Diagonals revisited

[Steely Dan]

*Snip* – more elitist garbage.

[edited by moderator - Kid Charlemagne]

 

[Henry]

Ladies and Gents, let's back up a step. Insulting one another has never been OK by the rules, and the past page of posts is showing off some pretty nasty attitudes. Please stop and think before you post, please.

 

[Felon]

Because I can't draw a square room a hex map. Rectange yes, but your basic 20 x20 room always looks funny.

Luke

EDIT: and I played GURPS for 5 years.

Pretty easy to do actually. Can't fault the hexes for that.

And the 20x20 room is toast in 4e. We've been given assurances on that.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Steely Dan - knock it off. If you can't contribute to the thread without insulting folks, maybe you should step out of the thread.

Edit: Oooo! Simulmod!

 

[Felon]

Could we drop the whole using the fickle-wife argument? Somebody's wife might want unicorns and talking cats to be playable races in the PHB. It's not a compelling reason for the general audience to accept a change.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Could we drop the whole using the fickle-wife argument? Somebody's wife might want unicorns and talking cats to be playable races in the PHB. It's not a compelling reason for the general audience to accept a change.

That's precisely what I was suggesting

 

[FitzTheRuke]

I was against 1-1-1 too but I've gotten over it.

At first I also hated the "square fireballs" and then I realized that a DRAGON isn't square either but occupies a square space, and that we now, essentially (and I think they could have used this to describe them)

Huge Fireballs
Gargantuan Fireballs
etc...

Nice and consistent.

Fitz

Oh, and the 20x20 room is NOT GONE. It's just not the whole encounter area. It may be attatched to a 5x30 hallway with three 10x10 alcoves attatched to it, etc, etc... but there will still be PLENTY of 20x20 rooms.

 

[AllisterH]

How would you handle a rogue using the "I can shift opponent my CHA mod" along a diagonal using the 1-2-1 system?

Doesn't the rogue basically lose out here which is what the OP is getting at? It does seem like the new rules will require models (dice->minis) for some of the tactical powers which I'm ambivalent about.

True, I haven't played without some form of models (be it pennies to dice to actual minis) since I began playing D&D, but there are some people that don't even use models (alhough I always wondered how the hell they judged where everyone was when the fireball spell went off.....) and I wonder if this will be a turn-off.

I can see what WOTC is going for with the virtual minitable.

 

[kennew142]

I guess the real issue is that there are two distinct camps in this thread. One group believes that it is more important for movement in the game to better simulate real world geography. The other group believes that it is more important to simplify movement. I'm not suggesting yet another poll ( ), but it seems that this issue divides gamers more or less in half.

The two sides will likely never be able to convince one another that their way is better. It seems that most of the arguments devolve into one camp implying that the other is too unsophisticated (dumb/uneducated) to be able to count diagonals, and the other implying that that everyone who doesn't like the new movement system is a snob (elitist/condescending individual).

The truth is that neither way of playing the game is wrong, or inherently better. Different issues matter more to different players. The problem with so many of the threads on this forum is that there are too many posts that imply that one method of doing something is objectively better than another. Therefore, anyone who disagrees is unsophisticated/elitist/dumb/condescending/etc.... It is the internet equivalent to calling those who have a different playstyle poo-poo heads.

Since we're all D&D fans, and spend a lot of time on our hobby, what seem to be minor issues affect us out of proportion to their actual importance. It would probably help the matter if all of us could remember that no one style of play is objectively superior. It does none of us any good to insult one another because we enjoy different things in the game.

This thread started out with reasonable discussion. The OP layed out his reasons for changing his opinion on diagonal movement. Very quickly it devolved into opposing camps calling each other names over their opinions and style of play.

Since I have approved of all of the rules previews to date, I tend to see more insults coming from the opposing camp. Objectively, both sides seem to share equally in the blame.

 

[jeffh]

Non-euclidian world? In a world in which both a 5d6 explosionfireball and a 15d6 explosionfireball have absolutely no effect beyond the same certain, immutable range - even though the intensity (damage) of said explosion varies significantly - using 1-1-1 movement instead of 1-2-1 is "handwaving geometric inconsistencies"? In a world in which circles cannot exist (any given square is either affected or it is not), we are "playing in a non-euclidean world" by implying square areas or ranges of effect?

There are arguments for and against either system, but claiming that only one or the other is non-euclidian is baseless. Find a better 'talking point'.

I can see why you would, from a physics perspective, have problems with pressureless fireballs, but I see nothing non-Euclidean about them. They violate no tenet of basic geometry. (Clarification: I am referring here to your 5d6 vs 15d6 point. The "no circles" bit seems like a strawman - it's just how the game approximates a circle, and it's as close as it can be given that the rules just aren't that fine-grained. Or rather, the 3.x version of it was.)

And I don't think this is mere semantic bickering on my part. It tracks a difference that I, at least, find very significant in this context - namely, the difference between physical impossiblility and logical impossibility.

If someone can't swallow a certain amount of physically impossible stuff, I have to ask why that person is playing D&D in the first place. Pretty much anything involving magic should give him/her problems, and I'm not sure why pressureless fireballs are any worse than the very idea of casting spells in the first place.

Logical impossibility, on the other hand, I have a much harder time swallowing, or even understanding. Certainly it renders any kind of character immersion impossible, assuming I don't want to play a madman. If it's there at all, it had better be subtle, not come up often, and be a consequence of something of clear value. Even if I accept the arguments in the first post that this rule meets the third criterion, it still fails the first two miserably. This rule smacks me in the face with logical impossibility, and I'd much rather count 1-2-1-2 (not strictly accurate either but much closer) than deal with that. (It helps that I find doing so simple and intuitive, and seem to be good at teaching it to others.)

I feel the same way about this rule that Hong apparently felt about Celebrim's equation (and, for all that I'm on the same overall side as C, rightly so).