When it comes to combat my group never plays without minis and a battle mat. The tactical and visual appeal is too nice to pass up.

However, because of the odd numbers for movement I am slightly confused on what each square of my mat should represent. The obvious choice is 1 meter per square but this seems to create HUGE ranges for weapons and doesn't truly represent the space a square takes up. This also creates vast amounts of distance being moved- especially when moving diagonal.

In D&D a square represents a 5 ft space. In Star Wars a square represents a 2 meter space. In RT- well- I'm really not sure.

How do you guys govern distance in your games when using battle mats?

The best advise I've seen around here is to change the scale during battle depending on the distances involved. If the battle starts off at long range, a square could be anything up to 10m. As the fight moves into melee range, reduce that, till you get to 1 square = 1m.

As for diagonal movement, hex grids are superior because the hexes only touch at their edges, so they don't have the problems of corner to corner movement.

For low/melee distances, I'd go for 2m per square. I'd handle truly high distance fights by dropping the map and going narrative - using it won't help you much when a character's standard movement is only a fraction of a square. Alternatively, keep the 2m scale and only provide the parts of the map that are interesting, only noting the distance in between. Many combats will have only a few places that are important: Where your players are, where the bad guys are and where the objective (or any kind of helpful terrain) is. The ground between those places is only somewhat relevant as your players will want to know if they'll be able to move from cover to cover when attempting to move into melee.

Such a map may look like this:

A G S
NNNNN NN
Y Y Y Y

~~~ "50 metres AP3 cover" ~~~ Guardsman 32 metres in

_______

x E E x

Whatever those symbols mean.

Thank you for the input.

My only concern is that some peoples movement is 5 meters. How would this work with 2 meter squares?

NobleSeven said:

I generally round down for odd movements.

So for a 2=1 scale a movement of 5 would allow 2 squares of movement.

I've been running two meters to one square since i began the Rogue Trader game some four months ago. I round up for odd movements, and let things with blast 2 affect something in adjacent squares. Since one of our longer games was Star Wars SAGA edition it was a fairly easy transition.

The only thing that took some adjusting was the ability to move at angles instead of the more chess like movements in the D20 systems. BUt that's mostly owing to the fact the mat is a rectangle and not square, which throws perspectives off.

For space combat I use a 1 to 1 since ranges are generally not as insane.