Distance and time in the game

[Finarvyn]

I'm not sure if this is a "general" issue or more of a 5E issue. This thought came to me during my 5E campaign with my family, so I may end up moving this thread there. I think it's a tactical battlemat type issue, which probably doesn't come up in "theater of the mind" style play.

I might also mention that I remember reading something a few decades ago in a book on wargame design (either the SPI one or Jim Dunnigan's book on wargaming) that an ideal movement rate is somewhere around 4 hexes per turn. Too fast and the board becomes too small and you zoom across it, and too slow means you basically sit and never get anywhere. This is the lens through which I'm looking at this issue, I suspect.

As time passes I'm becoming more and more unhappy with the way distance and time work in the game. In my mind a band of adventurers creep together in a pack, perhaps with a scout a ways ahead of the party, and they advance alongside one another until they encounter something to fight or investigate.

In my 5E campaign I notice a few things which lead me to some thoughts:

(1) Because of initiative turn order one character moves six or more spaces, effectively cutting them off from the party, then the next one moves up, and so on. It's the nature of "taking turns" but it does stretch the credibility a little, except if that first one is the scout. If that first character encounters a trap or a monster, that character is alone for a while until the rest can catch up.

(2) Movement in general is somewhat problematic in its scale. Standard movement is 30 feet, which tends to translate to six squares per turn but can seem a lot farther if one moves diagonally. (That darned "root two" issue, so 6 squares in a diagonal is really 1.4*30 feet or around 40 feet. I am considering a rule where diagonal move costs 1.5 squares.) So, by moving twice (the "dash" action) instead of move-fight, that same character can move 60 feet or 12 squares in a turn. A rogue could in theory move 18 squares in a turn if he has 30 foot movement, does the "dash" action, then spends his reaction for "cunning action" to effectively move three times. And if that rogue happens to be from a race which has 35 feet base movement, this explodes up to 21 squares in a turn. Now, 21 squares in 6 seconds turns out to be around 12 mph, which is nowhere near the 20-25 mph found in a really fast sprint so in that sense it doesn't seem broken, but 21 squares zig-zagging through a dungeon complex really breaks my map.

(3) Time is also somewhat problematic. Characters in 5E typically get a move, an action, a bonus action, perhaps a reaction. All in six seconds. So in six seconds a character might move two squares, swing a sword against a worthy foe, move two more squares and provoke an opportunity attack, cast “healing word” at a fellow in view, then move two more squares to be out of sight of the enemy. And that doesn’t account for upper-level characters who might get multiple attacks, or two-weapon fighters (with or without the appropriate feat) with a sword in one hand and a dagger in the other. So the net effect is characters zooming all over a tiny map, performing actions at breakneck speed so that we can kind-of-sort-of keep track of distance and time.

(4) Last night my wife’s character cast a spell on a monster which caused them to be afraid, and the monster horribly botched their saving throw so had to run as far away from my wife’s character as possible. We decided the rules implied a “dash” so the monster was suddenly 12 squares away, and far off of the battle mat. This sort of thing has also happened with “turn undead” where the undead needs to flee from the cleric. Easy enough to hand-wave that the creature would slink back onto the map in a turn or two, but it still represents a scale issue on the map.

So one thing I have tried is to rescale maps to 10 feet per square instead of 5 feet, essentially cutting speed in half and making the map appear larger. The downside of this is that technically one could fit four characters to a square in this scale, but minis are made larger so that the minis no longer fit properly on the battle mat. It’s a trade-off.

Have others put much thought into this? Is this a “me thing” or do others have ideas on how they deal with these issues?

[jamesmishler]

I always preferred my modified Moldvay time, speed, and action system. Initiative by party every round, then DM assigns who goes when depending on the flow of the battle. 10 second rounds. Combat movement 10 to 40 feet per round, double if you move instead of attack. No split movement, no movement if you are casting a spell. Retreat full movement from melee but your opponents get an "opportunity attack," or fighting withdrawal (with no attack) at half movement rate. No bonus actions, no reactions (except set spear against charge).

Nice, simple, easy. Unfortunately, as modular as 5E was supposed to be, adapting that core part of the system breaks everything, and even if it worked, most modern player would rebel against the changes.

[hamurai]

A lot of this seems like a 5E-problem, but might as well apply to 3E or 4E (I'm not very familiar with either).

(1) Group initiative might solve that issue? When I ran a 5E game at the table, I asked the players if they wanted to act as a group and stick together, with all the advantages and disadvantages that entailed. Sometimes, as you say, a scout would leave the group and scout ahead, but most of the time the group was together, so we used group initiative. If the scout left, they gained individual initiative.

