Re: Abolishing The Grid (was Re: Question about play styles... Targeting AoE spells.)

"Jasin Zujovic" <jzujovic@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1e0f659fce7d32d989941@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I ran a session once without the grid. Either someon forgot to bring it,
> or we just didn't bother to clear out all the glasses and dice and
> thingies from the table once combat started, I cannot recall.
>
> I thought it worked surprisingly well. (We never did this again,
> however, so probably the players didn't think it worked as well as I
> did...) There was even a bit of 3D movement, since the PCs started out
> on the castle walls, with the attackers on the ground, but it wasn't all
> that difficult to track the distances. However, to run it this way, you
> need to trust the DM to make impartial decisions, and not worry too much
> about 5 or 10 ft. here or there, since it's next to impossible to really
> calculate all the distances completely correctly.

We play pretty much this was all the time. Well, for the last 15 years or so
anyway. Occasionally we'll use a grid marked white board to help locating
things, but in general, we don't bother with it at all. Movement is by
distance in whatever direction you like. The "adjacent square" bit for AOO is
done based on how close you come to each other. What we Do have is some wooden
pieces from an old board game I owned. Game long lost and forgotten, but the
pieces live on. The long thin ones are assumed to be 10' each and are used for
walls, edges of roads or cliffs, and so forth. Occasionally we use them to
measure distances as well.. The tall fat ones are characters / monsters when
the letters and numbers face up, or trees, pillars, etc., when they face down.
The double-wide ones are horses, carts, and so forth when laying flat and doors
and so forth when standing on edge.

See typical encounter here:

http://home.comcast.net/~paralyn/Misc/IMG_2233.JPG

In this case, the PC "A" has just returned from peeking around the door, which
is why they know where the pillars are and how the walls are shaped inside the
door. Yes, they brought a pack mule in the dungeon with them. The PCs have
markers with single letters on them.

This gives you an implied grid, since each of the long thin pieces represents
"about" ten feet.

Here's a typical free form encounter:

http://home.comcast.net/~paralyn/Misc/IMG_2235.JPG

In this case, the PCs are trying to get to the teleportation gate, a
stone-henge like construct made up of the pillars. It's fifty feet across. It
stands on open ground between a the tree covered ridge and the woods the PCs
are on the edge of. It's about 80' from the nearest character. The enemy (the
markers with letters and numbers) are up on the ridge only 50' from the gate,
and are crack shots (the PCs know this from just having tried to get to the
gate moments ago). In this case, all distances are stated between me and the
players. The setup on the table top shows only not-to-scale relative
positions. It's used as an aid to know things like relative position, who's
closest to what, which direction they're facing and that sort of thing.
Distances are kept on a scratch pad or simply remembered. Which NPC is which
is kept on another pad, usually using different colors to represent something
if possible. In this case the red marker (R6) is a large orc they've
encountered twice before. W1 and W6 are two other orcs they're not familiar
with and/or haven't seen well enough yet to identify specifically.

This all sounds a lot more complicate than it actually is in practice. Or
maybe it doesn't seem complicated to us because we've been practicing it for
many years. On the other hand, I've run games with players I've never met
before, and they picked up on this quite quickly, usually being entirely
comfortable with it before the first session is over.

- Bill



.

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