Quote from: JoeNuttall;859069There's more than one interpretation of abstract being used here.

Yeah, no kidding. In what way and to what extent things are abstract can make a huge difference. I tend not to have trouble with things like this in general, but I have come across the occasional method of keeping track of(or ignoring) positioning that even I think is weird.

I tend to play a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse and Cortex Plus and other assorted stuff where positioning in combat rarely matters very much. More nitpicky tactical things like facing and which hand my shield is in don't factor in at all(I remember rules for both of those in GURPS 3e).

But yeah, in super tactical games where things like facing and distance are Very Important Things, I could see how it would be annoying to not know specifically where all the pieces on the board are. But I wouldn't be playing one of those games in the first place(the occasional convention one-shot notwithstanding), so for me it's just something that doesn't come up.

I greatly prefer abstract ranges.

These two guys are 20 feet away, this guy is 25 and this asshole coming at you is 10 feet away vs three guys at medium range and one at short range.

I and my players much prefer abstraction to feet/yards/metres. We are all rubbish at judging distances, so '20 feet' is as abstract to us as 'short range'.

To give some idea of range and tie it into gun combat, when setting up a FUDGE game I defined ranges as:

Across a table
Across a room
Across a street
Down the street
End of the street

This was for a game set in Victorian London and worked well for us in visualising where friends and foes were. Better than close/short/medium/long, or so we found.

Quote from: Bren;859097It 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.

Well, not all analogies work all the time. Sorry I didn't pick a better one for you.

QuoteWith 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.

I can only conclude that people around you are more used to estimating exact distances.

QuoteAnd 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.

My mother can estimate long distances in a similar way, though she used to be able to tell even closer to exact numbers at a sight. That said, she was considered an exception. (I used to be able to do much the same before I got shortsightedness).

QuoteI'm OK with being an exception.

So am I. And one of us probably is, unless we assume totally equal distribution.
Maybe it is me, though my empirical experience shows otherwise. But maybe I have extrapolated too far from it!

Depends on the system. When executed properly, these systems are really just formalizing the way that people handle "precise" distance without some form of visual reference.

For example, if you're playing D&D without a grid and the GM says, "They're about 20 feet away from you." what's the GM really saying there? There's no tape measure. He imagined the scene, eyeballed the distance in his head, and gave a figure that's basically in the right ballpark. He could have just as easily said 15 feet or 25 feet.

In general, the GM is going to make these decisions base on one of two criteria:

(1) A visualization of the game world ("they just came out of the tree line and that's a fair distance away, let's call it 150 ft."); or

(2) A mechanical assessment ("a typical PC should need to run for at least two rounds before reaching them; they can run 120 ft. per round, so let's say they're about 150 ft. away")

When using an abstract movement system, a GM should be able to use the exact same criteria.

Numenera, for example, breaks distance down into four categories: Immediate distance (anything up to about 10 ft.), Short distance (anything up to about 50 ft.), Long distance (anything up to about 100 ft.), and Extreme distance (anything beyond that).

So now the GM can use the same basic process:

(1) The archers came out of the tree line. The PCs are really far away from the tree line, so that's Extreme distance.

(2) The PCs shouldn't be able to reach them in a single round, so they must be at an Extreme distance.

Quote from: nDervish;858937Secondly, you're neglecting the ability to coalesce groups into effective points.  If Alice and Bob are in melee with three of the monsters while Charlie and Dana are firing their bows at the fourth, while it tries to escape, then you only have, at most, four nodes on your graph (Alice/Bob/m1-m3, Charlie, Dana, m4).  If Charlie and Dana are standing together, that further reduces it to three nodes.

Another common form of abstract distance mechanic are Zones. (We're using those in the Infinity RPG.) And the mental process they're formalizing is basically what nDervish is describing here: Alice, Bob, and the monsters are all basically in the same spot (they're all in the same zone). Charlie and Dana are a little bit off to one side (one zone away). And there's a monster who has run X zones away that Charlie and Dana are shooting at.

Where people seem to run into problems is when they take an abstract system, try to translate it back into specific measurements, and then run the specific measurements back through the mental process they use for abstracting it into the theater of the mind.

Okay, so if all these mechanics are basically doing the same thing in the "theater of the mind", what's the point of them?

First, it gets away from the false deity of "precision". Precision is great if that's what you want and if you're using a visual representation (usually miniatures) and mechanics which allows you to take advantage of that precision. But if you're not, pretending that there's any real difference between 125 feet and 130 feet is an illusion.

Second, it can eliminate irrelevant mathematical calculations by cutting directly to the mechanically relevant distinction.

Third, these mechanics can also serve as a nice, flexible foundation for other mechanical features. For example, you can define zones with various effects that can make it easier to manage strategically interesting terrain without using battlemaps.