Re: (TFT) Line of Sight

[ErolB1@aol.com]

In a message dated 10/11/2006 12:27:10 PM Central Daylight Time, 
craigwbar@comcast.net writes:


> The variety of terrain types available just on Earth, let alone Cidri, 
> could
> be let the GM or military scenario designer get away with almost anything, 
> I'm
> afraid.  Here in Colorado, we have grasslands which functionally offer an 
> LOS
> of about 5 meters to someone lying down, but which would show that same 
> person
> at that 5 km range very clearly if they just stood up.  But up in the 
> Rockies,
> the evergreen forest tends to have a virtually desert underlayer with no
> brush, no grass, no dead vegetation even: you look around and you can see
> right through the trunks of the trees for 1/2 km or more, but if you climb a
> rocky knob and look at the vista, you see nothing but impermeable green tree
> tops.  Out west and south, we've got that scrubby "tumbleweed desert".  A 
> man
> sitting still behind a bush would be invisible at 1/2 km but moving around,
> you can see him at 5 km again.  And so on...

I was afraid it would be something like that, but I was hoping for some 
halfway-decent hard numbers (e.g. from an old army manual or some such).

What prompted my request was my working on rules for hiding, chases, etc. 
plus a look at the D&D 3.5e rules for terrain - in particular the maximum 
distances for "detecting the nearby presence of others" in that system. The current 
edition of D&D give what strike me as very short distances: 2d6x10 *feet* in 
heavy forest to 6d6x40 *feet* on the open plains. (I might buy the heavy forest 
distances, but ~250 meters *maximum* spotting on an average roll on the open 
plains?)

Anyway, I'd prefer not to crib from other games, whether D&D or Squad Leader, 
but to use "real world" distances (if such exist) and then mangle them for 
playability while knowing just how unrealistic I'm being. I also expected that 
I'd have to make some pretty drastic simplifications, but I figured that if I 
could get the median distances sorta-kinda right, for walking man-sized figures 
who aren't particularly trying to hide, the rest would follow. 

Erol K. Bayburt
Evil Genius for a Better Tomorrow
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