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Posted by: Troysome Sep 9 2010, 05:42 AM

Hi All;

In a few months, I am going to be starting a Shadowrun campaign. I have played D&D for many years and have almost always used battle mats in one way or another. In D&D the grid conversion is 1 square (25mm or 1 inch) is 5 feet. A close-ish converstion from 1 square = 5 feet would be 1 square = 2 meters. Would this work?

Do any of you use battle maps? If so, what is the meters per square that you use? How would you bring in (or would you) a sniper from 100+ meters out? How would you (or would you) use a battle grid for vehicle combat?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Posted by: Neraph Sep 9 2010, 07:27 AM

I came from running D&D myself, and I just had to stop using a battle mat altogether. Instead I now use (if I use anything at all) a dry-erase board with eyeballed movement rates and everything. A more fluid board for a more fluid game.

Posted by: Summerstorm Sep 9 2010, 08:00 AM

Yeah... i started with SR and some other stuff and only recently got into a D&D group. I find battlemaps INFURIATING. Damn 5 ft. steps and crap (sorry).

I too make it more fluid. For really important tactical battles a have some printed overhead maps or floormaps (For outdoors you can print out google maps) and just mark where someone is, maybe lay down a die or something to mark "approximate" locations.

If someone says: i run up and hit him, i just say: "you got there" or "eh, you are too slow. Maybe next round". My players are from that D&D group... so some of them are a bit weird with movement rates, though *g*.

Posted by: TommyTwoToes Sep 9 2010, 01:00 PM

We tend to use rough sketches to lay out floorplans for indoors, outdoors we just keep track of ranges generally.

Posted by: Runner Smurf Sep 9 2010, 01:16 PM

I use Tact-Tiles for my map boards. They are no longer around, but a successor product is out now (http://longtoothstudios.com/blog/shop) that is pretty much the same thing. I also use some stuff from http://www.worldworksgames.com/store/ every now and then.

The reason I use the Tact-Tiles is that it allows me to draw at the maps prior to the game and easily transport them to the place where we play. The grid helps me when drawing, as it gives me straight lines...and I suck at drawing. It also helps give the players a sense of scale as well (1 square is 1 or 2 meters, depending on the map).

The trick is to not be overly strict about the map and movement. Particularly with 3rd and 4th ed D&D players, there is a tendency to be overly reliant on the board ("I move x squares and shoot my pistol at the grunt 2 and now he'll be in short range as he's only y meters away."). The map is not the territory, and the board is not the game.

My 2 cents.

Posted by: Toloran Sep 9 2010, 01:19 PM

I came from D&D as well and I've found that for non D&D systems, battlemats are more of a hassle then an asset. However, a visual reference IS often helpful in combat so what I generally do is use colored glass tokens (I could use models but I don't have any Shadowrun looking ones at the moment) and then guesstimate their approximate positions. If a player wants to know how far apart they are, I just give them a non-number distance depending on what they need to know it for. Ie. "It's withing your run distance" or "It's within medium range for your gun" etc.

Also, no matter what kind of grid you use, there will ALWAYS be a parallax distortion and those always annoy me.

Posted by: RobertB Sep 9 2010, 01:36 PM

We use Tact-Tiles and minis for our Shadowrun group and don't have any problems doing so. We generally use a 1 square equals 2 meter ratio as you mentioned for most combat encounters since they tend to take place indoors. If the sniper issue comes up in your game, you'll either need to adjust the scale, or mark the location by a direction and distance. I've got some cardboard vehicles that we use during tactical combat, but if you move to chase combat you'll have to start using the abstract system from the books.

BTW, there's a lot of hate for minis and grid maps on these boards for playing Shadowrun so beware. Do what works for your group. Mine prefers exacting detail over "hand-waving" any day.

Robert (aka Spanner)

Posted by: Kagetenshi Sep 9 2010, 02:31 PM

Exactness is good—if you hand-wave it, your world becomes inaccessible to your players and they cease to occupy real space, at which point everything involving range and AoE becomes GM fiat. That said, Shadowrun is tough on exact maps, with the emphasis on ranged combat keeping whole chunks of realistic-scale areas in focus—consider that a single city block means 80 meters each way or more, and that a single goon with an assault rifle can force several blocks to be in play at once.

