AOE on a grid

[Sir Awesome]

To all my fellow GM's on the forums,

We play on a Hex grid and have just been doing blast as a radius attack with a radius equal to the number of targets the blast hits via the chart in the basic book.

So...
Small would be a circle with radius 1
medium would be a circle with radius 3
Large would be a circle with radius 5

and so on.

How many of you play on a Grid, and how do you handle Blast attacks?

[Atama]

It sounds like you’re making small blasts more powerful than the book intended. They rarely hit more than one person at a time. Unless by “radius 1” you mean a single hex.

We just count number of targets and see who is reasonably close to each other.

[Kuildeous]

This is something I've pondered. Torg has enough crunch to support grid play, though I do prefer theatre of the mind.

The AOEs really should ramp up more slowly. Increasing the radius by 2 each time will really spiral crazily.

This also assumes that radius of 0 is the hex itself.
Radius of 0 covers 1 hex (1)
Radius of 1 covers 1+6 hexes (7)
Radius of 2 covers 1+6+12 hexes (19)
Radius of 3 covers 1+6+12+18 hexes (37)
Radius of 4 covers 1+6+12+18+24 hexes (51)
Radius of 5 covers 1+6+12+18+24+30 hexes (81)

So a medium blast that has 3 radius could affect 37 targets. Even if our definitions don't match up, and your radius of 3 is my radius of 2, then that's still 19 targets, which is still a lot more than intended by the rules.

If I were to adopt a hex map, and that's certainly reasonable, I'd probably go with 1 hex = 1 meter, with the understanding that 2 friendlies can share a hex. Then I'd assign the blast radii as:
Small: Radius 0 (1 hex)
Medium: Radius 1 (7 hexes)
Large: Radius 2 (19 hexes)
Very Large: Radius 3 (37 hexes)

Even that is pretty excessive, so I might impose a maximum of 1, 3, 5, 10 hexes within the blast area. If people are doubled up in a hex, then that hex still counts as one.

Or maybe I wouldn't impose a max. Unless you're doing a tight phalanx maneuver, you're not going to see enemies stand base-to-base with each other. Realistically, how often would you see 7 enemies standing in a tight circle when each hex is a meter? They're almost certain to have at least another hex between each other, so the medium blast would realistically still only get 2 or 3 foes. If they're all crammed in an elevator, well….

It's something I thought of, but I never implemented. I'm kind of curious to see how this could work because I'm not generally opposed to map battles. It's often not my first choice though.

[ZorValachan]

It sounds like you’re making small blasts more powerful than the book intended. They rarely hit more than one person at a time. Unless by “radius 1” you mean a single hex.

We just count number of targets and see who is reasonably close to each other.

I think this is a misconception. It is worded strangely, the part about the number of targets not including allies is glossed over by many.

I use squares and do the 1 square (2m) away for small, 3 away for medium, 5 for large, etc. It actually works quite well. I do require an actual target. So the casters need to be aware. 2 adventures ago the psi hit himself, not realizing the affect was everyone in the blast. He used his occultech legs to leap into the mass if foes and targeted the guy he landed next to. It hit all the foes and himself, but all the others were outside the range.

It's also interesting. Fir 25+ years i GMed completely TotM for Torg, but as soon as we went to TE, the same group wanted grid maps. It actually works well with movement and ranges.

[Tangent]

Our group likes to use maps too, and we have blast templates from another game that are nice to use.

Mind you, the only enemies that we've ever faced where the enemies are dumb enough to clump together are zombies, ghosts, and edeinos warriors (apparently Living Land axioms don't support "Don't cluster together, they have grenades/fireballs/whatever!").

Granted, edeinos warriors are hard to take down in groups like that, and ghosts are immune to grenades, but the zombies got mowed down like grass!

Of course, grenades not being their true death, they came back the next night...

[GeniusCodeMonkey]

In every game my group play, doesn't matter the system, we always have plan G.. throw a grenade and run...

[fougerec]

I use the ones I have for Savage Worlds when I used maps and they work pretty well.
Small = 1" Radius
Medium = 2" radius
Large = 3" radius

[Staffan]

On a hex grid, I'd give a Small blast an area of three hexes in a triangle. It's a fairly common AOE pattern used in Gloomhaven.