I love the cards and art, but wish they'd made them bigger to be honest. I think the idea of touching the card to be engaged with the effect is sinple enough, but feel my players would rather have some realistic map set out with some miniatures.

Has anyone done this? I imagine you could keep the range formulas the same, but just use a larger scale map, but I'd also be curious to know if anyone has made something different that might work well?

Thanks,

wOOkie

I used my scanner and blew up the place cards to about page size(remember to save as a bitmap and high resolution), and I made a bull's eye color clear cover(each ring of the bull's eye repersent distance from extreme to engaged). I place box text on the place page to say what the effect is and all the players see what it is. I find this easier that putting out markers for distances, Also you can make up your own places.

Bending Arms said:

Hmmmm...I didn't get how you did the ranges? The abstract ranges are the single biggest problem of this game for my group and any way to make the combat situations clearer would be highly appreciated. If I understood right you have one bullseye on top of the location card? What then if there are two characters both engaged with the location, but not with each other? It would be great to see some images how you organized the whole thing. Also if others have good ideas for this all of them are highly appreciated.

We use a 30' movement for our MAPTOOL games. Engagement is any figure our group of figures touching base.

Medium/long/extreme takes multiple 30'.

It works VERY WELL.

No, we didn't bother with dwarfs and halflings having short legs (we're trying to ditch the old D&Disms).

jh

i concur with E. The 30' grid movement system works very well in place of the abstract movement concepts fo 3rd Ed.

Gitz

• We do something close to the 30' grid but still use abstract distances. I made a bunch of cardstock 6"x6" square tiles and I lay them out as needed. They don't really represent an exact distance of measurement. I place a location card in the square to represent the area's special rules (if any). If the standups or miniatures are in the same square and touching, they are engaged. Just in the square together, they are close range. In an adjacent square, that's medium range to the target. One or two more squares further away is long range. Anything beyond that is extreme (the edge of extreme would technically be up to three more squares away). This actually works out with the RAW saying it cost one maneuver to move to an adjacent square. So moving from the edge of extreme to long takes 3 maneuvers, long to med 2 maneuvers, etc. I made some smaller 3"x6" edge grids so I could indicate groups further away just by laying out more of the grid. I plan on making some base image for them like grass or dirt and when I do I can post them if anybody is interested.

We use abstract ranges and the location cards but still draw stuff on a battle map using dry wipe (we just don't use squares for complete accuracy).

It seems from your post, you are struggling with PCs touching the location cards and that is too abstract in all situations?

For us, if the location card represents something that is a relatively small object or area, we may use that location to represent the object on the game map. So cart, is a great example of that. we simply use the cart location card on the map for the location of the cart and any figure touching the cart location is considered in or engaged with the cart. We'd then draw trees, buildings whatever round that location card to represent the rest of the area being explored.

Also if exact placings aren't important, we'd again simply use the location cards and PCs engaged with that card are at that location. So for example, I might put out the old road location card, a wizards tower location card and the city gate location card.

I can use this set up to represent an old wizards tower slightly off the beaten track a shortway from town, Initially the PCs are placed touching the city gates card.

As the PCs head off along the road, the tokens would be moved to be touching the forest road location card, and i'd continue to describe what happened and the players would continue to describe what the PCs did as they moved down the road (so this is pretty much story mode, I guess).

If the PCs spot the wizards tower through the trees and someone decides to scout it out, even if we switched to encounter mode at this point, the token representing the PC scout would simply be moved to be touching the wizards tower, BUT if something happened such that the wizards tower needed expanding on in some detail, say for intstance, while scouting the PC stumbles upon a small group of goblins and a fight ensues, then I'd likely draw out the details of the wizards tower and surrounding environs on the map, put the PC token for the scout on the expanded battle map drawing (or let the player do it), place goblin tokens on that drawing and just place the wizards tower location card close to it, so that the mechanical rules for the wizards tower can still be used while people are considered to be in its environs (which is normally pretty obvious) without having to just keep all the tokens PC and goblin touching the card and keeping the battle completely abstract. The road and city can stay abstract locations (unless the road became important tactically during the fight perhaps, in which case i may expand that out on the battle mat too....)

It might be this idea to switch from complete abstract to more formalised encounter maps as needed (and back again), that you are struggling with?