Playtest Two - Grid, Movement, and Measurement Changes

[rough scroll]

Crucible Playtest Two - Grid, Movement, and Measurement Changes

Another significant change coming in Crucible Playtest Two (in addition to the [action economy changes]) involves an important change to grid, movement, and measurement in the Crucible system. Playtest One is designed around use of a square grid, using standard mapmaking conventions that each square represents 5ft/1.5m of distance. After careful consideration, the Crucible system will be moving to a design that is gridless by default. As a system designed specifically for virtual tabletop and the digital medium, the discretization of space into a specific grid configuration represents an unneccesary constraint which can be handled more elegantly using digital tools in a gridless game space.

What Was Not Working Well?

To be honest, many things were working well with a square grid as designed - so this change is not so much about fixing flaws as it is about capturing the full opportunity available to a digital-first TTRPG. Some limitations of the square grid approach, however, included:

• Facing an awkward choice about how to handle diagonal movement or measurement.
• Depending on the diagonal rule used, measured template shapes for actions or spells differ from the pure geometry that they represent.
• Forcing token placement onto a square grid eliminated the possibility for more nuance in the range of certain attacks. For example you couldn't have a "short range" weapons like a dagger or unarmed fists with a shorter range than a Longsword. Nor could you have a longer-range weapon like a Glaive without increasing the range of its attacks to 10 feet.
• Token movement on a square grid made increases to a character's Stride attribute overly powerful in determining their movement speed and effective distance.

What is Changing?

Scenes in Crucible will still use the same assumptions about how many pixels of a map image represent what amount of in-world distance, but Tokens may stand anywhere that is unobstructed rather than being forced to snap into a grid configuration. The range of actions or distances of movement will be measured using true Euclidean geometry which removes any tactical distinction between diagonal vs. lateral movement. The coverage of area-of-effect templates will be determined by their exact geometry rather than a translation of that geometry onto a square grid.

I anticipate continuing to provide rules for playing Crucible using a square grid - so that will probably continue to be an option for players who like the simplification that a square grid adds. Game balance, however, will be pursued with gridless gameplay in mind meaning that the translation of those design decisions into an enforced grid will come with certain imperfections. Gridless gameplay will become the default mode of play in Crucible.

Key Benefits

Some other key benefits of this change include:

• Increased accuracy of movement distance and action range.
• Improved accuracy of area-of-effect template shapes and their placement.
• A more interesting interaction between measurement and distance and the action economy system. The Action cost of moving a certain distance will be directly determined by the distance moved, rather than the Move action allowing a certain number of spaces to be traveled.
• More nuance in the design of weaponry where different weapon types can have different effective ranges, allowing for more variation in weapon options and impact of weapon choice on character building.
• More nuance in the design of Actions where actions can have different effective ranges with more granularity than what was possible when ranges needed to be mapped to a grid system.
• Improves the game design around the Stride attribute, which becomes a measurement of your character's capacity to take free movement actions on your turn.

Concerns and Challenges

This change does come with a few disadvantages, most notably:

• The measurement and movement system will need to clearly visualize the engagement radius of creatures in order to determine whether you are "in range" to Strike or have provoked a Disengagement reaction.
• The system will need to define and implement clear rules for stacking or collision to restrict where tokens may be placed or what paths they may travel.
• The heightened granularity of movement and elimination of grid snapping makes the exact placement of Tokens more strategically meaningful. This may be enjoyed by many players - but could also lead to increased "decision paralysis" when deciding exactly where to place your token during your move. Micro-optimization of Token position may slow down combat and disrupt the immersion of the roleplaying experience.

What to Expect

Crucible Playtest Two is still a ways away, but as this mechanical change has come together I wanted to be sure to share with everyone ahead of time to allow for discussion. This choice is "already made", but I do still want to hear your feedback - both good and bad - about the direction.

Frequently Asked Questions

Post reserved for answers to frequently asked (and answered) questions about this change.

[tawdry ore]

Immediate reaction on reading the first sentences was "wtf, the grid system was working so well!" but by the time I read it all I'm converted. Why do we just accept a dagger and a longsword have the same range in other systems when they clearly don't in practice? The idea that decision paralysis might become problematic doesn't seem that real to me, if the system can show "you are in range" or "it can reach you" in some visual manner on movement I think it'll just work. I'm no designer, but this sounds exciting and I can't wait to see it!

