 1e math for distance/round and measuring it out. Spoiler alert - holy fucknuts the math is off.

I've had gun nutters bemoaned the range stats in almost every RPG, and then the running guys bitching about movement rates. I have flashbacks about a rant by a really fun GM who does mountain climbing as a hobby who totally loses his shiznack about climb rates in RPGs. And then there's Ken St. Andre's rant on how damn hard archery is against a stationary target.

Quote from: Bren;859017But we don't all know what "short range" is.

Why not? It's usually right in the rulebook or the GM tells you. "Needlers are short range weapons, they take -4 penalty at medium range" and suddenly, you know what your PC's needler does. "Is that guy in short range? Yeah? Great, I shoot him with my needler. Oh, he's medium range? Can I charge across the deck and shoot him?"

However, I am NOT saying one way is better than the other. I fully acknowledge that for some players, calling out "30 feet" is much better for immersion than calling out "short range."

Its a preference thing. In my game design, I am happy to accommodate both preferences. Its not rocket science to include optional rules for making the game more abstract, more "exact" or more minis friendly.

I don't think this issue is more serious than whether the gaming group prefers to order pizza or subs. Meat and cheese on a bread roll! No! Meat and cheese on flat bread! Death to the infidel!

There's more than one interpretation of abstract being used here.

There'a abstract positioning like the chart above, where you're basically using counters to represent everyone's position but rather randomly not actually putting them where the characters actually are but in some sort of abstract representation which doesn't work half the time, and which locks people into "what the game says I can do" rather than "you just say what your character does and I'll tell you what you need to roll".

Then there's the language you use at the table. If your game only distinguishes between short/medium/long range, then it's perfectly reasonable to answer "medium range" to the player when you know it's actually 90 feet away, or to say "90 ft". Personally I never mention the actual range, I just say "that's -3 to hit for range", as they can already see what's going on.

Then there's the abstract in the sense of it being known where everything is in relation to everything else, but winging it a bit and not bothering with precise positions. This is what I do for many combats when it's of no interest and we're trying to move things along a bit. When it does become important or interesting, we nail things down.

Finally there's the antithesis of abstract - use of a grid with exact positions for all combatants. It's a big imposition on how you play and is not even a good representation of the real world anyway. The first time I saw style promoted was with the Basic Game rules for Star Frontiers which at the time I viewed as babyish - turning RPGs into a board game to explain to newbies how it worked. It seems odd to me that 30+ years later it's so prevalent.

Quote from: Nexus;859014Its like "shaky cam" fight scenes. They're actually much more like being in a real fight (hectic, confusing and disorganized), IME, but allot of people don't like them.

I could see the "a lot of people don't like them" on TBP. Here, most people want to get in the same headspace as their characters.
(In fact, that's why I'm here).
And for that, "shaky cam" fight scenes are a whole lot better. You might still not like them, but they are closer to how your character sees stuff. (Unless you're playing a really experienced human character or a powered character, but most people don't seem to start with those). And yes, being able to think in exact measurements and noticing the whole picture would be a huge advantage, making the experienced people seem almost cinematic when compared to normal fighters.

QuoteOrganized orderly initiative and actions per "turn" (where turn is some arbitrary amount of time) aren't "realistic" either but it facilitates enjoyable game play (IME. IMO, YMMV, etc).

And there's nothing wrong with using them! I'll just note that they're better for an inherently more cinematic playstyle, or one where the focus is not on getting in your character's head. Because yes, if we're after producing a movie, a shaky cam doesn't improve the story being told, IMO.
But if we're talking a security camera recording of a violent incident? It's likely to be messy and unclear on details, yes.

Quote from: Bren;859017No we don't all think in those terms. Yet another reason that approximations of actual distances are better than vague terms that we each interpret in our own way.

You cut out the previous sentence. The one where I'm saying it's an analogy:).
Not even all martial arts think in those terms. Maybe you're trained in one of those, like me. But this one is a popular one and easy to explain. And it's good enough for an analogy. That's why I'm using it;).

And frankly, unless you're talking either travel distances, which are of no concern for most fight systems, or if you're an engineer, most people I know talk in terms of "close enough" or "not close enough" to reach when they refer to everyday objects. I strongly doubt they'd suddenly bring out the internal distanceometer if a fight starts:D!

