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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 11:42AM
#191
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Date Joined:
Jan 15, 2009
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And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW. It is fudging. Which is my point. As long as you were all on board with that it worked. Nothing has changed with 4e.
4e is definitely more persnickety about distance, which is why 1-square shifts matter
If your rounds were 60 seconds instead of 6... see one shift in AD&D would have been oh 50 feet... and fifty feet mattered but a shift was about all they allowed you to move in combat. 
Translating the untranslatable.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 11:43AM
#192
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I'm one of those guys. We didn't fudge whether we used maps or not. I don't mind if people fudge. People should play the game they want. But we played RAW as much as we were able with whatever books we had access to at the time. And you didn't have to have gridded squares to do it as long as you described situations using real numbers and you worked from those numbers. Take a few notes? Sure. Grid based maps? Not required.
I think what I was saying is you need more than a few notes. You'd need to be able to locate all PCs unequivocally in 2d space, so you'd have to have the coordinates of each character and do a BUNCH of (fairly simple) geometry. I think it is fair to say that there are quite a few situations where it hardly matters. There are also quite a few where it matters a whole lot, and it gets more and more so at higher levels where lots of AoEs of various types are getting flung around on a regular basis. Sure, I could sit down and calculate from X, Y coordinates who is and isn't in a Cone of Cold, but it would take an order of magnitude more work than just laying it out on a map. Guestimates are just always biased and almost always biased in favor of the PCs and since Magic Users (and to a lesser degree clerics/etc) will be the major beneficiaries what you find is that casting gets a lot easier. This is a big reason why 1e casters were often considered 'overpowered in combat' when in fact they were more just glass cannons, horribly powerful but also horribly limited, at least up to where you hit 4th level spells or so.
And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW. It is fudging. Which is my point. As long as you were all on board with that it worked. Nothing has changed with 4e.
4e is definitely more persnickety about distance, which is why 1-square shifts matter, but weapons didn't have reach (notwithstanding the hyper-complicated weapon vs. armor type chart) in 1e..
you don't need a whole new set of rules
Need is the worst basis for aything in a hobby that is entirely voluntary. We don't need anything. Sometimes, rules help. There's a wide gulf between RAW and Imagination-fu. Most people play somewhere in the middle... in every edition.
definitely agreed. 4e is quite a bit more persnickity because it really revolves a lot in a fight around exactly what bonuses you get, etc. I've run some 4e fights without bothering with a map, you can do it without something like SARN-FU and even do it accurately if its a small fight, but for a complicated scenario I think you'd want some rules, certainly they would be helpful. Wrecan's are pretty nice ones.
That is not dead which may eternal lie
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 11:47AM
#193
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No, you don't want to understand. THat's clear. You want to be right....or something. The way you form your questions makes it obvious. In a large melee there wasn't a lot of movement going on. A few distance notes were sometimes necessary in combats with lots of ranged attackers, but not always. Each player would keep track of their own distance from enemies or from the main melee. You don't need a photographic memory to do this. You're really reaching here. I'm not sure what your goal is to be honest. If you simply go into combat using distances in your descriptions and each player tracks a couple of numbers, it kind of takes care of itself. You clearly did not do this (and that's ok). But for some reason can't conceive of it. Your own personal limits are causing you to think a thing is impossible. ("I didn't' do it, therefore it can't be done"). And now, you're pursuing it with the vigor of an internet lawyer. It's strange.
Oh, so now you know what I'm thinking too. 
From your own description of the bookkeeping involved...there were what?...6 people keeping notes on distances. There sheer volume of the note taking involved is far more work than sketching out a crude map on some graph paper and using some kind of markers to keep track of location.
I guess my problem is that you maintain that you were as totally and infalably accurate as a map grip with markers, but only kept some general notes on distances. I don't believe for a minute that both are possible, and I suspect that you realize this contradiction too, but for whatever reason continue to argue that it is possible.
The kind of melees I run (especially in 4e) often have dozens of combatants, involve combatants at many different elevations and could not be tracked with note taking without pages and pages of paper being used and slowing down the combat to a crawl. All of that is replaced with one sheet of paper (or a battlemat if you will) and a collection of miniatures. No note taking required. All you have to do is look at the map and instantly you know the relation of everything on it to everything else. It is rare for us as well to have to count anything. We can look at five 1" squares and know it is 5. Sometimes we count to be certain, but it is rare in extreme that we guessed wrong.
