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Reply To: Scale and Abstraction in Gaming

November 17, 2018 at 4:33 pm #1303147

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14xp

First off, the idea of a basketball court full of terrain makes my eyes glitter.

The abstraction of scale has always bothered me just a little. The first example I would have pointed to would also have been the BattleTech machine guns. However I as you have to buy the idea and a lot of factors could work their way into it. Loose formations, terrain, and the idea of these opponents moving around a lot. So that at a greater distance it would be less possible to hit something reliably. I have heard of scenarios where there was no maximum range, but only incremental range penalties, such as you may see in D&D in some earlier editions, or in Car Wars. Because of the calculations necessary to determine the penalties, these games took a bit more time per turn. I still remember fondly a few 4 way games of Car Wars; each turn took so long to accomplish that we were at about an hour per second.

Good article. Thanks for stirring up the awesome memories of those games of 35 years ago.