Re: (TFT) Line of Sight

["Craig W. Barber" <craigwbar@comcast.net>]

Yeah, you're right again.  70 feet for DD3.5e seems reasonable (even the
minimum of 20 feet seems reasonable in some types of heavy jungle or bad
circumstances), but 250 feet on the plains is patently silly.

When I moved back east for a year or two, we kept getting lost on the highway
because I couldn't see the exit, much less the destination, coming up.  No
joke, and I'm not actually a complete idiot, either!  Out here, we get in the
habit of saying, "Oh look, there's the mall.  We'll be to the exit in another
couple of minutes!"  LOS of 200 yard to 2 miles or so to a big box or the
like.  Back east, there's a backdrop of trees on the side of road
everywhere...

Hmm...

Maybe SNIPER manuals would tell this more accurately than regular army?

I wonder if biologists track LOS when they study an environment?

CB




  ----- Original Message -----
  From: ErolB1@aol.com
  To: tft@brainiac.com
  Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 5:36 PM
  Subject: Re: (TFT) Line of Sight


  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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