I like the idea of abstract movement, but I'm not quite so clear on how to handle one particular situation. I'll try to illustrate it with an example.

A Wood Elf Waywatcher and a Dwarf Troll Slayer are standnig at close range to each other, staring down a nasty Beastman Wargor who is also at close range. The Dwarf Troll Slayer, filled with bravado, bellows out "Hang back, Wood Elf! I'll take this brute!" The Dwarf's player spends his maneuver to engage the Wargor, following up with a melee attack. The Wood Elf wants to put some distance between herself and the enemy, since she is not as tough as her Dwarf companion. She uses a maneuver to move to medium range with the Wargor/Troll Slayer engagement and then she fires off a shot from her bow.

At this point in the battle, the Troll Slayer and Wargor are engaged, and the Wood Elf is at medium distance from that engagement.

On the Wargor's turn, he decides to go after the Wood Elf, thinking that she will be easier pickings. What the Wargor would like to do is to "disengage in the direction of the Wood Elf", basically. So, could he use a maneuver to disengage from the Troll Slayer, moving to short range with him, while simultaneously move from medium range to close range with the Wood Elf? I imagine the Wargor is circling around the Dwarf until he is effectively right between the two heroes, so that when he moves away from the Dwarf, he is simultaneously moving toward the Wood Elf.

Is that a legitimate interpretation of the abstract movement rules?

In an engagement, the dwarf would be circling around as well.

I don't think a "while simultaneously" in this game is worth only one Maneouvre. One to disengage to close range, one to move from close to medium i.e. close-to-the-elf.

To me it goes against the spirit of the rules to allow the Beastman to disengage and move to within close range of the Wood Elf in a single maneuver. The latest FAQ update clarifies that just as it is possible to move from engaged with an ally or piece of terrain to medium range from it in a single maneuver, it is possible to move from medium range to engaged with the ally/terrain in a single maneuver; however, you always have to spend a maneuver to engage or disengage from an opponent or group of enemies. This is a separate maneuver and doesn't involve covering a lot of actual distance, so the Beastman would have to spend two maneuvers to disengage the Dwarf and move to close range of the Wood Elf. Note that the Beastman will still need to spend yet another maneuver to engage the Wood Elf, else this was for nothing as the Wood Elf can continue to flee next round and the Dwarf can re-engage. That's a total of 3 maneuvers rather than just 2 as you proposed, but that is the price of leaving the engagement with the Dwarf to engage the Wood Elf.

Let me put this another way. If the Beastman was not engaged with the Dwarf, it would be two maneuvers to engage the Wood Elf that starts at medium range. What you are proposing would allow the Beastman to essentially disengage for free from the Dwarf, which clearly isn't right.

Thank you both for the clarification.

I've just run a combat test using two heroes against a group of three marauders, and I think I am going to need some additional help with this whole abstract movement thing.

The biggest issue that I am running into is abstract movement as it relates to the "other combatants" IE, the combatants other than the one you are trying to move closer to or further away from. I'll use an example to illustrate what's confusing me, and perhaps someone can shed light on things for me.

In my test battle, I placed Kethana, a Waywatcher and Dalan, a Pit Fighter at close range to each other. These are my heroes, and I imagine they are walking across an open field, a few paces apart.

Then, at medium distance from the heroes, I placed three Chaos Marauders in a small group, all at close range from each other. So just take a moment to frame that scene in your mind.

We rolled initiative, and Kethana, the Waywatcher, went first.

Because Kethana has many ranged attack actions, she declared that she wanted to use two maneuvers to move further away, to long range. I may have handled this wrong, but I had Kethana's player declare which Marauder she was moving away from, and then place a trail of three tokens between her and the marauder she declared as the one she was moving away from. This being done, several questions immediately popped into my mind:

- Is Kethana still at close range to Dalan? They began at close range together, but she moved to long range frmo one of the marauders, so can she still be at close range to her ally?

