Not necessarily 1-D, but a 2-D space divided into a small number of much larger chunks. D&D traditionally divides the map into 5-foot squares, and most melee weapons work against people in adjacent squares only, while ranged weapons may be able to cross dozens of squares.
A zone-based combat game will often intentionally omit actual measurements, but you can imagine that each "zone" might be thought of as a 30-foot square or even 60-foot or larger in more superheroic games. With that 30-foot square established as the minimum quantum of distance, your swords and punches effectively acquire a 30-foot range, as they now work on anyone in the same zone as you. Short ranged weapons like throwing knives, pistols, and some projectile combat spells might even *also* be constrained to working only within a zone, making them effectively equal to swords in effective range. Bows and crossbows might work into the next zone over, but that's no longer such an overwhelming difference in scope.
Good post! I haven't even thought about some of these extra inherent benefits of ranged vs melee (like the "create wall" calculation).
Some feedback, though:
1.
In places where there are screenshots, please clearly mark the two opposing sides in different colors or shapes. In Image 3 for example it's not at all intuitive that the token on the right is the enemy of all the other tokens.
2.
Regarding section 3.1,
> I have never heard of a single TTRPG which included proper aggro mechanics; at best, very rarely, you may see an ability which makes it disadvantageous to attack people other than the “tank”. This means your enemies are actually completely free to attack whomever they like (...) they simply cannot do their job (...)
This argument doesn't add up - "disadvantageous to attack" is completely in line with the goals of the "tank", because it reduces the danger to other party members (or hurts the enemy). The clearest example is Attack of Opportunity in D&D and PF, which is a mechanic that punishes enemies that try to move away from you. Enemies in melee with the "tank" will be punished by being dealt extra damage and potentially being stopped from advancing or acting. Another common ability is to Grab/Grapple, forcing enemies to stay near the melee and away from the ranged characters. Abilities like these two tend to have a very small radius of their own (forcing the "tank" to be a melee character).
Also, it's worth mentioning that in real life ranged combat has indeed absolutely dominated modern war. No one fights with swords anymore, when guns are cheap and effective and light and have a long range. Combat is much more about exploiting asymmetry between the forces. TTRPGs very often put groups in an unrealistic situations where two sides are roughly equal in capabilities and unaware of each other until the encounter begins. In these situations, melee attackers often get the benefit of starting very close to their enemies and ranged attackers often have no way of "kiting" (due to fast enemies, lots of walls, hazardous elements, etc).
> please clearly mark the two opposing sides in different colors
Yeah, good point for the future.
> This argument doesn't add up - "disadvantageous to attack" is completely in line with the goals of the "tank", because it reduces the danger to other party members (or hurts the enemy).
In my view, this is one of those cases where a quantitative difference turns into a qualitative one. In MMORPGs, tanks typically can "tie up" all or most of the enemies they can see, and the tie is essentially perfect: as long as the aggro from the DPS characters doesn't overcome the artificial aggro from the tank, enemies aren't going anywhere. This gives the tanking abilities a lot of control over how the encounter will unfold.
Things like disadvantages, attacks of opportunity and so on, on the other hand, are questions of degree: enemies can choose to ignore them if they are willing to take the penalty. This means that, figuratively speaking, if Threat (Mage) > Threat (Tank) + Threat (Penalty) then enemy will just take the penalty and ignore the tank.
It also means that in order for the tank to be useful they, themselves, have to present a credible threat to the enemies; but this breaks the MMORPG triangle, because then the roles of DPS (actual threat) and tank (little threat, pulls enemies) are conflated. At that point melee character "tanks" by simply being a high-value target, and anyone can do that by default; there is no actual pull of enemy attention away from high-value targets which is the cornerstone of tanking.
This isn't the case for grapples or attacks of opportunity preventing movement, but those are generally limited to single targets (only one grapple target or one AoO per round; can increase with feats but still small number) and can fail (hard to push success likelihood above like 75%) which again means that qualitatively speaking these abilities are so much less effective than conventional tanking that it's not correct to think of them as a similar type of ability.
By 'Zone-Based Combat', do you mean one-dimensional battlespace? I know Miserable Secrets uses that, but I've never played FATE.