For group initiative we used as a roll modifier the average of the highest and the lowest modifier. In the end, who cares, really? Most of the time the d20 decides, not the mod...

We did only use the battlemat for encounters/puzzles and the like. I did not have the entire dungeon layed out on the table, so we switched back and forth from theatre of the mind to battlemap.

(2) Just make it the same for all - characters and monsters -, then none can complain. I'd just disallow diagonal movement in general, or you rule that only every second move can be diagonally? When we played, diagonal moves were not allowed. Using a hex map might also help.

(3) Screw the 6-seconds rounds. Does it ever matter, how many seconds passed in one round? We early on ruled that a round can be from about 6 seconds to 30 seconds, depending on what's happening. The game tracks time not in seconds or hours (except rests and a few spells of 8 hour duration which just hold until the next long rest in our games), but in rounds, so that's an abstract unit which may easily be adapted to whatever happens in your game.

(4) "As far away as possible" - that was usually "out of the dungeon" or "over the hills and far away" for me, at least if the duration of the effect was longer than only a handful of rounds. That enemy is out of combat for now. I did usually make a note, though, and the enemy might have returned as a wandering monster or in a random room.
Edit: "As far away as possible" is a subjective thing, I think. I always felt like it must be until the creature feels save - the exact distance can hardly be known in such a situation of pure terror. So the creature might just run and cower behind the next big rock if there's only flat earth beyond. Could be an alternative to just removing the enemies from the board.


Our main DM for online 5E games was put off by battlemaps at some point. We experimented with zone maps, which went rather nicely, but you need players who would accept maybe losing a class advantage or two - there are several classes who gain increased speed which was useless in a zone map. But we made up for it by ruling that those with increased movement would get an initiative bonus and in case actual run speed would matter, we counted the increase as usual to determine who was faster.

So what worked better for us? For 5E D&D, we returned to the battlemap - it's a lot less problematic on a VTT. The tactical options in combat were a big favourite for some of our players and the board-gamey feel worked for late evenings on week/work days. It took away a lot of the benefits of theatre of the mind, mainly immersion for me, personally, but worked best for our group. Foundry VTT was nice to look at and the DM had a couple of good tools at his disposal.

We're still using the zone map for other games, for example for our (also online) Warhammer Fantasy RP 4E group. WHFRP doesn't have a huge emphasis on the difference in move speed (although the stats exist), so the zones work really well for us. You can easily just use any atmospheric picture for a scene and establish a few zones.

[Desparil]

Oct 29, 2022 15:15:48 GMT -6 hamurai said:

A lot of this seems like a 5E-problem, but might as well apply to 3E or 4E (I'm not very familiar with either).

This is basically a 5E problem because 3E and 4E are more mechanically robust but the 5E designers chose to simplify. A lot of this is resolved in the older editions because

1) You're not allowed to move both before and after your action, and movement gets locked down even more after a turn or two since most of the time you're only allowed to move 5 feet without provoking an attack of opportunity when you're in an enemy's threatened area.
2) You're allowed to delay your turn and permanently shift your initiative to a later point in the round, typically used to get the PC party all acting together and/or to wait and see what the enemy will do before committing. Importantly, this shifts your entire turn with full tactical flexibility on when you come back into the initiative order and what actions you're able to take when you do, unlike 5E's anemic "ready an action" option.
3) This is is more particular to 4E, but in 4E especially having the group stick close together is highly incentivized in the first place.
4) It's much more uncommon to have abilities that can be used as a swift/minor/bonus action in prior editions, except possibly for drawing or sheathing weapons/items from one's belt (no "free object interaction" in 3E or 4E, though in 4E if you don't move at all on your turn you're allowed to substitute your move action for a second minor action).
5) Armor can slow you down to 4 or 5 squares in a turn, whereas 5E ditched armor speed penalties

Personally, for pretty much any edition, I play with 10-15 second rounds (average 12 seconds) as suggested in 2E Combat & Tactics so that there are 5 rounds in a minute. That makes dealing with existing effects and abilities easy since 12 is an even multiple of 6, and 5 rounds per minute makes for nice, easy division and multiplication. If I'm working with an older edition, I can decide on a case by case basis as it comes up whether something that lasts say "1 round/level" should be interpreted as "short rounds" or as full minutes. I like the roughly 12 second span of time because it's lengthy enough to allow for a wide variety of actions, but not so long that it causes the dissonance that 1 minute rounds have between the length of time they represent and how little the game rules actually allow you to do in that time.

As for diagonal movement, if you find it's a problem then definitely go for the 1.5 squares, that's presented as an optional rule in the 5E DMG and was standard in 3E, and it was even used in the old AD&D "Gold Box" video games - it's got pedigree. In the last virtual game that I was in on Roll20, we used the built-in measuring tool which calculated the distances precisely and then rounded them off to the nearest square for us, no manual square-counting required. I will say that I've played both ways, either counting diagonals as extra or not worrying about it, and I can't say that it's ever been a serious issue one way or the other.