- Is Kethana still at medium range from the other two marauders? SHe used a maneuver to add some distance between her and one of the marauders, but what about the other two.

It just got more confusing from there, but I'll stop here and let's just start with those two questions.

You need to work in zones.

You have started your heroes in one zone and your baddies in another, at medium distance.

Your waywatcher moves away from the baddies (and therefore away from her colleague).

The problem with the abstract movement is it doesn't show you which direction she has moved in.

I think it would be safe to assume the waywatcher is at medium range from the pit fighter, and long from the marauders and the pit fighter is medium from the marauders.

As the marauders havn't moved i would say she is long range from all of them, not just one.

But can you really work in zones when all movement is relative to something else? I also don't think you caxn have an abstract movement swystem that doesn't take direction into account, if only because the player might want tp specify what direction she is moving in to achieve some specific goal. For example, falling directly back behind a line of melee fighters, so that an enemy who wants to reach her would have to pass through that line. Or, the scenario might introduce an element that makes direction important, like having a battle atop a narrow walkway, or fighting to get through a hoard of enemies that are trying to keep the characters away from a castle gate, or from a ship that is about to sail.

My gut feeling is, this system will really start to break down when I have my full group of four players and they're battling 5+ monsters. I can see a scenario in which the combatants are spread out all over the place, with an engagement here and an engagement there, and everyone is trying to figure out how far they are from everyone else.

From my reading of the rules and my experience playing the fights out at a smaller scale, it all seems like "best guess", and judgement calls by the GM. And I'm actually fine with that, I just want to know that's what it is going in, so I can explain that to the players. It's the players who are likely to get miffed when things are vague or they don't understand them. That's what I'm ultimately hoping to avoid.

One rule I'll probably adopt to keep myself sane is to define things as "groups". A group would be a number of characters that are all in engaged or within close range of each other. I'll likely start the players out like this in each encounter, unless they have a reason not to be together. Same with the enemies. I can visualize things a little easier if I imagine the two opposed groups facing off at the start of a fight. Also, it makes sense that a character who wants to go to range and put some distance between herself and the enemies, could use one maneuver to move away from the entire enemy group.

It's pretty much whatever you want it to be, because it is abstract. If you have a character surrounded by enemies, but not engaged with any of them, it might be possible for them to move away from one or more and end up at medium range from those while remaining at close range to the others, but that would be a pretty specific case and I wouldn't do it to them every time. In general, if a player spends a maneuver to "change range increment" to get to medium range from enemies that are currently at close range to, they'll end up at medium range to all of them. It would be unfair to charge them multiple maneuvers to change range increment to each opponent separately.

Direction does come into play too, which you use the stand ups or minis to track.

If you have A - O - B where A is close range to O and medium range to B and A moves away from O to get to medium range from O such that you have

A O - B

Now A is at medium range to both since it takes 2 maneuvers to go from medium to long, but halfway to long range from B. If she spends a maneuver the following turn to move even further away, she is now at long range from B, but still at medium range to O.

OTOH, if you have (forum won't let me put a backslash on second line between A and B, you'll have to visualize it):

A
|
O - B

where A is at close range to both O and B and A moves away from O to medium range from O, such that you end up with this:

A
/ |
O - B

A may be at medium range to B or close range to B, depending on the A player's intent . Were they trying to move away from B as well or not? Determine what the player was trying to do, then place tokens accordingly.

You could also treat it a bit like Positioning in Burning Wheel:

- You make a manoeuvre target at one opponent or engagement;

- If you don't specify anything else, nothing else changes.

So, starting at Close range from the party and moving one manoeuvre away to Medium from the Party leaves you still at Medium from the monsters, since you didn't manoeuvre against them. Under this proposal, you would have to make an additional manoeuvre to change range against both the Party and the Monsters at the same time.

Those are good suggestions, though is still makes my head hurt somewhat. I think I just need to get in more practice with all of this, and remember that player intent and GM judgement are important aspects of this game's movement system. Coming from D&D4E, I'm used to something a bit more structured and clear-cut than that. I must "unlearn what I have learned", to some degree.