Kalex the Omen Dungeonmaster Extraordinaire Concerning Player Rules Bias
Show
Gaining victory through rules bias is a hollow victory and they know it.
The argument goes, that some idiot at the table might claim that because there is a "default" that is the only true way to play D&D. An idiotic misconception that should be quite easy to disprove just by reading the rules, coming to these forums, or sending a quick note off to Customer Support and sharing the inevitable response with the group. BTW, I'm not just talking about Next when I say this. Of course, D&D has always been this way since at least the late 70's when I began playing.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 11:58AM
#194
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Date Joined:
Jun 15, 2010
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I'm one of those guys. We didn't fudge whether we used maps or not. I don't mind if people fudge. People should play the game they want. But we played RAW as much as we were able with whatever books we had access to at the time. And you didn't have to have gridded squares to do it as long as you described situations using real numbers and you worked from those numbers. Take a few notes? Sure. Grid based maps? Not required.
I think what I was saying is you need more than a few notes. You'd need to be able to locate all PCs unequivocally in 2d space, so you'd have to have the coordinates of each character and do a BUNCH of (fairly simple) geometry. I think it is fair to say that there are quite a few situations where it hardly matters. There are also quite a few where it matters a whole lot, and it gets more and more so at higher levels where lots of AoEs of various types are getting flung around on a regular basis. Sure, I could sit down and calculate from X, Y coordinates who is and isn't in a Cone of Cold, but it would take an order of magnitude more work than just laying it out on a map. Guestimates are just always biased and almost always biased in favor of the PCs and since Magic Users (and to a lesser degree clerics/etc) will be the major beneficiaries what you find is that casting gets a lot easier. This is a big reason why 1e casters were often considered 'overpowered in combat' when in fact they were more just glass cannons, horribly powerful but also horribly limited, at least up to where you hit 4th level spells or so.
And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW. It is fudging. Which is my point. As long as you were all on board with that it worked. Nothing has changed with 4e.
4e is definitely more persnickety about distance, which is why 1-square shifts matter, but weapons didn't have reach (notwithstanding the hyper-complicated weapon vs. armor type chart) in 1e..
you don't need a whole new set of rules
Need is the worst basis for aything in a hobby that is entirely voluntary. We don't need anything. Sometimes, rules help. There's a wide gulf between RAW and Imagination-fu. Most people play somewhere in the middle... in every edition.
definitely agreed. 4e is quite a bit more persnickity because it really revolves a lot in a fight around exactly what bonuses you get, etc. I've run some 4e fights without bothering with a map, you can do it without something like SARN-FU and even do it accurately if its a small fight, but for a complicated scenario I think you'd want some rules, certainly they would be helpful. Wrecan's are pretty nice ones.
"I think what I was saying is you need more than a few notes. You'd need to be able to locate all PCs unequivocally in 2d space, so you'd have to have the coordinates of each character and do a BUNCH of (fairly simple) geometry."
Not really. You only have to have super detailed information if you do something that requires it.....frequently. If you're not sure of who would be in the blast radius (due to poor notes), then you simply move or try to draw an enemy to a place where you ARE sure. We weren't trying to drop a fireball that included a bad guy but avoided a good guy 3 inches away. We all agreed that was a pretty lame abuse of the rules. We wouldn't try to do that with or without a grid. (If someone was doing things like that then I can understand the charges of fudging even if you WERE using a grid/minis) We played the game the same. The outcomes were as indistinguishable as we wanted them to be. In both cases, magic users were not overpowered. If anything, it was the opposite. Unable to get spells off, maintaining elaborate component lists and dying quickly, they always seemed the harder characters to play by far. Maybe if we were playing a level 15 party of magic users and clerics with unlimited spell components and fudged casting time, we would have the problems you describe. But once you play based on described distances it gets easier and we simply played this way from the start because no one told us not to. Seemed perfectly natural.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:00PM
#195
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Date Joined:
Jun 15, 2010
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No, you don't want to understand. THat's clear. You want to be right....or something. The way you form your questions makes it obvious. In a large melee there wasn't a lot of movement going on. A few distance notes were sometimes necessary in combats with lots of ranged attackers, but not always. Each player would keep track of their own distance from enemies or from the main melee. You don't need a photographic memory to do this. You're really reaching here. I'm not sure what your goal is to be honest. If you simply go into combat using distances in your descriptions and each player tracks a couple of numbers, it kind of takes care of itself. You clearly did not do this (and that's ok). But for some reason can't conceive of it. Your own personal limits are causing you to think a thing is impossible. ("I didn't' do it, therefore it can't be done"). And now, you're pursuing it with the vigor of an internet lawyer. It's strange.
