At anything beyond the simplest level of “There’s a 10 by 10 room. You see an orc guarding a pie.”, gridless combat relies on abstract notions of positioning and distance, even if the game system has explicit rules for movement. That is, you may have a speed of 30 feet/round in a gridless game, but, in terms of actual play, the distance between you and any other entity is one of the following: “adjacent”, “yes, you can get there in one round”, and “no, you can’t get there in one round”.

By this I mean, rather than trying to maintain a perfect mental image of exactly where each statue and column and other object is, in relation to every other entity, a player asks “Is there a column near me I can hide behind?” and the GM, who has a general sense of how many columns there are, and if the character is likely to be near one or not, can usually answer quickly, “Sure, there’s one near you” or “Yes, but you’ll need to run across open space to get there” or “No, you’re at the north end, where there’s no columns”, or whatever. The character isn’t at location 7,8 on the map; the character is now “behind a column”. That column stops existing the moment the character stops hiding behind it or otherwise relating to it, and because its position is abstract, it doesn’t exist, really, for another character, who isn’t hiding behind it.

Gridded combat shifts the focus from the characters to the world. The world exists; the characters live in it. (...) In gridded combat, the player doesn’t ask “Is there a column near me?” — he looks. There is, or there isn’t. He can see the path to get there, and decide if it’s safe. He can pick from multiple possible hiding spots, based on what kind of advantages they might give him, and, very importantly, the relative positions of all his enemies and allies. In gridded combat, he sees that while two columns give him equal cover, the first puts him in range of Fred, so he can use hand Fred a gun or a potion or whatever. In gridless combat, he might ask “Is there a column near Fred?”, which means he has to think of that possibility in the first place.

Everyone differs, but, for me, I’d have felt much less involved in the world and the game if it was a floating cloud of abstractions. Having a map which showed everyone’s position served as a solid platform on which my imagination could build the action sequences that evolved with each die roll. It is much easier for me to add motion, action, wounds, a dive for cover, explosions, etc to the movie unfolding frame-by-frame in my mind when the raw outlines of the set, at least, are visible and well-defined.

And that, in turn, is what led me to thinking about what “creativity” might mean when discussing combat, and why some people say they find the grid is “limiting”. On a grid, I do not need to think to ask if there’s a column near Fred that I can reach: I can see if there is or not. (...)  Without a grid, the positions of me, Fred, and the column are indeterminate; I need to first originate the idea of both hiding and moving near Fred, and then ask if it’s possible.

With a grid, I might see it’s not possible — or instantly see a better option — or do a lot of other things, without asking. Without a grid, the GM and all the players perceive my interaction with the imagined space through the questions I ask aloud — they have to be aware in case they need to resolve a conflict between my imaginations and theirs, they need to say, “Hey, no, I thought I was further away than that”. They might take note a column has materialized from possibility to actuality, and it now has a momentarily fixed relative position (as it were) of “near Charlie, who is also now near Fred”, and use that. To those who prefer gridless play, this is what is meant by creativity: Instantiating objects within the quantum cloud that is the shared, imagined, space.

Gostei desse playteste da paragons http://www.paragons.com.br/?p=30056

Foi essa sensação de opções que mais gostei, afinal, quando tratamos da maioria esmagadora dos jogos old school, são apresentadas pouquíssimas opções para dinamizar a mecânica de combate com habilidades dos personagens que não são conjuradores, tornando os outros imensamente mais poderosos. Não estou aqui para pedir por equilíbrio, apenas, defendo a redução das disparidades, através de opções dinâmicas para personagens não conjuradores. Trocando em miúdos, um guerreiro ter uma ou duas opções no combate (dentro das regras descritas) vai torná-lo uma bucha de canhão, frente aos magos e clérigos, que tem inúmeras opções com suas magias. Sacaram o que eu quis dizer?