Or maybe you're the exception and always think in exact distances due to internal disposition, early age training, or something. Still, that would make you an exception IME.

Spinachcat, some of our difference in view point may be semantic rather than substantive.

Quote from: Spinachcat;859061People (players, GMs, designers) are TERRIBLE at judging distances!

It's a distance. It's measurable. 30' is farther than the length of your living room. It's less than the width of your house (unless you live in a row house and then it's less than the depth of your row house). It's about 10 very long strides. It's putting one foot after the other end to end about 30 times. Short range is - just a minute let me look it up in this particular game's rule book.

QuoteI did an extra credit assignment with friends in high school by taking AD&D 1e math for distance/round and measuring it out. Spoiler alert - holy fucknuts the math is off.

The movement rate per round being off is an entirely different thing than having no clue how far 30' or 100 yards actually is.

I completely agree that movement rates are a tricky problem since you have both speed and endurance to consider. People who go out for a jog (which most of us call a run) jog at a 9-minute mile pace. Slow runners (joggers really) have a 10-minute mile pace. People who only jog casually do that for maybe 3 or 4 miles to get their 30+ minutes of vigorous exercise.

Elite marathoners run a mile in less than five minutes (less than half the time of our casual runner/jogger) and the marathoner will do that mile after mile for 26.2 miles. Trying to cover elite athletes, weekend joggers, and a guy carrying a chest full of silver simply in an RPG system is probably not possible and it certainly isn't easy - as a close analysis of movement rates in every RPG will show.

And that is before we get to the additional complexity of accounting for the movement of non-humans. A horse is much faster than a man in a sprint of say a mile or two, but over very long distances like say 25 or 50 miles, a fit man can run the horse into the ground. Does your game system simulate that? Not usually. And if it does, probably not very well.

QuoteI've had gun nutters bemoaned the range stats in almost every RPG, and then the running guys bitching about movement rates.

Neither of those examples is about not knowing how far things are. They are about the range being incorrect or the movement rate being incorrect. Sometimes that is not a system issue, but a player issue. I've seen some players who don't understand (even thought is is written in the rules) that a base movement rate is a slow and careful walking pace (say 2mph) rather than a fast walk (4mph) or a slow run (8mph).

QuoteI have flashbacks about a rant by a really fun GM who does mountain climbing as a hobby who totally loses his shiznack about climb rates in RPGs.

This also sounds like a complaint about the speed of movement, not about not knowing what a distance of 30' is.

QuoteAnd then there's Ken St. Andre's rant on how damn hard archery is against a stationary target.

This one I don't know. Hitting a stationary target is obviously the easiest thing. Hitting a moving target is probably an order of magnitude more difficult. So what is Ken's rant about?

QuoteWhy not? It's usually right in the rulebook or the GM tells you. "Needlers are short range weapons, they take -4 penalty at medium range" and suddenly, you know what your PC's needler does. "Is that guy in short range? Yeah? Great, I shoot him with my needler. Oh, he's medium range? Can I charge across the deck and shoot him?"

That is one way games handle range. Its not the way I'm most familiar with and that may account for part of the reason we are looking at this differently.

Many game systems have different short, medium, and long ranges by weapon type. So thrown rocks and .50 caliber machine-guns each have different ranges. So short range for a rock might be 30' while short range for the .50 might be 300'. I'm more used to the latter mechanic as that is the way that RQ, D6, OD&D, and AD&D handle weapon ranges.

QuoteHowever, I am NOT saying one way is better than the other. I fully acknowledge that for some players, calling out "30 feet" is much better for immersion than calling out "short range."

Its a preference thing. In my game design,

Fair enough. I agree people have different preferences. I'm perfectly willing to accept that some people prefer not to know how far something actually is and to use a vague descriptors like close or far. And that for people who like that, doing that is better and more fun for them.  

I've seen that work out very poorly in practice as player A thinks close is reach out and touch distance, player B thinks close is in the same living room, and player C thinks close is on the same football field. That is a difference of two orders of magnitude.