Going 1 grid shape to 2 meters is a little coarse; for indoor or restricted environments I might suggest 1 grid/1 meter. That said, once you get outdoors halving the number of grid shapes you need per block can be a big help.

~J

Posted by: vladthebad Sep 9 2010, 02:34 PM

If you have access to a computer connected projector, using a virtual tabletop is a good way to go. Our group uses http://www.rptools.net/index.php?page=maptool for our games, and when we get together in person we project it onto a large white posterboard on our table. If you make your tokens for maptool into white circles you can put minis down on them that are then lit from above by the white tokens. What's really nice about that setup is the control the GM has over vision. Each token can have different vision and light properties that reveal enemy tokens on the map. "Fog of war" is another feature where you can have large portions of the map unrevealed until players enter rooms, etc.

Now the only thing is that learning maptool takes a little doing, but there are helpful videos online, and a robust development community who are generally quite helpful. Since many people use VTTs like maptool to play over the interwebs, a lot of the custom macro stuff is geared towards facilitating dicerolling and stat management, but if you are meeting in person those features are less important. All you really NEED to do is learn how to manage maps and work the vision tools and you are good to go.

Posted by: tifunkalicious Sep 9 2010, 02:53 PM

Same, I ended up scrapping my typical D&D mat for rough sketches and representation by tokens on a smaller space. We can play on much smaller tables, which is a plus in the dorms. Whenever I have units 'grouped' I usually rule that aoe spells will hit all in the grouping and apply a meter of grenade damage reduction after the first target and up it by another meter for every 5 or so.

People aching that this allows for shady ruling worries me. Are shadowrun GMs THAT bad?

Posted by: yesferatu Sep 9 2010, 03:37 PM

I picked up some terrain from http://www.scryingeye.com at Gencon and I've been very happy with it.
They come in sheets, which you need to cut out, but it has broken down cars, garbage cans, mailboxes...building interiors and exteriors, streets and more.

I'm laminating them slowly, but I'm really happy with them.

I had used a battle mat and markers for years, this is much much better.
Dry erase boards of any size tend to be really expensive.

Now if I could find decent figures.

Posted by: tifunkalicious Sep 9 2010, 04:01 PM

Reaper's Chronoscope line has some great figures that are more or less SR-appropriate (lacks any metatypes other than human, however)

http://www.reapermini.com/Miniatures/chronoscope/

Posted by: Platinum Sep 9 2010, 04:03 PM

We have used battlemats. 1 hex = 1 meter or sometimes 2. The maps were blank and laminated. We just drew terrain with dry erase, then moved around.

Posted by: Neraph Sep 9 2010, 04:09 PM

Convert every Meter to one inch and play on a Warhammer 40k 6' by 4' gaming table. There's some pretty exactness, plus they have tons of really good cover/models/buildings to work with too.

Posted by: Neurosis Sep 9 2010, 05:36 PM

I don't think that SR as written takes well to mat and mini play.

I think if you go back to like 1E you can find some rules for it, though (hexes IIRC).

Posted by: Neurosis Sep 9 2010, 05:36 PM

I don't think that SR as written takes well to mat and mini play.

I think if you go back to like 1E you can find some rules for it, though (hexes IIRC).

Posted by: Warlordtheft Sep 9 2010, 07:07 PM

CHronscope is good for SR mini's. I have a collection of the old Ral Partha line + some of them and a few other lines. 40K, and others may work-but the big issue is the lack of Meta's.

As far as map scales go I typically use 1"=2 meters. But also have used 1"= 1 meter for tight spots in doors, and 1"= 5 meters for out doors.

Those on metric (AKA-in Europe) do you use 1 CM =1 meter?

Advice for movement: remember move rates are for the entire combat turn. it may be necessary to place a marker at the a model with a lower number of IPs start point should it run or walk. That way you know generally where the model is for a model with a higher number of IPs (it took me a while to figure that this is the best way to go barring a house rule).

