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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6588961" data-attributes="member: 996">arcs?  I am aware of nothing that uses an arc in any edition.3e and 5e have varied areas of effect - lines, cones, spheres, columns, spreads, cubes etc.  Expressed in feet.  3e gave you templates to facilitate using a grid, but aside from that, was no different than 5e.  The templates didn't make it /harder/ to run TotM, they just facilitated using a grid.  Grids, in turn, just make it a little easier to determine distances and positioning on a surface - using a play surface just makes it easier to handle distance, movement and positioning /than trying to track it all in your head would be/.  Squares are not exactly hard to visualize, especially since the correspond to the space occupied by a medium creature.   Take three hobgoblins standing in a phalanx.  Does a 15' long 45-degree cone catch them all?   Depends on where the caster is and at what angle relative to the phalanx he can place the cone, considering that he's the vertex.  Can a 3.5 cone-template?  Maybe, it depends on whether they're lined up in a row/column, or along a diagonal.  Can a 'blast 3' catch all of them?  Yes.  Neither 3e nor 4e used facing, either.  5e does not just list ranges, it lists precise geometric areas.  Also, by 'just' listing ranges, it gets into questions like what the range is from the top of a tower to an enemy at ground level at a distance.  In 3e, that's a simple calculation, in 4e it's an even simpler comparison - in 5e it's the Pythagorean theorem.   And 5e does not just list ranges, it has rules for ranges, various area effects, movement, and positioning, all down to the foot.  That's just more and more fiddly numbers to work with.  That's not so great for TotM.It looked more like eliminating the 3.x 'shift' form of movement.  Essentially, in 5e, you can circle your opponent all you want.  Depending on where another opponent is, circling the one you're engaging might let you engage him, as well (you'd be flanking yourself - but 5e doesn't use flanking), or you might provoke or use an action to disengage.  It doesn't save the DM from needing to know exactly where everyone is relative to eachother.  If 5e really were trying to facilitate TotM, it would have had to have gone further than that.  To 13A's 'engaged' range with rules for engaging and disengaging from multiple targets, and no worries about circling around in the melee causing you to engage a new opponent or disengage from one of the ones you're already engaged with by leaving his reach.</blockquote>

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