[naive crater]

I'm split on this - on one hand, I do agree with the benefits; but I worry that without easy-to-use tools for players to pre-measure their moves and attacks, moving behind cover to make ranged attacks, but then realizing you're 0.1 feet away from the max range feels... odd. Perhaps simply rounding up or down would alleviate this, but I'm interested to see how this actually feels in play.

[tawdry ore]

If there's one thing I've come to realise with Atropos and Crucible it's that I'm often comparing with current systems, all of which were not designed for VTT. Atropos has my trust here, he's shown Crucible can leverage a VTT to remove chore-like parts of gameplay like you've described there, so I'm perfectly happy to take a wait and see approach here

The current engagement system really sunk that in for me and my players - 0 work, all automated, it just worked and no other game system in Foundry had an engagement rule that seamless and yet that powerful

Actually that's a good question - will the current engagement system survive in a similar format, despite being gridless? Instead of number of enemies within 1 grid square it'll become number of enemies within a range?

[rough scroll]

Good question - engagement will become a circular radius around the token and probably become linked to your weapon strike range

[tawdry ore]

I like the sound of that 🙂

[rough scroll]

Certain talents might increase your engagement radius instead of or in addition to the number of enemies you can engage

It will of course be important for this radius to be visualized when you have the token controlled so you can understand where you want to position your character

[tawdry ore]

That's sort of what I envisioned yep, something like BG3 does when placing an AoE: it highlights a unit that'll be affected. Could highlight tokens to indicate certain things: highlight orange when moving into an adversary's reach/engagement range

[hasty moss]

Personally, I'm wary about it from a TTRPG mechanics standpoint, it seems like it has a lot of potential to be fiddly. But I'm very interested to see how Atropos implements it from a software standpoint, lol

[rain sky]

I like this one, because for asthethic reasons, I always set the grit to 0 visibility. But to get this work we'll, it needs good tools to see which range everything has.

[thick trail]

I can see the appeal for going to a grid-less system honestly. Having faint radial auras could be used to help players know their effective range for things like melee reach and maybe even a larger aura for effective move distance? While obviously more complicated in its development I really feel this will add a lot more than it takes away.

[rain sky]

Maybe a function where you hover over an melee/range action and around the token appears a ring which shows it?

[hallow ridge]

So, here's a couple of issues I see with this:

1. This immediately forces people to rely on topdown tokens for player characters & such, which may not be preferred by everybody.
2. Even without a grid, Foundry still snaps to an invisible grid for everything, including tokens, at least for me, which could lead to issues of "but I didn't want to place the token there what happened?" especially when it seems accurate placement will be very important. Yes, holding down shift helps, but it shouldn't be something that you rely on

[vernal mountain]

Again along with the 3->12 AP change, I'm struck that this could be really good use of FVTT to do all the grunt work, and give the players a better experience.

But (and that's a big but), the support tooling will have to handle it.

Really, really looking forward to play test 2 👏🏻

[vernal mountain]

Another question on gridless... How do you handle the "physicality" of the token?, i.e. the character actually occupies a specific volume of space, so another character can't move through it ... they get blocked.
Would each token become a movable "circular wall"?

[sinful grail]

Not necessarily. If the basic system relies on pure distance between token centres, then there's no need for top-down tokens.

[hallow ridge]

Well, if you use something like circle bordered tokens, you could run into the issue of "tokens are too close and I can't see them properly" or "I can't see where exactly I need to place my token"

[sinful grail]

1ft = 1.524m and while cutting off the 0.024 in regular gaming spaces works well, it will pose a problem once you're getting into larger spaces (i.e. sea battles), because 150m are 492ft, not 500ft. Doesn't have to be a problem, but might become one in the future.

[sinful grail]

That's a good point to keep in mind. My initial response is "You can't put tokens on the same grid cell, so don't put tokens too close to each other, i.e. don't let them overlap" but I feel that doesn't fully address the point.

[hallow ridge]

if you don't let them overlap, you might not be close enough to use some of the weapons with a shorter range

[sinful grail]

That sounds like an issue that can be solved easily: Every token has a minimum reach of their token's radius. That should be (at least roughly) the same for all same sized actors anyways.

