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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8411520" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, you lose a lot of the tactical granularity of 4e which its power system is built around. I'm not saying you could not design powers around a zone system, but they would almost inevitably be more abstract, pretty much by definition. At that point you would probably want to shift the conception of what exactly powers DO and how combat is narrated, etc. That is, if powers aren't operating as a set of heavily interacting tactical factors that PRODUCE the narrative by virtue of their high level of detail and small granularity, then what are they doing? In a game where "that room" is the unit of space and position, you will have to engage some other mechanism or practice within the game in order to generate the fiction of what is going on in "that room." Do you see what I mean? Now, you could try to recover all of that detail with some sort of more intricate systems in some other dimension, like effects that work in terms of initiative order, or conditions, etc. that would try to recapture something like "I fired Thunderwave through the door into that room and pushed all the bad guys back to the other wall." In 4e that would be a literal change in game state on the grid, and the consequences might include freeing up a path for other characters to enter that room instead of being stuck at the door. I don't know anything about Lancer or how it does this, but most RPGs that have tried zones either don't really deal with close interior combat that much, or don't actually use them in that case (I'm thinking of Traveller for example). In Traveller you have basically 'range bands', which act somewhat like zones in a scenario taking place in moderately uncluttered terrain. Inside something like a starship they just don't really apply, and you go right to fiction where there actually aren't much in the way of actual rules on positioning. The point being, it isn't at all a tactically detailed game in the same way that 4e is. It has a lot of tactical 'stuff' in it, in a sense, like tons of weapons and gear, but how it all works is very narrative.So, IMHO, no, 4e doesn't work with zones and such, not really.As an aside, I'm experimenting with a more 'scaled out' kind of combat to reflect upper tier characters "letting lose" and battling each other on a huge scale in HoML. I don't know exactly how that will work, but my feeling is that you just get a whole other set of 'powers' at that tier. While there will have to be a way to translate them back to the 'standard scale' they are not really the sort of thing you would unleash indoors, basically, or if you did, you would expect some pretty cataclysmic results! (IE a Mythic Fire power isn't just going to burn up some guys over on the other side of the room, its going to explode the whole building, and probably half the neighborhood). Still, there IS a grid, its just BIG! Once you 'go mythic' in your fight, then yeah, terrain and such maybe works a bit more abstractly due to the larger scale, but there are still 'squares' and you can thus pull off all the 4e-like sorts of tactics, just at an epic scale!</blockquote>

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