Timo Pietilä wrote:
> The Wanderer wrote:
>
>> Timo Pietilä wrote:
>>> Why two? At melee distance that would be just one (on average).
>>> You at the center of your grid and your enemy at the center of
>>> his. Or you backed up as far as you can in your grid and he at
>>> the border between his grid and yours. One space. Two is only if
>>> your enemy is in as far as he could get from you and you are as
>>> far as you can get from him.
>>
>> I think we're making different assumptions here, because that
>> doesn't make any sense to me.
>>
>> The two combatants are never in the same square at the same time,
>> so the fight is obviously not restricted to just one
>> ten-foot-square space. The most natural interpretation seems to me
>> to be that, at the point of actual combat, each is on the side of
>> that space closest to the other one.
>>
>> If you are assuming significant amounts of maneuvering and dodging,
>> as the "ten square feet is small" view would seem to indicate, then
>> obviously enough both are going to be moving around inside the
>> available space - and I see no immediate reason to assume that each
>> will refrain from moving out of their own square into the other
>> one's, since after all one is attacking the other; given the
>> possibility of doing that, we are then effectively dealing with one
>> 10x20 space rather than one 10x10 or even two 10x10. (Q. E. D.)
>
> In game terms you attack by trying to enter your opponents space that
> is only one 10x10 space and then defender is trying to prevent that
> from happening. Even with person that is in his own square _average_
> distance between you and your opponent is just ten feet, which is
> like I said a small space to conduct fight.
Not at the moment when actual (melee) combat is taking place - at that
point, the distance is "as close to 'right next to one another' as the
weapons involved require". Since that's the moment we're talking about,
I'm not sure I see how the "average" distance is particularly relevant.
Not to mention, the opponent - who is, as you say, trying to prevent you
from entering their space - will presumably be right up there at the
edge to block you from entering, since otherwise there's not much way to
achieve that goal.
(It just occurred to me, apropos of an earlier part of this discussion,
that one could argue that part of the "speed" (blows) penalty with
larger/heavier weapons lies in the increased difficulty of using them in
the too-small spaces available... but then one is still left with the
inconsistency of the same hallway being both exactly wide enough for a
goblin and exactly wide enough for a dragon, so it is perhaps not worth
making that argument.)
> It would be 10x20 square if you could let your opponent behind you
> (IE. push past you).
Or if the fight can range from one end of the 10x20 to the other, but
without one combatant ever being effectively "on the other side of" the
other.
> hmmm...idea: Why not allow melee fight with nasty enough monster to
> cause that swap places?
You'd have to make allowances for monster size in this, as IMO a
stronger factor than monster nastiness, and I suspect that the end
result would not be worth the effort and the annoyance. Still, it might
be worth an experiment.
>>>> and we are also assuming that every corridor is at least that
>>>> wide
>>>
>>> Of course, but it still does make pretty small space for
>>> swordfight.
>>
>> I'm not disputing that.
>>
>> It is also, however, unreasonably wide for a standard hallway,
>> particularly one in which only one person can pass at a time; a
>> standard hallway, in my experience, is usually somewhere from two
>> and a half to four feet wide.
>
> Well, those hallways are used by dragons and giants too :-). Angband
> architecture's is not usual human architecture.
Of course.
But, in a ten-foot-wide hallway, you could easily have a PC walk past
(say) a floating eye, or a sleeping orc, or a potion mimic, or anything
sufficiently slower, or...
You could also have multiple human-sized creatures, e.g. orcs (or, say,
hounds), swarm in around a PC simultaneously.
Neither of these things (nor perhaps others I haven't thought of) are
possible in Angband, nor IMO should they be. But with ten-foot-wide
hallways, for them not to be possible would be highly unrealistic.
The idea that hallways are ten feet wide may be arguably appropriate, in
realism terms, for combat purposes, but it leads to significant problems
in other areas. It is, as I said, a trade-off, with problems no matter
which way we slice it.
--
The Wanderer
My usual .sig is on vacation while I adjust to my new computer
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