13th Age A proposal for replacing the 4e combat/powers framework with the 13th Age one.

[rabindranath72]

That's it. The late Wrecan had a number of good blog posts like that. Hopefully wizards doesn't ask the archive to remove any of that stuff anytime soon.

Ah yes, now that I looked at it, I recall we tried to use it back in the day. We found out it was somewhat too fiddly; we much prefer the more abstract nature of 13th Age.

 

[rabindranath72]

The loss of granularity is certainly something you'll feel.

You could make it strictly comparative, and also take shifting into account:

By default, everyone has a Reach 1 and can use their move to Shift 1.

You can attack an enemy in melee without engaging them if your Reach is greater than their Reach.

You can engage an enemy who's reach is greater than yours if your Reach + Shift is greater than their Reach. Otherwise you follow the rules for disengaging (I can't recall the 13A disengage rules, exactly, ATM).

In some ways that's better than 4e reach (a bit like 3e reach or threatening reach), but it's fairly simple.
You can disengage from an enemy automatically if your Shift is greater than his Reach.

Thanks for the comment; this is very interesting. The 13A disengage rules work as a saving throw (as a Move action), with a penalty of +1 for each enemy beyond the first with which a character is engaged. They allow more than a simple shift (as in principle you could move anywhere Nearby) so I suppose factoring in the save also the Shift could potentially work. Some food for thought.