Mechanic Round-up: Positioning in Games without Positioning

[K]

Now, I was wondering how different games handle positioning when they don't have actual positioning systems in place like DnD 3e/4e's counting of squares and mini-maps.

I remember in 2e DnD we used to just have the DM tell us what the range on things were. Could a bow shoot at the goblins? "Sure, it can, and you take the medium range penalty." was the answer.

That being said, in most games I've play the positioning has been abstracted and/or DM-dependent. Shadowrun, Storyteller game, etc.

So I was wondering if anyone had seen a novel way to handle position and being "in combat" vs "out of combat."

[shadzar]

your DM did that in 2nd? things have ranges and you should be mapping things...i didnt use maps on the table but gave room descriptions and let characters map for themselves, so they should know how far away form an enemy they are and in general what direction. still my favorite way. nothing to drag out to show positions and you keep the battlefield and everything else in your mind. you could have used a map and just counted off the feet.

without some sort of "map" i wouldnt know how to do positioning myself...when needed we used some kind of reference even if it was a book for the room and pieces of candy to show where things were in the room.

[RobbyPants]

I remember in 2e DnD we used to just have the DM tell us what the range on things were. Could a bow shoot at the goblins? "Sure, it can, and you take the medium range penalty." was the answer.

I've only really played 3E and 2E. We pretty much ran fights as you described.

I had an idea of what the battle field looked like, and I'd describe it as best as I could, but there would inevitably be confusion because of some detail I left out. We'd sometimes make quick and dirty Ad Hoc maps with whatever was handy just to give everyone an idea of base position, but it would be much more crude than a 3E battlemap.

If you're running fights with just two people (I used to play/run a lot of solo games), then you can simply track distance, and that's pretty easy. You just add and subtract movement speeds based on who's doing what. Of course, once you add in a third person, triangulation makes that method unreliable.

That's the best I've ever come up with.

[Krakatoa]

Before DnD I got into RPGs from BESMd20, which doesn't use a grid.

I never had a problem with the system of movement being completely abstracted; the GM would keep up with character movement and if a character tried to make an attack that was out of range then he or she would just say so. Unfortunately BESM is a very broken system and since some of our characters could move at 600 MPH, there was rarely, if ever, anything out of melee range. I personally was okay with this but some players in my group prefer using a grid. I guess it just depends on what your players are more comfortable with.

Edit: Now that I think about it for a moment, in some ways I think it works better to not have a grid. At least, ever since we started playing D&D, all our combats have been in relatively uninteresting backdrops. This is of course partly the DM's fault, but I think abstracted combat can encourage more interesting settings. Before we had combat on top of trains, inside trains, in a high school auditorium, running up walls and crap.

[TheFlatline]

4th ed is a light tabletop wargame these days.

In 3rd edition you could still half-ass it (and I did, many times).

I usually only bust out the map in combat if it's a big set-piece of combat. Otherwise we free-flow it. It just takes to f*cking long to draw out each and every field to scale and place everything, especially when everything you're doing is basically "I attack".

In a ranged game it becomes even less important. The *only* time it's important then is if you're dealing with blast radius.

[tussock]

I like to use "the melee" as a drifting reference point, with everyone a certain distance from it in some direction, and choke points defined by the surrounds. Until the melee forms, there's a gap of some size and party order says how far back everyone else is from the nearest.

Attacks in the melee are randomised, whirlwind attack gets d6+2 targets, skill use or overwhelming odds for advantage or sneak attack. A shield wall is just everyone defensive fighting. If you try and charge through the fighters I just assume they're smart enough to cut you to pieces, or at least d6 of them are, unless you use your tumble or roof slippers or whatever.

Then there's duels, driving back the enemy, .... I'm sure I could make 4e work the same way, if anyone wanted to play it here, or buy the books.

If players want a map, I can usually whip up a rough first-person perspective, while reminding them that this is all happening very fast(tm).

[RobbyPants]

I like to use "the melee" as a drifting reference point, with everyone a certain distance from it in some direction, and choke points defined by the surrounds. Until the melee forms, there's a gap of some size and party order says how far back everyone else is from the nearest.

