It's a fucking nuisance.
Tips, tricks, quick reference sheets?
>struggling to deal with weights and distances in TTRPGs
I don't think you're cut out for this TTRPG thing, OP
>>46688657
I dont really care about such things.
If its an nuissance, just forget about it.
>>46688676
consider that her ass is much closer to you than the rest of her.
>>46688657
handwave everything.
No, you can't carry three assault rifles along with that sniper rifle and the backpack with a 5-man tent and sprint for an hour.
Travel Rates
>>46688683
I'm coming up on the end of a year long campaign, it's the only one at my college that didn't peter out after 3 sessions (I chalk that down more to it not being the only non-D&D than me being good).
Weight is hand waved and distance is only used in combat. Except I don't have a good idea of how long a fucking meter is so shit gets whacky sometimes.
>>46688699
Thanks for the post friendO :)
>>46688706
>>46688707
Yeah, s'how I've been doing but my campaign for next year is going to be Stars Without Numbers in a kustom setting and a good accounting of what the crew has (civil war\military coup group that has to fly around in 1 small-ish ship and avoid detection) is probably going to be necessary.
>>46688729
I had those covered, 1889 comes with lots in the core rule book.
Bigger issue was always storage capacity and how much shit could be held in a vehicle, ship\airship.
also see
http://www.candlekeep.com/library/articles/travcalc.htm
https://sourceforge.net/projects/aviationtool/
>>46688657
Read the book. See if there are rules for these. Apply them. Draw yourself maps (use paper with a grid or an app like roll20). Use them to measure distance.
If you do not want to do these, you can wing it and make stuff up, but it will be much less impressive.
>>46688757
Is it impressive if it only comes up once\tallying up every rifle and donkey doesn't change anything, really? I wanna believe it matters but struggle w/execution when I see no benefits.
How do you feel about dead-simple encumbrance systems like in Lamentations of the Flame Princess?
>>46688943
How does that one work?
>>46688943
Dead-simpL sounds good. Have a simple explanation to go with?
>>46688780
It does matter because it creates additional worries for the characters. If you think that these are unimportant and you do not want to hit on these mechanical notes through narrative then just ignore them. If you want to create a story where they have to evacuate the town they are in but are moving too slow with all their gear on and need to decide what their priorities are (obviously framed in a better way) - keep it and stick to the rules.
>>46688657
Use traditional English units. Yards, leagues, stone.
For example, take classic D&D.
An unencumbered character can move 40' (run 120' = 40 yards) in a round.
Short range on any weapon (e.g. 70' for longbow) is one third of the maximum range (210' = 70 yards). Easy to remember.
Overland distance is normally calculated as running speed in feet ÷ 5 = miles per day, i.e. 120' ÷ 5 = 24 miles. But it's much easier to treat it is walking speed ÷ 5 = leagues per day, i.e. 40 ÷ 5 = 8 leagues. (Especially if your over-world map is a standard 6 mi = 2 lg to the hex scale.)
Characters in classic D&D are increasingly encumbered for every 40 lbs. carried. That's about three stone. Consider a thousand coins to the stone on average, and you can always tell how cumbersome a treasure is at a glance. Easy.
>>46688958
You treat your inventory like a videogame. The number of items you're carrying determines your encumbrance. Also up to +2 depending on what armor you might be wearing. Subtract your Strength modifier, subtract 2 if you're a dwarf, and then you have one of four different speeds depending on the final number.
>>46688657
Whatever you do, make sure that you use relevant units. In a hexcrawl you're probably better off counting by hexes, in a pointcrawl by time. Or just abstract it away entirely, and just timeskip the scene to something you find more interesting. Does it really matter how long it took to travel from A to B? If it doesn't, why keep track of it?
Encumbrance might not matter depending on your game, but even if it does there's a mountain of difference between how something like OD&D does it (armor, weapons and treasure have discrete weight; the rest is lumped together as a flat value) and how, say, BECMI does it (EVERYTHING has a discrete weight). And those editions actually have the damn thing matter on account of treasure directly correlating with XP.
Something like 3E or 4E, though? Those don't really need encumbrance rules.
Every rule should exist for a reason. Try to figure out what those are and you can figure out if there's a better way to handle them.
Take, for instance, how AD&D measures ranges in inches and 4E by squares - it's directly applicable in a miniatures game in a way that measuring in in-world units isn't.
And sometimes you don't even need to have discrete ranges in your game, such as when you aren't actually using miniatures. I've even seen it abstracted down to ranged/melee, with the former being able to target anything in the current scene and the latter only able to target whatever you're actually in close combat with.
Anything in particular that you find irritating in regards to weight and distance?
>>46689151
Travel times are not an issue for me. Hex crawl for local and point crawl for global has served me well and came very intuitively to me when I began DMing.
Distances are issues in combat scenarios. Is a door frame 5 meters across? And is it a table width? Are all tables also as wide as all door frames? Some funkyness is to be anticipated but if iDe-grid it creates new problems with distance. I've tended to deploy "distance circles" of standard units and just sort of bullshitted the rest, but I still don't get a feeling of how far things are from people and each other.
