Thomas Shey
Legend
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.
Cubits. Keep it biblical.
"Smacking" distance
"Shooting" distance
"Yeah, that's right, you'd better not come any closer" distance
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.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.
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.
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).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.