[howandwhy99]

1. I am not sure I understand. If this is a combat, the higher init acting PC will have his fellows acting on the same turn, just later. Combat is kind of a blur. If exploration, I'd start with them all in marching order formation, just like beginning a combat. So a 2×2 can lead to 2 PCs falling in the pit!

2. By my reading, it may be the map. MV:12 is Gary's old school. X4 full sprint =48 squares, but halve that for any cornering: 24. Pretty comparable. And at 10' squares (so your mph reading adds up). Even a sparse map has encounter rolls. If a PC moves the length of 6x normal move, then roll for an encounter. (Length, not time). Or auto, if they are loud. Sprinting down dungeon corridors I think counts as automatically being noticed.

3. I would argue this was a design intent. You can make locations bigger, draw a more extensive map, open the width of what counts as an encounter area, but the effect you describe will largely remain. I suggest using strong tactics for the monsters. Setting up ambushes using the environment to their advantage (adjective not game term). Running: with escape tunnels defended & plan B's upon failing to evade and restarting combat.

4. Yes, it sounds like a size of the map issue. Though without "sticky" defensive melee lines and withdrawal actions, flanking becomes something of a sport.

- yep, I would definitely redraw the maps and use larger battle maps. And consider using a shared mini when character / monsters work in formation in a single space.

[hamurai]

Oct 30, 2022 5:38:21 GMT -6 Desparil said:

5) Armor can slow you down to 4 or 5 squares in a turn, whereas 5E ditched armor speed penalties

Not entirely - heavy armour will slow you down by 10 feet if you don't have high enough STR.

Well, I'm pretty sure 3E had classes/feat which increased move speed and I think it was possible to get additional attacks with feats, for example when you strike down an enemy, you get another attack, something like that. 

My only contact with 4E was the Ravenloft board game, which worked pretty well. Not sure how much of this was actual 4E, or adapted for the board game.

[Desparil]

Oct 30, 2022 9:07:09 GMT -6 hamurai said:

Oct 30, 2022 5:38:21 GMT -6 Desparil said:

5) Armor can slow you down to 4 or 5 squares in a turn, whereas 5E ditched armor speed penalties

Not entirely - heavy armour will slow you down by 10 feet if you don't have high enough STR.

Well, I'm pretty sure 3E had classes/feat which increased move speed and I think it was possible to get additional attacks with feats, for example when you strike down an enemy, you get another attack, something like that. 

My only contact with 4E was the Ravenloft board game, which worked pretty well. Not sure how much of this was actual 4E, or adapted for the board game.

I suppose that's technically true, however, I've never seen the penalty come into play in 5E unless it involved some sort of multi-classing shenanigans taking the bare minimum Strength score required to get a fighter's armor proficiency and Action Surge while actually intending to play a wizard or warlock. This being as opposed to previous iterations where the speed reduction was regardless of Strength.

I'm not as familiar with 3E, so I'm not sure on ways to increase movement speed other than getting a spell caster to use longstrider or haste on you. The feat you're remembering is the classic Great Cleave, but keep in mind that the chain only continues as long as you can continue scoring killing blows, and you can only use it as many times as there are enemies currently within your weapon's reach since you're not allowed to move at all between swings.

I actually haven't played the Ravenloft game, I overlooked it at the time and it's actually a bit hard to come by nowadays, at least for a reasonable price. I have played Wrath of Ashardalon, the other 4E-era board game they put out, and that one is very much a simplified version of actual 4E gameplay with a fixed stable of premade characters.

[tdenmark]

This is by far the hardest problem to work around. I’m experiencing this in my Gunslinger RPG, guns compound the problem. Particularly table space.

A staggered grid solves the diagonal movement issue.

At some point you just have to accept its a game and not a simulation of reality.

[aldarron]

Not sure I understand the problem but I guess this is strictly a minis thing. If we are talking OD&D you have a 30' melee range in combat so inside that range distances are irrelevant. Otherwise you are just measuring feet, not squares. <shrug> I'm not sure if I'm being helpful here.

[tdenmark]

Nov 21, 2022 2:24:20 GMT -6 tdenmark said:

This is by far the hardest problem to work around. I’m experiencing this in my Gunslinger RPG, guns compound the problem. Particularly table space.

A staggered grid solves the diagonal movement issue.

At some point you just have to accept its a game and not a simulation of reality.

Here is a staggered square grid. It plays a lot like a hex grid.



dungeoneering.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-lost-art-of-staggered-squares.html