RAW Forest terrain… too much roughage?

[imagel]http://img54.imageshack.us/img54/4270/forestzg5.gif[/imagel]The rules for forest terrain seem time consuming and very harsh on combatants. Two or more percentile rolls per square takes a bit of time even for a small battlefield. Rolling up a large battlefield sounds quite frustrating.

And speaking of frustrating, with so much terrain that will slow characters and prevent charges, most fight will last a discouragingly long time or be a rinse and repeat sniping fest. Now some amount of that would be fine and should be expected for a forest, but with the %’s called for, the D&D forests seem almost unusable.

And anyone have an idea how many HP each section of light and heavy undergrowth have?

http://www.systemreferencedocuments.org/35/sovelior_sage/wildernessAndEnvironment.html#wilderness

I think those percentages are just guidelines to be used when making maps and describe in general the distribution of forest growth. They're not meant to be rolled individually for each square entered.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I thought the purpose of that table was to help a DM create a setup (miniatures, graph paper, etc) setup up a forrest ahead of time. For this purpose, the numbers seem fine.

I would never be rolling percent dice to determine if a tree was in a given square during an actual game. You are correct that that would be way to time consuming.

I think there's confusion about terrain elements because the SRD just gives the "crunchy" terrain element tables with no instructions. The tables look like something that's supposed to be rolled on, but they're not.

In the actual DM guide the section about terrain types gives several pages of "fluffy" design info about how a DM can map out a terrain based encounter and how the terrain element tables are guidelines as to what might or might not be shown on a map.

The idea is that a map of an an encounter in a dense forest should have massive trees in about 20% of it's squares. It's meant to be a design guideline for the whole map, not a specific rule/dice roll that's applied to each square as it's entered.

This is one of those areas where they should have included more info in the SRD, or left the whole thing only in the DM guide. By splitting out part of the rules, they've left people bumping into trees in every square.

Side Question: Is the Heavy Underbrush the only place in the system 30% Concealment exists?