Oh, so now you know what I'm thinking too.
From your own description of the bookkeeping involved...there were what?...6 people keeping notes on distances. There sheer volume of the note taking involved is far more work than sketching out a crude map on some graph paper and using some kind of markers to keep track of location.
I guess my problem is that you maintain that you were as totally and infalably accurate as a map grip with markers, but only kept some general notes on distances. I don't believe for a minute that both are possible, and I suspect that you realize this contradiction too, but for whatever reason continue to argue that it is possible.
The kind of melees I run (especially in 4e) often have dozens of combatants, involve combatants at many different elevations and could not be tracked with note taking without pages and pages of paper being used and slowing down the combat to a crawl. All of that is replaced with one sheet of paper (or a battlemat if you will) and a collection of miniatures. No note taking required. All you have to do is look at the map and instantly you know the relation of everything on it to everything else. It is rare for us as well to have to count anything. We can look at five 1" squares and know it is 5. Sometimes we count to be certain, but it is rare in extreme that we guessed wrong.
Only the DM routinely kept any notes on distances. Everyone else kept track of their characters positions mentally. You really are trying to make it sound harder than it is. And I agree, the same can't be done with 4E combats. Way too much to track. You really have to have a grid and minis to make 4E work the way it's written.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:07PM
#196
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Date Joined:
Aug 30, 2007
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And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW.
Wait, people actually played 1e RAW?
Anyway, all the back and forth is pointless. You're right that even if everyone didn't fudge when not using a map (or even while using it), most people probably did. The fights we didn't use maps for were typically ones that weren't that important so no one really cared if half the stuff was fudged (well that and times when we just didn't have maps available like during a camping trip where we started a 2e game up and didn't even have paper so we wrote character sheets on the inside or raisin boxes and passed around the shared pencil, good times). But if no one minds the fudging, it's not an issue, regardless of which edition we're talking about.
Owner and Proprietor of the House of Trolls.
God of ownership and possession.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:13PM
#197
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Not really. You only have to have super detailed information if you do something that requires it.....frequently. If you're not sure of who would be in the blast radius (due to poor notes), then you simply move or try to draw an enemy to a place where you ARE sure. We weren't trying to drop a fireball that included a bad guy but avoided a good guy 3 inches away. We all agreed that was a pretty lame abuse of the rules. We wouldn't try to do that with or without a grid. (If someone was doing things like that then I can understand the charges of fudging even if you WERE using a grid/minis) We played the game the same. The outcomes were as indistinguishable as we wanted them to be. In both cases, magic users were not overpowered. If anything, it was the opposite. Unable to get spells off, maintaining elaborate component lists and dying quickly, they always seemed the harder characters to play by far. Maybe if we were playing a level 15 party of magic users and clerics with unlimited spell components and fudged casting time, we would have the problems you describe. But once you play based on described distances it gets easier and we simply played this way from the start because no one told us not to. Seemed perfectly natural.
Fair enough. I agree that there are many situations where it is unambiguous, and I'd agree too that you could play it safe and err on the side of caution. I'd call that 'somewhat different', but I don't really want to argue with you, you're quite reasonable. Besides, at a fundamental level I don't think we really disagree much on the original point. 1e certainly is a whole bunch less strictly map dependent than 4e is. I think its possible to question people about why they would accept playing one mapless and not the other, but it starts to stretch things a bit to insist that they're equivalent.
That is not dead which may eternal lie
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:19PM
#198
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And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW.