So, basically, you use the single distance approach I used for one-on-one fights, and just abstracted the rest? That works pretty well if you don't need to get fussy.

I suppose you could always track three separate numbers:

1) Distance from back ranks of side A to front ranks of side A
2) Distance of front ranks of side A to front ranks of side B
3) Distance of front ranks of side B to back ranks of side B

This assumes that people are roughly in four distinct groups (front-line or not, on each side). You just have to figure out whether or not an AoE would hit everyone in a single group or not.

[Murtak]

Abstract combat works, as long as you have exactly one point of interest (the melee, the chase, whatever). I can't see it working with multiple points of interest.

A simple example: two parties, a single room. One side has a couple of grunts and an archer and the other has a wizard and his bodyguards. The bodyguards are trying to hold the gate to the wizard can complete his spell. Can they block others from going past them? Can they block line of sight for the archer? Can the grunts push them from the gate?

[fectin]

I've always preferred sketching out terrain on one of those big erasable grids, unless it's really simple. (I seriously love those as tabletops; even if you never use it for terrain, it makes keeping track of durations or initiative order easier like you wouldn't believe.) Even if it's rough, it's much less of an interrupt to the gameflow than players getting confused about where they are/what's around them.
Don't count squares (unless it's a chase or something), don't worry about accuracy, but having a sketch is nice.

[K]

How do they do positioning in games like Champions? Exalted?

Personally, it seems that games tend to go all wargamer and have people with rulers, they use grids, or they abstract. I can't seem to see any other options.

[CatharzGodfoot]

There's also LARPing. I think those are your four options.

[hogarth]

How do they do positioning in games like Champions? Exalted?

Champions uses a hex map. Speeds in combat are usually limited to something semi-sensible, topping out at something like 30 hexes per phase; range modifiers also tend to add up reasonably quickly (-1 per 2 hexes), although there are ways to eliminate them. Compare that to Villains & Vigilantes, where you could quite possibly have a speed of 200 squares per round with the power Heightened Speed, which also gives you more actions per turn in which to move as a bonus.

[RobbyPants]

LARPing probably counts as an abstraction to a point. It works okay up close, but if you're trying to simulate someone being an archer or mage or something, they might want to stand far enough away that it's not practical to LARP.

[fectin]

How do they do positioning in games like Champions? Exalted?

Personally, it seems that games tend to go all wargamer and have people with rulers, they use grids, or they abstract. I can't seem to see any other options.

Exalted does positioning mostly by fiat. All the non-mook characters are superfast, there's no AoO or anything, and you get bonuses for jumping around that are important enough that you do so all the time. The rule of cool is literally a game mechanic. So, tracking precise positions is fairly counterproductive.
That and Mage are actually where most of my basis for recommending table-sized sketched maps comes from. Just be ready to add to or erase from them.

[tussock]

A simple example: two parties, a single room. One side has a couple of grunts and an archer and the other has a wizard and his bodyguards. The bodyguards are trying to hold the gate to the wizard can complete his spell. Can they block others from going past them? Can they block line of sight for the archer? Can the grunts push them from the gate?

Blocking is based on the scene prep, say the gate needs 3 men to block it, hard tumble or very hard jump check to pass them, or use bullrush/overrun after thinning them down a bit. Big fighters can pull themselves through with grapple, or throw the guards out of the way. LOS is scene too, is the Wizard raised? If not assume they give soft cover, unless you've provided a better place to stand or he makes one for himself.

So you just gave me a melee choke point with a wizard out one side and an archer out the other. It takes highly 3D fight scenes to really need a 2D map, and even then only because it's easier to move down than up.

[Krakatoa]

I think it would be fun to have, for plot reasons like a djinn screwing with the party, a combat happen from a 2D perspective like Super Mario, with floating blocks and tricky jumps.

[Aryxbez]

I think it would be fun to have, for plot reasons like a djinn screwing with the party, a combat happen from a 2D perspective like Super Mario, with floating blocks and tricky jumps.

Hell yes, I would actually like to seen an encounter like this, unsure if it'd handle as well as the idea though.

