No Miniatures, Gridless System

Minigiant

Legend
Supporter
So I was thinking of converting 4E into a simple system that works without minis while keeping all the importance of the squares. It would look like this.

Field 1-
Center: Empty
Border: Wizard, Ranger

Field 2-
Center: Fighter, Warlord, Rogue, Goblin Cutter, Goblin Warrior, Icy Terrian
Border: 2 Goblin Cutters

Basics:

Each location is broken up into fields. A field is 25 squares swaped into a 5x5 square. Each field contants two parts of halves, the center and the border. The center is the middle of the field that allows easy access to everyone in the field. The border is the edges of the field.

Placement and Positioning:

Large or smaller creatures can be in the center or border of a field. Larger creatures are in both the center and border of a field unless they squeeze to a smaller size.

All creatures in the center of a field is adjancent to all other creatures in the center of the same field.
All creatures in the border of a field is adjancent to all other creatures in the border of the same field.
All creatures in one half of a field is 1 square away from all other creatures in different half of the same field for the purpose of reach.
All creatures in one half of a field is 3 square away from all other creatures in an adjacent field for the purpose of reach.

If you have an ally with at least speed 3 in the same half of a field as you, you and the ally flank all enemies in that half of the field.

A burst 1, burst 2, blast 3, or blast 4 covers an entire half of a field. A burst 3 or blast 5 cover both halves of a fiield

Space:

A field can be open, crowded, or overcrowed. The sum of the squares occupied by enemies and the squares of difficult terrain determines how crowed a field is. A field with 0-7 of these square is open, 8-15 of these squares is crowded, and 16 or more is overcrowed.

Movement:

For the purpose of movement, each field is 5 squares away and each half of a field is 2 squares away from the other half of the field.

There is a cummulative -1 penalty to speed for each square a creature wishes to avoid when moving. This penalty increases to -2 in overcrowded fields.

A crowded or overcrowded field grants a -1 penalty to speed.

A pushed creature who does not not leave the half of the field is 1 square away from each other creature if the pusher wishes.



What do you think?
 

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After a quick glance, my first reaction is that it would be nice to allow move actions to prepare area effects. For example, I have a Dragonborn with Enlarged Dragonbreath. I want to attack as many enemies as possible, but don't want to hurt my allies. It would be nice if I could spend a move action positioning myself to hit enemies instead of allies. Normally, I would just hit as many enemies as I could without hitting allies, and that's a reasonable sacrifice in itself.

Alternatively, you could allow a 1-to-1 omission of creatures: I don't want to hit this ally, so I don't hit this enemy. Of course, this makes solo monsters and such tricky.

You could also allow omission of squares instead, so that omitting 3 squares will avoid up to 3 allies while still hitting one large creature.
 




the Mike Mearls' system very similiar. But it removes too much of the tactics or leaves all the tactical crunch on one side, the DM or PCs.

I don't like omission of squares other than movement. The areas of powers are already there and it gets a bit silly if your big explostion can only hit one guy al the time. It's fine if your PC just has bad aim and misses everyone else.
 

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