Which of these is the optimal distance of measurement for your TTRPG enjoyment?

[Thomas Shey]

It depends on the usage; for general usage, feet, yards or meters are fine, but for combat distance meters or yards are good because they can be used for square/hex size.

 

[Slit518]

Cubits. Keep it biblical.

Another person of taste, I see!

 

[Committed Hero]

Poronkusema!

 

[Thomas Shey]

"Smacking" distance
"Shooting" distance
"Yeah, that's right, you'd better not come any closer" distance

So, 13th Age range categories?

 

[Thomas Shey]

To make it clear, I actually don't mind range bands conceptually (I have a little more problems with zones because I have trouble conveying them usefully), but I'm often playing games where I want more specific detail than that (because it allows distinctions in things like range, area and movement that usually broad categories don't) but there's nothing that says that distinction has to be important to everybody, and it isn't even always important to me.

 

[Staffan]

To make it clear, I actually don't mind range bands conceptually (I have a little more problems with zones because I have trouble conveying them usefully), but I'm often playing games where I want more specific detail than that (because it allows distinctions in things like range, area and movement that usually broad categories don't) but there's nothing that says that distinction has to be important to everybody, and it isn't even always important to me.

That's perfectly fair. More detail allows more nuance. For example, wood elves in 5e have a higher speed than humans, and that's part of the overall balance between them. If you move to a fuzzier system that won't matter anymore, and perhaps they should be given some other ability to compensate.

 

[aramis erak]

The following are all used in games I've run recently (last few years), but not all of them in the same one...
Feet, Yards, Miles
cm, m, Dm km
Shaku, Jō, Ken, Ri (Japanese Traditional Measure)
SI distances from millimeters to gigameters (millions of kilometers)
G·Turns (much easier than getting players to grok than M(km) aka Gm)
AU (~149.568 Gm)
Lightyear (9460.73 Tm, or 63241.1 AU)
Parsec (3.24LY, a contraction of Parallax Second - it's the distance of a body with 1 arc second of parallax on a 2 AU baseline)
1.5m grids
10m grids
8km grids
unspecified distance hex grids (Battlestations!)
game inches of 15', gridded at 4 squares to the 1', so 3.75 feet per grid-square

One I'm prepping for uses a game artifice rather than giving real-world units... Savage Worlds uses game inches - I forget whether it's 6 feet or 2m. Checking, it's 2 yards = 6 feet ≈ 183cm.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That's perfectly fair. More detail allows more nuance. For example, wood elves in 5e have a higher speed than humans, and that's part of the overall balance between them. If you move to a fuzzier system that won't matter anymore, and perhaps they should be given some other ability to compensate.

It can also be relevant to making various weapons and such relevant, though of course not everyone cares (again, including sometimes me).

(As a note, 13th Age does give wood elves a different ability given movement is very general in it for just that reason).

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

That would probably require a significant overhaul. Especially given that 5.0e couldn't really keep 5-foot grid references out, despite not being a grid-required game. I'd say a 3rd-party could do it, but while 5.0 has been Commons-released, I don't expect the same from OneD&D.

Did Level Up include such a thing... cinematic mode with zones? Just speculating.

Yeah - ranged and melee weapons would be easy, but the spells is where it starts to take some work. It could be done, but we're talking almost at a spell-by-spell level once you get past touch range. With errata just about every time a new batch of spells drops.

 

[fluffybunbunkittens]

Yeah - ranged and melee weapons would be easy, but the spells is where it starts to take some work. It could be done, but we're talking almost at a spell-by-spell level once you get past touch range. With errata just about every time a new batch of spells drops.

I don't see how spells are so different. They cause an effect within a range. The range is something you've already had to decide for the ranged weapons (near/close/far). So you mostly just need to decide how many things an AoE affects (which can be all in a zone or 1d6 random targets or a static number based on the diameter - the specifics are not important, only that there is a general ruling).

There's a few pells with unique effects, like Wall of Force, where you'd just have to trust the GM to go 'okay, the point of this spell is that you separate things from each other, so what do you want to separate/contain?' But, even as things exist in the base rules, many spells are murky enough that GM has to make judgement calls anyway... I don't see this as a big departure.