Usually when I didn't use a map, it worked out since most people were melee types anyway, so once they got into position for melee, didn't need to change position much from then on. Although I can appreciate the use of battle grids, it can make to be a bit of a hassle for setting up the exact terrain features, or encounter locale. I think you have to have some movable terrain props on the fly, or dry erase board, especially if want encounters moving over a large area, like in Pirates of the Caribbean, or even DBZ, where moving spans of land crashing through mountains and the like.

[CCarter]

3E and 4E are both by design pretty miniatures dependent: in 3.0 partly due to "attacks of opportunity" and partly due to fighter-types losing most of their actions if an opponent is more than one square away. Most rulesets are less dependent on exact positioning.
As far as specific ideas goes to streamline positioning issues so that they're below the care threshold:
*longer combat rounds mean larger reasonable movement distances for characters, so that exact distance matters less. In AD&D of course rounds are 1 minute - though this causes other issues.
As an extreme example, Tunnels and Trolls has 2-minute combat rounds. As well as the length of time, damage is assigned by difference in attack totals at the end of each round - exact initiative doesn't really apply for most actions, so position at any time is irrelevant as well.

Specific factors like reach and flanking might have other workarounds e.g.
*Dragon Warriors doesn't have flanking/facing, but a character has a pool of Defense points and has to choose how to allocate these between opponents. Should an opponent have 0 defense against them, you can say they're behind the defender.

*For reach, an attack penalty system might work. Determine who has longest weapon and they get a free attack as the opponent closes: the shorter-reach opponent takes a penalty to hit for being outside the foes reach. If they land a successful hit despite the penalty, they get inside the other guy's guard and from then on, he takes the penalty.

[Agrinja]

The more I read it, I rather like the way Burning Wheel handles positioning. Exact distances don't matter, as far as ranged attacks go you're basically concerned with Close Range, Optimum Range, and Long Range. In melee, you've got distance categories based on reach, which is something like Lunging, Optimum, and Inside with certain weapons having bonuses to fighting within a certain category, daggers for example being great on the Inside while Spears suck there.

[K]

Is there some Burning Wheel online source I could check out? What I have seen has made me not want to buy the books, but I am curious.

[Molochio]

Abstract combat with no concrete or clearly defined environ can be a delightful and time consuming thing.

Simply breaking battle into three range categories of melee, long, and very long is sometimes enough.

[Judging__Eagle]

I started using Dice as distance markers in the Wargame playtest I did for FAR; d12s for distances ranging to a foot or less; d20's for up to 20"; and d10's to represent 10's of inches.

The battle lines were drawn across the width of a table; and across 30~ inches I was able to show the players something like 200"+ across of battlefield.

I'm honestly not sold on "abstract" positioning. As a long time wargamer, and player of countless real time strategy games, I know the massive importance of unit position has on success/failure. Being able to flank, side-step, or otherwise move in a manner that is advantageous to yourself, and disadventageous to your opponents is a skill that requires practice.

Sure, table-top grid/hex combat does like to have "ideas" like AoOs; but honestly, how often can players say they've really had to deal with them? Most people tend to charge right in like the tactically deficients they are; so they don't really "see" AoOs in their games. That's mostly why people prefer to abstract, because they honestly are so tactically shallow that simply handwaving away the ideas of "flanking" in a strategic or larger than 1-on-1 tactics is completely fine with them.

I'm fine with simplifying, or "representing" distances; but out and out handwaving of distances is only going to benefit the players who suck at combat positioning and tactical movement. While the players who are remotely good at it have to "assume" that every other creature they ever fight along side, or against; has no concept of flanking, or lapping around, or circling; or any of the dozens of grains that make up the concept of "flanking".

Which is fine, but I really don't enjoy the idea that in an encounter involving 6 creatures of medium-humanoid scale; the MC won't place 2 markers for their creatures, and adjucates if people are flanking or not. Especially if they're not really clear on who is where. Which is what it boils down to, "who is where?".

[ETortoise]

Is there some Burning Wheel online source I could check out?

On the downloads section of the Burning Wheel wiki there are sample chapters from the books as well as The Sword, an introductory adventure.

http://www.burningwheel.org/wiki/index. ... =Downloads