[tawdry ore]

I'd assume the plan is that overlapping is not possible between different dispositions (you can't go through an adversary) by default, and that when the edges of two tokens are touching they're at 0 distance from each other. Measuring centre to centre is going to cause problems yeah

[obsidian pond]

Best decision ever. I hate grid based systems on a VTT.

[rough scroll]

Thanks for all the thoughts and feedback so far, folks. I appreciate hearing everyone's opinions and thoughts and I'm relieved to hear that this change of direction is - for the most part - one that sounds appealing to people.

I feel pretty confident that circular tokens will work quite well with this system. I do think square tokens - if that's something anyone does - would not be a good choice though because it would look weird with a circular strike radius on a square shaped token and might yield some counter-intuitive gameplay

[rough scroll]

Your second point might represent a misunderstanding. Foundry VTT has a built in "Gridless" mode which disables snapping by default.

Regarding positioning and collision - it might not happen as part of playtest two - but eventually it will be important for each token to have a hit box for the purposes of collision. This is probably an area where automation will come gradually over time rather than all-at-once.

[vernal mountain]

The weapon reach being different sure opens interesting choices ... and that's what players want 👍🏻
e.g. I'm a knife fighter and want to get in close, but the opponent has kept a few AP's, so they can send 1 or more AP's to "step back", keeping me disadvantaged

[woeful yarrow]

I just don't understand how you're going to do variable ranged weapons. At the scale of d&d combat, there's not a ton of difference between a short and long sword.
The mechanical consequences of weapon size tend to be damage scale, 1H v 2H, concealment, and throw ability.
I'm not sure what the payoff of longsword v shortsword is supposed to be by range in a turn based token oriented combat system.

Are you going to need concealment to get up on someone with a dagger? Will everyone be sporting epees for that extra pixel of range?
Also, what does this do to Rune casters without a Metamagic add-on? Or Monks, for that matter.

[rough scroll]

It’s not going to be as finely granular as your comment suggests. Weapons will belong to well-understood range categories, but instead of - for example - there only being 2 melee weapon ranges (5ft normal and 10ft reach), there may be something like 4 melee weapon ranges (3ft, 4ft, 5ft, 6ft)

Overall it will make a difference, and it’s an intentional nerf to “reach” which was too powerful, but it’s not going to be a matter of weapon A having several pixels more range than weapon B

Basically now every weapon has a small - but variable - amount of reach

The goal is that every weapon has pros and cons: base damage, range, action cost, other special traits - all make it a more strategic decision of what weapon is right for you

If you choose an epee to have an extra foot of weapon range you would then be sacrificing something else where another weapon might be better

Hopefully that makes some sense @woeful yarrow

[woeful yarrow]

I'll have a better understanding when I see it in action. In D&D, at least, reach almost always came with 2H by default which was at the expense of shields. Also, damage tends to be lower than your mauls and such.

I'll cede that a guy with a Greatsword having a good reach advantage over a sword and board fighter or dagger rogue makes sense. Idk if I like a sword fighter having a baked in reach advantage over casters and kickboxers.
But... I'm sure that'll shake out as the game evolves.

[tawdry ore]

What don't you like about a sword fighter having a reach advantage over a kickboxer? That seems like it should be the case

[compact tiger]

It opens up for talents to expand it through some weird martial arts or something.

[rough scroll]

I’m not sure whether the system will ever have specialization into specific weapon types rather than general weapon categories - but that’s basically the model for exotic weapons.

Not so effective in the hands of most wielders, but very effective in the hands of a specialist.

That means a weapon type which might not seem that good (for example unarmed strikes are short range) unless you have the specialized talents that removes that weakness (like a martial arts specialization)

[woeful yarrow]

Mostly that it'll neuter unarmed fighters without some counterbalancing factor.
But again... the extra action points and talent tree might change the math on this.

[wheat wasp]

personally i think unarmed fighting should be at a disadvantage without specialized feats against armed opponents. other then those who focus on fighting in such a way really would be at a disadvantage and I'm sure with some training they can be brought closer to being on par with those who armed or possibly even given unique methods of handling fights that armed people wouldn't have.

[hasty moss]

From an IRL or lore standpoint, sure. But if you just go "unarmed fighting is at a 1-2 feat disadvantage from the start", it's a massive disincentive regarding people wanting to make an interesting and flavorful character.

