RPGaDay 2021 - Day Sixteen

 Whoops... totally forgot to do one yesterday! The day kind of just got away from me and I forgot just about EVERYTHING I was supposed to do. I had an online book club in the evening that I ORGANIZE and completely forgot about and would have missed if it weren't for the fact that I just happened to sit down to update Strava after getting home from a ride and say a message from one of the other members saying "Hey, I tried to get into the room, but it doesn't seem to be working!?" So, in a panic I got it open and had to sit in sticky, sweaty clothes for the entirety of the discussion!? 

Will I go back and do Day Fifteen... Not sure... but here I am to press on with Day SIXTEEN! 

Let's go with Move today!

I like the the newer trend in abstracting movement in combat situations into zones - I've seen this in FATE and Warhammer: Age of Sigmar - moving away from the nit-picky, bean-counting methods of tracking every centimetre of movement and facing and allowing a more fluid, dynamic narrative approach of describing the fancy maneuvers you might want to do without having to fuss too much about whether you have enough movement allowance to do so. I do LOVE using maps and miniatures - I mean, this IS a MINIATURE WARGAMING blog, after all -  but I don't think this takes away from the ability to do so. Areas can be defined as zones on maps or the tabletop and your pretty miniatures can be used as really fancy markers to define which zone you are in, and which enemy combatant you are engaged with, within that zone. 

It's like using point-to-point or area-to-area movement in wargames - as opposed to hex-grid-maps, which I also very much prefer. Hex maps in historical wargames often allowed players to do things that simply would never happened historically - ad. could not happen, for very good reasons. that mountain range is completely unpopulated with no roads or passes... that desert cannot be crossed in this direction because of the lack of water... that jungle is so dense you'd need and army of engineers and three years to carve a pathway to get to the place that would take three weeks of marching around the other way on the established roads/trade routes. Getting to those places would mean half your force dying of exhaustion or starvation! You shouldn't get a simple movement penalty, it just shouldn't be possible. I'm sire there will be people that will argue that the most successful generals were "out-of-the-box thinkers" - which always seems to be used by rules lawyers to justify the abuse of absurd loop-holes in the rules.