Oh i agree it will totally fall apart with high concentrations of people - especially as you say without direction to guide exactly which direction any given person is moving in relation to someone else (other than their target).

I would probably say it wouldn't hurt to do a rough map of the area so you can at least provide some sense of direction to yourself if not the players.

I also come from a D&D background (2nd, 3rd and 4th!), but don't forget Dark Heresy and Rogue Trader also use 'squares' and actual measurements to control combat - moving from absolute clarity of relative position and engagement ranges is something most of us will probably have to do.

Possibly asking the players to be clearer as to which direction they are moving may assist you - if they move straight back you will get a line and if they flank you will end up with one of mac40k's triangles, but this is only simples for small numbers of combatants.

I think i will still have a combat map of sorts and gauge roughly how far each person can move without needing to resort to feet and inches..

I think people tend to make this more difficult than it needs to be. We've had combats with 4 PCs, multiple NPCs, and numerous groups of henchmen all at different ranges and it wasn't all that difficult to handle. You mostly don't need to know the range between a PC and everything else, just the range between him and the creature(s)/object(s) he wants to interact with. In my 3 person triangle example, that's why I said determine player intent rather than specify who A, B, and O were. If B & O are both opponents of A, he may be trying to move to be at medium range away from both. If A & B are allies, A may be trying to move away from O while remaining at close range to B.

There's nothing wrong with using maps. Just don't let players use them against you by forcing you to translate abstract ranges into squares however. imagine a scenario where PC A is 10 squares away from a group of opponents, PC B is 20, and PC C is 25. You've decided that both the PCs A & B are at medium range, but C is at long. Both A & B can move to close range of the monsters with a single maneuver. They can also both engage for 2 maneuvers, although B has to cover twice as much ground. Then C on the other hand has to spend 2 maneuvers just to get within medium range of the monsters. Wait a minute, your players will say. B moved 20 squares and engaged for 2 maneuvers, but C has to spend 2 maneuvers and can't get closer than 10 squares out (otherwise he'd be in close range), thus is only able to move 15? Furthermore, if C only moves 5 squares, it's still going to cost 2 maneuvers. That doesn't seem right. does it?. A map can be a nice visual, but can cause more problems than it solves. Lastly, don't expect that just because 10 squares (arbitrary number) was medium in one encounter that 10 squares has to be medium in every encounter.

Regarding this:

"You mostly don't need to know the range between a PC and everything else, just the range between him and the creature(s)/object(s) he wants to interact with."

First Aid comes to mind, which requires one character to engage with another in order to heal him. While you did say "mostly", and thus allowed for this, I'd still contend that it could be a matter of life or death to get this right.

Venthrac said:

Again, I contend that under most circumstances, it won't be that hard. If an archer hangs back at medium range while the melee weapon fighters move in and engage the opponents, all the PCs are either engaged with one another or at close range to each other with the exception of the archer, who is clearly at medium range from everyone. Note that it is possible to have the opponents spaced out in such a way as to have multiple engagements occur all within close range of one another, so unless you've got some elaborate battle set up with opponents spread out over multiple ranges to start with and characters going every which way, it really isn't an issue..

Since I posted this question, I've run a couple of battles involving a greater number of combatants than my previous tests. THey actualyl worked out pretty well, but vital to the success of using this system was a clear statement of intent from the players and myself (as GM) just about every time something moves.

So, I do still believe the system can work, but I am also equally convinced that clear communication is necesary to make that work. The GM also has to be both fair and quick on his feet in some cases. I had one interesting situation some up in which a character was right between two monsters, one to the north at close range and one to the south at close range. The character wanted to move due west and thus away from both monsters, but I pointed out that because the character was moving silumtaneous away from two enemies in opposite direction, the distance to each would not be shortened as much as if the player was moving directly away from just one of them. For two maneuvers, I left the player move far enough west to put both enemies at medium range. That's what seemed to make sense to me.