Part of the problems is all storage is in tonnes but there are two kinds of tonne and it's not always entirely clear as to which one it's using and often weights are given in pounds. That's a problem unique to 1889 though.
Abstractions are fun the issue is when y'ave guns with an effective range of 40 meters and guns with an effective range of 200 meters in the same game and y'need to discriminate.
>>46689185
While I really appreciate bumps like this we're pretty clearly having an actual discussion about weights and distances. Also perspective so the OP image just enriches the conversation.
>>46689255
>Hex crawl for local
I've always wondered - how do you deal with flying movement on a hex map? Like, wouldn't diagonal movement along the Z-axis be a problem?
>>46689303
Wouldn't the same also be a problem for square grids?
>>46689303
If it's air-air I use blobs in google Drawings from gDrive. It's as ugly as it sounds, does the job, but basically: grid-free is the way to be.
In case of patrolling aerial craft I'll more of denote their path, put them on a hex descriptive of their current general location.
Hexmaps require anything have an awkward vector of approach, just gotta learn to live with it but it's totally unsuitable for ship-a-ship combat.
The champions complete game has rules for weight. But mostly how heavy it has to be to reach orbit.
>>46688707
Get a bunch of scrap wood and boxes with weights in them and make the players wear/carry them while trying to do shit. Make them lighter even to represent their characters strength difference, doesn't matter. Unwieldy shit is way worse than weight.
>>46689255
>Abstractions are fun the issue is when y'ave guns with an effective range of 40 meters and guns with an effective range of 200 meters in the same game and y'need to discriminate.
If you feel the need for discrimination between those, then yeah that's when you start pulling out the rulebooks and combat table booklets.
For a lot of games, though, fights are going to take place on such small scales that the difference between 40ft and 200ft is immaterial - thus is the curse of squad-based games, dungeoncrawling, and small table sizes.
And at some point as you scale up you start abstracting things yet again on account of not wanting to make a hundred attack rolls for a hundred units, and other shit like that.
Also, of course, modern guns can have effective ranges in the kilometers. Because fuck you, small game tables and FPS arenas.
There's also the question about whether or not you actually need to make that distinction - does it actually matter that one of the guns has four times the range? If it does, do the exact distances involved actually matter or can they just be abstracted away yet again with the basic assumption that the one with the longer range wins?
Not to mention the old question of whether or not you should actually make attack rolls when an NPC attacks an NPC. But that may or may not be relevant here.
>>46689303
The really old method is to get something to stick the miniature on - stack it on a die, for instance.
I think OD&D recommended wooden dowels, presumably because those were in use in some other aerial combat game at the time. The system in OD&D is based on Fight in the Skies/Dawn Patrol, but hell if I've ever managed to find a copy of those rules.
Generally, it's a good idea to get some standardized flying patterns set up beforehand so that you don't need to futz around with Pythagoras' theorem. For every X hexes forward you can descend/ascend Y units, for instance.
>British
>taught metric in school
>try to use it in everyday life
>constantly confused when people use feet instead of metres, pounds instead of kilograms, etc.
>still don't fully grasp what a "metre" or a "kilogram" is, have to regularly measure things to get an idea
>finish school
>give up on SI units
>learn Imperial
>it quickly clicks
>can easily estimate the height of someone give or take an inch
>can easily estimate the mass of something give or take a few pounds (unless it's particularly heavy)
>can easily estimate how much liquid is in a container
Why is this?
I get that SI units are largely intended and defined for scientific purposes, but Imperial is just so much more intuitive to me.
Is there some kind of historical or psychological explanation for this?
>>46692940
It's all proportional to the length of your arms, especially lbs.
fluid oz. can suck a dick though, nasty australian measurement.
>>46689321
Why would it? You just count cubes instead of squares.
>>46689950
No, no, I didn't mean the logistics of moving your models - I got that covered. I meant the math. I feel like it would get very complicated if you have to use different metrics for ascent/descent than for regular movements.
>>46692940
Probably some kind of brain defect on your part.
>>46693203
I guess my brain was programmed in Imperial instead of metric.
As long as I never operate NASA equipment, I should be okay.
>>46693224
Or leave the US.
>>46693304
I said I'm British.
It's law now that we use grams and millilitres for food and drink, but I internally convert those to pounds and pints.
>>46693608
As someone who grew up on metric, pints and inches I can do, miles are more difficult, but fuck pounds and ounces and stone and whatever the bullshit the rest is.
>>46692940
>constantly confused when people use feet instead of metres, pounds instead of kilograms, etc.
You mean there's still Imperial scum in everyday life? Surely that would be confusing. I've never used the system outside of wargaming and I couldn't measure by inches or by pounds if my life depended on it and I had a calculator with conversion tables on it.
>>46688657
>It's a fucking nuisance.
If you truly detest them, then just ignore them and be donw with it.
>>46693800
Most people in Britain still use Imperial.
It's slowly dying out now due to metric/SI being used in schools and trading standards (see >>46693608), but road signs are still in miles and people still order pints of beer and milk, weigh themselves in stone, etc.