Posted by: TommyTwoToes Sep 9 2010, 07:15 PM

You can grab some Ogryns from 40k for troll sammies, And the obvious orky dakka boyz for the Ork sammies.

Of course GW charges a pretty penny for those blister packs.

Posted by: Dahrken Sep 9 2010, 07:32 PM

I never bothered with a battle mat, so I don't have a fixed scale.

I have made some white dry-erasable boards where I draw the general area, and mark a few dimensions to have a scale reference, then we use dices or whatever is available and not too big to show positions and we estimate range, LOS and movement on the fly. Fortunately most of the peoples at our table have decent mental arithmetic skills, so a fixed scale is not a necessity.

Posted by: Kagetenshi Sep 9 2010, 08:32 PM

If you mean me, yes. Shadowrun GMs do a very poor job of creating and making available to the players an entire world with exact distances, or even well-tracked relative distances, so the players end up having very little control over things like "who is in the blast radius" or "can the melee monster engage anyone that enters the area in a single pass of movement", mostly finding out about how well or poorly placed they were after the fact.

That's really the issue—if someone with a Heavy Pistol pops around the corner, say, what range category they're in and whether they're within 5 meters of another hostile are questions that are only accessible to the player by asking the GM. Movement-oriented tactics are available to the players only in the grossest form without prompting the creation of basically exactly this sort of map via repeated "and how far away from _ is _"-style questions.

It's not malice, but the game world is entirely within the GM's head—and any part of it that isn't will be created there whenever it's called for, with all the associated biases of the instant (do you have the self-control to be at all times certain that the goon with the assault rifle's placement out of Heavy Pistol range has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the players seem to be mowing down guards too easily? I certainly don't trust myself to that standard).

~J

Posted by: Dragonscript Sep 10 2010, 04:13 AM

I have two large battle mats that have 1" squares on one side and hexes on the other. We use the hex side for shadowrun and just make each hex 1 meter and it works great for us. One of the best gaming investments i've ever made. Get a chessex two sided mat, a factory second if you can. They are the same but with a couple blemishes and after a few gaming sections they won't be perfect anymore anyway so why pay anymore than you have to.

Posted by: capt.pantsless Sep 10 2010, 04:27 AM

It largely depends on what your gaming group likes. If they're tactical players, you should tend towards a tactical style gameplay, and bust-out a grid-map for every combat scene, and start counting squares whenever anyone needs to move. Conversely, the less tactical your group is, the less exact the map-making needs to be, to the point that some groups may not need maps at all, and a rough oral description will suffice. Good GM's cater to the group.

Personally, I like computer-drawn maps of varying scale (with MS Visio or similar) and use a sheet of foamboard underneath and use colored pins to represent the PCs, or just make X's for any characters. If you've got an 11 X 17 printer, 1-2 sheets can make a pretty serviceable map for the average gaming table.

Posted by: Platinum Sep 10 2010, 03:14 PM

Forgot.... graph paper works really well too.

Posted by: ShadowPavement Sep 10 2010, 04:51 PM

Don't forget that movement is a non-action. You do it while taking your normal simple and complex actions.

Posted by: Method Sep 11 2010, 03:48 AM

Plus you can run graph paper through a printer (for a Google map image for example) as well, although I've taken to making my maps with a 1/4" grid from the start, since my group is moving away from actually printing maps and using digital displays instead.

And I generally use scales similar to those Kagetenshi described above- 1/4" = 1 meter for indoors and 1/4" = 2 meters (or sometimes more) for outdoors. Seems to work pretty well.

Posted by: Game2BHappy Sep 13 2010, 12:37 AM

We also use the 1"=2m or 1"=1m for a lot of our game sessions. To make the distance that the characters can travel somewhat more circular, we added in the dnd rule that you can cut the diagonal (i.e. move directly to the kitty-corner square), but every other one costs double the movement. As with dnd, you can't cut corners around objects. Exact enough for your wargamer-type players, and simple enough for the rest.

FYI, when I GM, I recently switched to laminated maps with 2cm squares. I had to make them myself, but I really like the scale when the squares are representing 1m and I want to get more stuff on the map.