Not necessarily 1-D, but a 2-D space divided into a small number of much larger chunks. D&D traditionally divides the map into 5-foot squares, and most melee weapons work against people in adjacent squares only, while ranged weapons may be able to cross dozens of squares.
A zone-based combat game will often intentionally omit actual measurements, but you can imagine that each "zone" might be thought of as a 30-foot square or even 60-foot or larger in more superheroic games. With that 30-foot square established as the minimum quantum of distance, your swords and punches effectively acquire a 30-foot range, as they now work on anyone in the same zone as you. Short ranged weapons like throwing knives, pistols, and some projectile combat spells might even *also* be constrained to working only within a zone, making them effectively equal to swords in effective range. Bows and crossbows might work into the next zone over, but that's no longer such an overwhelming difference in scope.
Incredibly thoughtful article! Congratulations!
Good post! I haven't even thought about some of these extra inherent benefits of ranged vs melee (like the "create wall" calculation).
Some feedback, though:
1.
In places where there are screenshots, please clearly mark the two opposing sides in different colors or shapes. In Image 3 for example it's not at all intuitive that the token on the right is the enemy of all the other tokens.
2.
Regarding section 3.1,
> I have never heard of a single TTRPG which included proper aggro mechanics; at best, very rarely, you may see an ability which makes it disadvantageous to attack people other than the “tank”. This means your enemies are actually completely free to attack whomever they like (...) they simply cannot do their job (...)
This argument doesn't add up - "disadvantageous to attack" is completely in line with the goals of the "tank", because it reduces the danger to other party members (or hurts the enemy). The clearest example is Attack of Opportunity in D&D and PF, which is a mechanic that punishes enemies that try to move away from you. Enemies in melee with the "tank" will be punished by being dealt extra damage and potentially being stopped from advancing or acting. Another common ability is to Grab/Grapple, forcing enemies to stay near the melee and away from the ranged characters. Abilities like these two tend to have a very small radius of their own (forcing the "tank" to be a melee character).
Also, it's worth mentioning that in real life ranged combat has indeed absolutely dominated modern war. No one fights with swords anymore, when guns are cheap and effective and light and have a long range. Combat is much more about exploiting asymmetry between the forces. TTRPGs very often put groups in an unrealistic situations where two sides are roughly equal in capabilities and unaware of each other until the encounter begins. In these situations, melee attackers often get the benefit of starting very close to their enemies and ranged attackers often have no way of "kiting" (due to fast enemies, lots of walls, hazardous elements, etc).
> please clearly mark the two opposing sides in different colors
Yeah, good point for the future.
> This argument doesn't add up - "disadvantageous to attack" is completely in line with the goals of the "tank", because it reduces the danger to other party members (or hurts the enemy).
In my view, this is one of those cases where a quantitative difference turns into a qualitative one. In MMORPGs, tanks typically can "tie up" all or most of the enemies they can see, and the tie is essentially perfect: as long as the aggro from the DPS characters doesn't overcome the artificial aggro from the tank, enemies aren't going anywhere. This gives the tanking abilities a lot of control over how the encounter will unfold.
Things like disadvantages, attacks of opportunity and so on, on the other hand, are questions of degree: enemies can choose to ignore them if they are willing to take the penalty. This means that, figuratively speaking, if Threat (Mage) > Threat (Tank) + Threat (Penalty) then enemy will just take the penalty and ignore the tank.
It also means that in order for the tank to be useful they, themselves, have to present a credible threat to the enemies; but this breaks the MMORPG triangle, because then the roles of DPS (actual threat) and tank (little threat, pulls enemies) are conflated. At that point melee character "tanks" by simply being a high-value target, and anyone can do that by default; there is no actual pull of enemy attention away from high-value targets which is the cornerstone of tanking.
This isn't the case for grapples or attacks of opportunity preventing movement, but those are generally limited to single targets (only one grapple target or one AoO per round; can increase with feats but still small number) and can fail (hard to push success likelihood above like 75%) which again means that qualitatively speaking these abilities are so much less effective than conventional tanking that it's not correct to think of them as a similar type of ability.