From a balance standpoint, unless there are mechanics where forcibly disarming an opponent is a common thing (not a thing at all, but a common one that comes into play frequently), unarmed vs armed doesn't inherently need to be a night-and-day thing in terms of power

[woeful yarrow]

Feels like it would just be a branch of the martial talent tree, in the same way flame and cold are branches of the magic talent tree.
So long as you get a perk for unarmed fighting along with the base feature (flurry of blows or flying kick or something), I don't see it as a tax any more than I'd see "Heavy Armor Training" or "Two weapon fighting" as a tax.

[stark fable]

I've only followed Crucible development on and off. But having played a few gridless games (IRL and digital on similar tools) I hope you reconsider. Movement becomes extremely fiddly without a grid, especially with terrain involved and I'm not seeing a massive benefit that outweighs this in an RPG. These are just my two cents, do with them what you will.

[vernal mountain]

I'm hoping that the system is going to handle the movement costs that we see in other FRP games, e.g. +1 for difficult terrain.
Quite how to ...
(a) do the calculations, and
(b) visualise it for the players & GM
I've no idea 🤔
... but I can see it making movement more granular in a similar way to the way to the weapon reach discussed in earlier posts.
As always, "the devil will be in the detail", but I found play-test 1 really opened my eyes to the possibilities of a FRP system designed in conjunction with the VTT, rather than the VTT implementation being an afterthought.

[stark fable]

I have read the post. And I do not see what this hyper-granularity buys us. It seems like offering up a lot of playability on the altar of realism. And that doesn't sit well with me.

Granular token movement is basically how 90% of Wargames operate. The ones I have experience with, for reference are Warmachine and Infinity. And the former has a really good digital adaptation. I mean it, it's leagues above something like TTS and entirely 2d. Kinda like a good VTT. And movement is still clumsy.

What I am saying is that I'm not theorizing here. I've seen in those games so many workarounds and so much handwaving of details to make granular movement work. I've seen all the little behavioral tricks that players develop and how designers have to work around them. It's not a hypothetical "what could be" to me. I've seen it in action for hundreds of hours. It's not worth it.

The benefits listed above ... well I honestly do not see it. How much granularity do you need for a different weapon ranges to be interesting? How much granularity do you need to balance the movement stat? This already works well in other games. Sure, these use certain abstractions, but they're pretty proven abstractions. Why does this game require more granularity than any other grib-based RPG (TTRPG or video game RPG) before? And could that not be achieved sufficiently with a slightly finer grid?

[tawdry ore]

Interesting read for someone (myself) who hasn't played any such wargames. I wouldn't worry too much though, if it turns out to be super fiddly and can't be mitigated reasonably well I'm pretty sure it'd be walked back to some form of grid - Atro has been immensely open with the feedback cycle.

[rough scroll]

Good thoughts @stark fable Thanks for chiming in

[stark fable]

Something I should maybe add: I'm liking a lot of what I'm seeing from this system. I wouldn't be so harsh on this detail if it weren't for that. Overall I'm enthusiastic and hope the game does great. So aside from this aspect, great job!

[rough scroll]

understood. The exploration of gridless movement is definitely something I'm exploring, but the die is not cast yet and it is something that I think might not work out for reasons you describe and others

a more granular grid is also an option, but that has some software limitations in the design of Foundry VTT to overcome, which I don't really want to fight against

[vernal mountain]

Interesting and valid points ...
I still like the idea, as giving players more choices, both in character design & in game play, is always interesting

That said, it will depend very much on the implementation and the ease of use.
And I'm sure there will be lots of questions, e.g. can a character use a successful roll against a skill such as "Athletics" to allow them better movement?

[vernal mountain]

Any chance of hexagonal grid rather than square ...
My first FRP some 40 years ago was on a hexagonal grid map. Had it's pros and cons but the square diagonal effect always seemed a worse compromise

[rough scroll]

I think probably not. Hex is great for overland exploration or games with a certain tactical scale but for the heroic scale of a system like crucible (similar to D&D/Pathfinder in that regard) I think that hex grids do not work well on the types of area maps which are central to the VTT experience. Something that should be conceptually simple like a straight corridor in a dungeon becomes awkward when you are zig-zagging along hex offsets.

[hasty moss]

Yep. Hex grids are great right up 'til the moment you try and represent a building designed by a human