I've found a drawn map, that is loosley divided up into "sectors" seems to work well with this system, this only came up because we had a whole string of encounters take place in a catacombs type setting, with hallways and long rooms. In this setting, especially the hallway, there was no real way to perform a move that would make you get farther away from one group of things, without getting closer to another. In our example we have the party (A) the bad guys (B) and one of the players all on his own (P).

A was at one end of the hallway, B was on the other end, and P was stuck in the middle. P was trying to get some distance away from B, but P was also carrying an object that was radiating fear, P was the only character in the party that succeeded on his fear check, So P wanted to get away from B, but not get any closer to A so that the object didn't cause them any more stress. The problem is if P moves away from B, the only option is to get closer to A because of the specific terrain, and can't get further from A without moving toward B.

A P B

Now obviously this isn't alway the case, at straight narrow hallway is the extreme of movment limiting terrain, but this same issue came up in other rooms or terrain types as well, we started just sketching out maps on dry-erase or wet-erase maps, then diving them up into "sectors", anything in a single sector is at close range, it takes 1 maneuver to move from one sector to the next, its not a limiting as a grid map, but at least provides some anchors and visual reference to this abstract system.

On an open field with plenty of room and nothing to stop you from moving in any specific direction, then no map is needed, but time there is something that acts as a fixed reference point involved in a combat, we usually resort to the map.

Edit: Apparently lines don't show up in the posts, but the illustration is supposed to show a narrow straight hallway, walls on both the top and bottom of the row of characters.

At first I though this system was nice (been used to complicated D&D 3 and 4 tactical combat and movement on battlegrid).

Then I realize it was complicated in certain complex situations (see other posts above, there's some example).

Now, I use something between the two that works great with indoor fights, but not so well for outsides. I still draw a map on vinyl mat, but I don't use the squares anymore (I'm looking for a gridless vinyl mat). I just draw the "dungeon" rooms (here, dungeon really is a placeholder for any indoor environment) and make movement from one room to another cost 1 manoeuvre. The hallway between two rooms count as a room. So we know exactly where is the character, without having to calculate every square for movement. You can also move your character anywhere inside the room with a manoeuvre (when you arrive in a new room, you can do so within the same manoeuvre it costed you to move there).

I'm curious to know how the posters here would handle a situation in which a group of NPCs are trying to limit the party's movement. For example, imagine a long, narrow corridor like in the example given above. The party wants to reach the end of it, to claim a blasphemous tome that lays open no a Chaos altar. Between the party and the altar are a dozen mutants, at close range. They will do everything in their power to block the way and prevent the party from getting through.

Because there are only moments to spare before the evil ritual taking place at the altar is complete, and because the mutants are (relatively) weak, the party don't want to bohter fighting them. Rather, they want to push on through and race to that altar.

What's a good way to handle a situation like that? Could a player engage the mob, and then disengage out the other side and keep on miving? That seems too easy, given the active resistance the mutants are putting up. Should the players make opposed Strength checks vs. the mutants' Resilience or Strength?

I'm a novice GM so I'm still trying to get a feel for this kind of thing.

Silverwave said:

I completely agree. I could not conceive of using this system without some kind of visual guide to tell me where each combatant is relative to each other one, and in what direction. There are limits on what can be abstracted, especially when the arrangement of combatants plays an important role in the encounter.

Venthrac said:

An engagement assumes a number of participants moving, circling, jostling, etc. So I'd certainly allow it. As long as the PC is willing to spend the 11 Fatigue to disengage from 12 opponents.

Venthrac said:

In this sort of situation, if the mutants are actively forming a "barrier" to prevent the PCs from getting past them, it sounds like a great opportunity to call for an opposed Strength or Agility test (Str if the PC wants to push through them, Agi if they want to slip through/under/over). I would throw some Misfortune dice into the pool to represent the mutants' coordinated effort. If the check succeeded, I would allow said PC to disengage "behind" the mutants as a normal manuever. Failure means they are still engaged and would have to fight through them. They could always try again in subsequent rounds of course.

