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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 4043011" data-attributes="member: 3146">Conceptually, the place that it will bother me the most is when anything takes place off the two dimensional grid. Are the bad guys 30 feet off the side of the road on a ledge 30 feet off the ground? They're 42 feet away from the PC on the road then, but the non-diagonal counting game is going to say that they're six squares away. That's an example that came up recently in my game and that I know that the answer to "is it within point blank shot range?" would have been different if we were using the 4.0 rule.Now, as to why that will bother me. I'm pretty sure that the primary reason it is going to bother me is because we're using a two dimensional grid and for three dimensions, we tend to use real world distances rather than squares to count. How deep is the pit? I'm going to say that it's sixty feet deep rather than that it is twelve squares deep. How tall is the wall? It's fifteen feet tall rather than three squares tall. Since it is not represented on the grid, a square does not have any obvious meaning but, everyone can imagine sixty feet or fifteen feet.Now, if I know that 5 squares are five feet on each side and also five feet tall, I can calculate what square you are in if you're on top of that fifty foot wall or at the bottom of the sixty foot pit. But there is still going to be  pretty dramatic disconnect when I'm told that the guy thirty feet over and thirty feet up is actually six five foot squares away--or 30 feet--even though 40 feet is the most accurate approximation of five foot increments.The other place that this will bother me is with regard to charging. At least in the minis rules, you have to charge to the nearest square that is adjacent to a creature. But, if all distance is measured in squares you will almost always find that there are, in fact, several nearest squares to choose from.Take this situation for instance: M is the monster; P is the PC._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ M __ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ P _ _ _ Looking at it visually and using dead reckoning, it is pretty obvious that A is the square nearest to P that is also adjacent to the monster M_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ M __ _ _ A _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ __ _ P _ _ _ However, if you count the distances, you will find that there are actually three squares A that are adjacent to the monster M, one of which is actually on the other side of the monster M on the horizontal axis._ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ M __ _ _ 3 3 3 _ _ 2 2 2 _ _ _ 1 1 _ __ _ P _ _ _ Not exactly intuitive.At least when using the 1/2 rule for diagonal movement as we did in 3.0, a distance calculated in squares would usually work out about the same as a distance calculated in feet and the nearest square mathematically would generally be the nearest square on the grid as well.Not so in 4th edition. And it's going to come up whenever real world numbers interact with squares (which will be often) and whenever whenever someone charges (which will also be often, and worse yet, I forsee a lot of differences in the way DMs treat that with some DMs going for the actual nearest location based on a real world application of nearest and other DMs using the much more flexible but less intuitive "nearest in terms of movement cost")</blockquote>

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