Wait, people actually played 1e RAW?
Anyway, all the back and forth is pointless. You're right that even if everyone didn't fudge when not using a map (or even while using it), most people probably did. The fights we didn't use maps for were typically ones that weren't that important so no one really cared if half the stuff was fudged (well that and times when we just didn't have maps available like during a camping trip where we started a 2e game up and didn't even have paper so we wrote character sheets on the inside or raisin boxes and passed around the shared pencil, good times). But if no one minds the fudging, it's not an issue, regardless of which edition we're talking about.
Well, who knows if we WERE playing 1e RAW, since nobody is actually sure what RAW was... We THOUGHT we were playing it RAW, lol. And yeah, I know when we did go with mapless fights we were definitely 'fudging' at least by our standards. It seemed a good bit different IME, but nobody cared much one way or the other.
That is not dead which may eternal lie
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:19PM
#199
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Date Joined:
Jun 15, 2010
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And there isn't anything wrong with that, but it isn't 1e RAW.
Wait, people actually played 1e RAW?
Anyway, all the back and forth is pointless. You're right that even if everyone didn't fudge when not using a map (or even while using it), most people probably did. The fights we didn't use maps for were typically ones that weren't that important so no one really cared if half the stuff was fudged (well that and times when we just didn't have maps available like during a camping trip where we started a 2e game up and didn't even have paper so we wrote character sheets on the inside or raisin boxes and passed around the shared pencil, good times). But if no one minds the fudging, it's not an issue, regardless of which edition we're talking about.
Agreed. Pointless. But some people like to argue.
We didn't play RAW in every respect, but we didn't use a lack of grid/minis as an excuse to fudge combat either. We were true to attacks ranges and AoE etc. We frequently had a map for reference/visualization and players kept track of where they were at all times. No minis required. If someone lost track of what was what, we might stop and look at the map and discuss (or in some cases, draw one) more carefully and get everyones distances straightened out but that was only the highly complicated scenarios (and to be honest, that was kind of a fun thing to do too). Needless to say early D&D combat was much simpler, with less movement necessary to make sure you were doing what you needed to do with your character. Combats were fast and incredibly simple compared to 4E. There was far less to track in combat. Once you get used to playing this way, it falls into the background and becomes part of the description of the action.
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1 year ago ::
Jan 03, 2012 - 12:27PM
#200
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Date Joined:
Jun 15, 2010
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Not really. You only have to have super detailed information if you do something that requires it.....frequently. If you're not sure of who would be in the blast radius (due to poor notes), then you simply move or try to draw an enemy to a place where you ARE sure. We weren't trying to drop a fireball that included a bad guy but avoided a good guy 3 inches away. We all agreed that was a pretty lame abuse of the rules. We wouldn't try to do that with or without a grid. (If someone was doing things like that then I can understand the charges of fudging even if you WERE using a grid/minis) We played the game the same. The outcomes were as indistinguishable as we wanted them to be. In both cases, magic users were not overpowered. If anything, it was the opposite. Unable to get spells off, maintaining elaborate component lists and dying quickly, they always seemed the harder characters to play by far. Maybe if we were playing a level 15 party of magic users and clerics with unlimited spell components and fudged casting time, we would have the problems you describe. But once you play based on described distances it gets easier and we simply played this way from the start because no one told us not to. Seemed perfectly natural.
Fair enough. I agree that there are many situations where it is unambiguous, and I'd agree too that you could play it safe and err on the side of caution. I'd call that 'somewhat different', but I don't really want to argue with you, you're quite reasonable. Besides, at a fundamental level I don't think we really disagree much on the original point. 1e certainly is a whole bunch less strictly map dependent than 4e is. I think its possible to question people about why they would accept playing one mapless and not the other, but it starts to stretch things a bit to insist that they're equivalent.
I think that's reasonable. I'm sure there WERE things we werent' tracking....somewhere. We certainly didn't do it intentionally and actually tried pretty hard to be good about it. Three of us were on the elite math team (doing derivatives and limits in 7th grade) so maybe that impacted our abilities to track stuff, but I don't really think so. It really wasn't that bad. The biggest thing we did was mash up BECMI and 1E depending on which books we had or which module we were running.
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