Both are suitable responses. In one, the pc's moving past the obstructing npcs by exterting himself to weave in and out. In the other he's actively trying to force past a group who are actively trying to block his progress. I'd say use the former if the npcs are attacking the Pc while the latter makes more sense if they're just trying to keep him at bay. Also, perform a stunt like locking shields or whatnot would fit this nicely. "the warriors shove you back bodily, str vs. str"

If you assume the monsters form a linear barrier (they must cover all the ground from one wall to the other), I'll say they have to be a certain distance from each other, so you couldn't be engaged with all 12 monsters at the same time. More like, maybe 3. So I'll say, you HAVE to kill at least one to make a hole in the defense line, then you can disengage from the 2 other and then take X manoeuvres to reach the tome.

1) abstract movement: use a range chart, universalhead (go to his site, headlesshollow and look under freebies I think, his blog is funny in a Mr. Wilson kind of way), made a great one that is specific to wfrp ranges and can handle multiple engagements on the same chart, but there were a lot of other good suggestions about this too, so whatever you are most comfortable with, drawing it on a piece of paper if things are getting really complicated is just good straightforward common-sense if you don't want to bother with a range chart.

2) blocked hallway, don't want to resolve it as a combat, limited timeframe (as I understand the original question): i think this is really about how you set things up, to me it sounds like you want to cram twelve orcs in a narrow hallway while some nemesis finishes some ritual, or unlocks an intricate chest with some evil artifact in it. the point being they don't have to kill the players to win, just delay them. i'm a new gm too but i think there are a couple of ways to do things here that I would just like to what has already been said just a little

a. I don't know if this is right or wrong but I would treat all twelve orcs or grumkins as one engagement. according to the clarification on the feb faq then, engaging and disengaging them in the same turn would at least cost two maneuvers. at least one to engage the grumkins from close range, and then one more to disengage on the other side. you could be a real tool and break your group of twelve into four groups of three at medium range with each other; a little too clever for grumkins though. which i think is what gravitysangel is saying, that the tunnel is so narrow that they is only space for one btu there is space between them, in this case it wouldn't just cost 12 maneuvers, it would cost 24 to engage and then disengage form each one of them individually, woof. they would all knock themselves out from fatigue before they get half way throught the line. all of this depends on your vision of what you want to happen and how challenging you want this to be and how long you want it to take. and this is just talking about movement. i really think treating them as one massive "rugby skirmish" as the faq puts it would be best. but whatever

b. after you decide how much you want your players to pay in manuevers/fatigue, first one is free, then you decide how you want to resolve the task itself. i think there are at least two good methods. the first, just one opposed str check made by the strongest guy in the party (with the other characters assisting) use the Perform a Stunt card if you want. just remember, although there are twelve orcs in the hall if they are all share one A/C/E pool which I would use all my dice with if I was going to resolve this with one opposed roll. or you can draw it out and make it epic with a progress tracker and think out some events that happen along the way, it will work like a timer to up the anxiety, and add some humor maybe the orcs get demoralized by a character who is using a social skill to mock them or acting to throw his voice to confuse them and the orcs start chewing on each other and poking out each others eyes.

c. i think this is only a partially tactical question, it is a story-telling question. i love tactical boardgames and rpgs, i love to win. but i am trying to get away from tactics for the sake of tactics and ask about the story, and switch to "what kind of stories do I want to make possible for the players to act out?"

sorry for the long answer I just found the questions being asked kind of compelling and i wanted to be thorough

You're right, it would be 4 groups of henchmen, not 12 individuals.

I could definitely see allowing Perform a Stunt to be used to make an overrun/breakthrough sort of move. Perhaps a Discipline (St) check with per group of henchmen and [W] per PC assisting, and each success counting as a maneuver for disengaging out the other side. But I'd still give each NPC group one free attack, since the maneuver wasn't actually spent. I just wouldn't give them one free attack on EACH PC.