Hello everyone

Mine is not a rule question, but a curiosity regarding how to play.

I'm playing a campaign with 3 friends and so far we did it very well without the use of a grid. We also had few combat, thanks to the narrative style of the game and the beautiful setting. We are playing by Discord, off course, because of the quarantine and the distance between us.
But now, with experience points gained, my Soshi Illusionist (the only shugenja in the party) wants, and should, learn new invocations and many of them, especially the Air ones, deal with area of effect and zone of effect. Some of them are centered on the caster, other are centered on a target space you can choose and then affect the area around it.
There are invocations I can cast in order to create dark areas, which one or more of us could exploit with Ambush or other ways.
There are also invocations which deal supernatural damage around the caster till a certain range.
So... How can I play all those things without using a grid for positioning characters' and enemies' miniatures?
How do you handle all of this?

Thank you very much in advance

In narrative play, only common sense and the GMs decision can decide who is inside a zone and who is not.

Try it with your group. If you find that it leads to common disagreements, either switch to grid combat or other invocations.

Its a play style thing, and there is not one correct way. Some groups do not care about the tactical details, some derive their suspense from them. That's why there are two range systems.

Welcome to the forum and I hope you will stick around, good news is, your post stayed in moderator limbo for 2 days, so there is a chance of you coming back and reading this.

As @Harzerkatze mentioned, either you set up a grid somewhere (TTS or Roll20) or you change to more abstract distances where range 0 equals close, range 1 equals short, range 2 equals medium, etc...
The one problem I have with the grids is that for a tactical system, it works poorly with the way the movement in the system is set up.

On 4/28/2020 at 9:49 AM, Akasha666 said:

Hello everyone

Mine is not a rule question, but a curiosity regarding how to play.

I'm playing a campaign with 3 friends and so far we did it very well without the use of a grid. We also had few combat, thanks to the narrative style of the game and the beautiful setting. We are playing by Discord, off course, because of the quarantine and the distance between us.
But now, with experience points gained, my Soshi Illusionist (the only shugenja in the party) wants, and should, learn new invocations and many of them, especially the Air ones, deal with area of effect and zone of effect. Some of them are centered on the caster, other are centered on a target space you can choose and then affect the area around it.
There are invocations I can cast in order to create dark areas, which one or more of us could exploit with Ambush or other ways.
There are also invocations which deal supernatural damage around the caster till a certain range.
So... How can I play all those things without using a grid for positioning characters' and enemies' miniatures?
How do you handle all of this?

Thank you very much in advance

As mentioned, narrative style requires narrative decisions. That said, perhaps the use of opportunities during a skill check can help adjudicate number of targets etc. just try to be consistent and let the players know "the rules" ahead of time and maybe even before points are spent on invocations.