And the rate issues you mentioned being a problem for exact distances becomes worse with abstract ranges since now in addition to the speed/endurance issues we have added variation in distance. So player A thinks a climbing rate of 1 round to cover short range means climbing is way too slow (at a sluggish* pace of 3 feet per round or 0.4 mph), player B thinks it is about right for a skilled climber (at a pace of 30' per round or 4mph), while player C thinks it is way too fast (a gibbon-on-crack* pace of 300 feet per round, 40 mph).

Another problem I have with abstract distances is we now need a table to explain how big a living room, a movie theater, a football field, and 10 city blocks are in our abstract system of distance. Which adds a translation step.

QuoteI don't think this issue is more serious than whether the gaming group prefers to order pizza or subs. Meat and cheese on a bread roll! No! Meat and cheese on flat bread! Death to the infidel!

Agreed. None of these issues are serious. Except for the pizza sub thing.



* Here I use "sluggish" as a casual descriptor. Snails and slugs are more than an order of magnitude slower. A speedy snail goes 0.03mph. A gibbon brachiates at 34mph so I figure a gibbon on crack ought to swing at least  10% faster.

Quote from: AsenRG;859078You cut out the previous sentence. The one where I'm saying it's an analogy:).
Not even all martial arts think in those terms. Maybe you're trained in one of those, like me. But this one is a popular one and easy to explain. And it's good enough for an analogy. That's why I'm using it;).

It didn't really make a lot of sense to me. So as an analogy it failed. Which is why I said I don't think the way you do about this issue.

QuoteAnd frankly, unless you're talking either travel distances, which are of no concern for most fight systems, or if you're an engineer, most people I know talk in terms of "close enough" or "not close enough" to reach when they refer to everyday objects. I strongly doubt they'd suddenly bring out the internal distanceometer if a fight starts:D!

With one exception, I can't really recall people talking about position as "close enough" or "not close enough." The one exception is reaching things on the top shelf. I don't really see that as a good combat analogy though.

I'm more used to people using actual distances as in, "run down and out go five yards down the side then run to the center of the field" or "run to the goal line" which we all know is 5 of those  10 yard lines away.

And after running Track and Field in middle school/high school I got used to estimating 100 yard distances. From running, I got used to estimating paces. From OD&D I got used to drawing and mapping floor plans. So I probably do think about things more like engineer.

QuoteOr maybe you're the exception and always think in exact distances due to internal disposition, early age training, or something. Still, that would make you an exception IME.

I'm OK with being an exception.

Put me in the "numbers are just easier" camp - and I don't use a grid at all.

I hate having to remember what "short", "long" or "very far" means, like with Fate's "fair", "average", and whatever. Worse, different games (and gamers) may use different meanings of "short range" and so on.

Even "simplified" encumbrance systems are harder for me than just counting kilos when really needed. "One unit of encumbrance weights 4 to 14 pounds" drives me crazy, "carry 10 pounds x STR" is just easier for me.

I dislike tables with numbers too; just give me a formula, even if it involves fraction ("add 1/3 of level to wizard attacks"), unless you have a real reason to use a table that involves a significant difference from using a formula.

Numbers are just easier for me to interpret.

With that said, I believe it varies from person to person, and it is mostly about personal preference.

Even if I didn't think actual maps with terrain and specific character movements were important and great, I would still have a problem with generic abstract range bands for weapons. I immediately had this reaction when first seeing it circa 1982 in Traveller. Abstract range bands tend to want to have a short list of neat/clean words like close, short, medium, long, and extreme, or similar. But that makes it impossible to show any more subtle differences between different types of weapons, such as various melee reaches versus a thrown knife versus spear versus bow versus rifle versus cannon versus missile - they'd each have very different ideas about what was close, medium, or far, and without actual numeric ranges, how could you have one weapon be different from another?

To me, as soon as a game's abstractions and artificialities visibly remove the nature of the imagined situation from what happens in play, the game stops being about what it's supposedly about, for me. My suspension of disbelief disappears. I'm not buying that I'm in a situation where you have a rifle if my bandolier of knives does exactly the same thing - you have a generic weapon just like I do, and we're playing some abstract game rather than the situation the story is supposedly about. That's not interesting or enjoyable to me. Though, I acknowledge that somehow many players feel the opposite.