The Palladium Game System: How I Would Redo it! Part 3a: Combat Movement

As the main combat overview was getting silly big, I decided to put movement into a subsection.

As mentioned, normal movement is 4 squares in any cardinal direction per move action, or 3 squares if any diagonal movement is taken. (All 3 squares could be diagonal if you choose.)

However there are a few special things to take into consideration. Fast characters move 5 squares (4 with diagonal), and slow move 3 (2 with diagonal).

Everyone pretty much has the same speeds then. Its how many move actions you take that really determine how far you go.

But there is a catch you say. What about stuff like cars, jets, or space movement? That's easy. We have 3 more scales of movement, with each being equivalent to 10x the movement on the previous scale. Meaning a slow space movement ship can go 30 squares in Jet Scale, 300 squares in Car Scale, and 3000 in Human Scale. Given that we consider a square in Human Scale to be 2 meters, this means a square in Car Scale is 20 meters, a square in Jet Scale is 200 meters, and Space Scale is 2000 meters, or 2 kilometers.

For you math fiends this means a ship in Space Scale is moving on average 8 kilometers every 10 seconds. Space is big.

For slower scale units trying to move in larger scale ones the best bet is this: they move ONE square in the scale above them every 3 turns if fast, 4 turns if normal, and 5 turns if slow. For scales more than 2 scales above the one being used (if you need to worry about a guy on foot while the battle map is in Jet Scale for some reason..), they do not move AT ALL. Likewise a unit in Jet Scale moving on a Human Scale map doesn't even get to move. It can pretty much be put wherever the controlling player wants to put it! (Though a good GM may require some sort of check roll to see if something that fast can even pinpoint itself! )

This is obviously abstracting movement, but the whole purpose of this inspired by Palladium game system is to simplify the overly detailed nerdshoes stuff Palladium does. (If you want megadetailed stuff go play Gurps or Advanced Squad Leader.)

Optionally you can even add in a ultratech speed scale where every square is 20 kilometers or a .2 meters per square if you like to play really tiny things.

Things that can slow down movement: This is simple. If its minor difficult terrain its 1 additional square of movement to cross. If its modestly difficult terrain its 2 additional squares of movement to cross. If its very difficult terrain its 3 additional squares of movement to cross. Anything beyond this may take multiple move actions to cross if not be outright impossible for certain units to traverse.

Ideas on the terrain: Minor difficult: Muddy ground, obstacles that go to about 1/3rd the height of the unit moving.
Modest difficult: Very broken and uneven terrain, obstacles that go to about 1/2 the height of the unit moving.
Very difficult: Extremely broken, uneven outright dangerous terrain, obstacles that go to about 90% of the height of the unit moving.
Beyond: Quicksand, massive snowdrifts, obstacles that go beyond the height of the unit moving.


Well! That should be it for combat. I could add in more combat actions with rules but I really do not see the point or the need.
Next up should be Talents and Powers, then Classes & Skills to finish it all up outside of some conversion guidelines. (The latter depends on how badly I want to see Palladium try to Cease and Desist me, and how vague I want to get on conversions. Since character sheets from Palladium are available online, it would be a piece of cake just to tell you "Take the stat from the first row, and add the third one together and average and that is your X stat." Plus its a way for fans to be inspired to do their own conversions without ever giving Kevvy Wevvy a chance to even challenge you. Like if I were to tell one what the big shiny Rifty guys on page XXX armor would be in my ruleset without ever using any of Palladium's silly and overzealous TM, R, and C symbolled words what can they really do to stop me?)

Nothing. Because even a sad goober like myself can be awesome for one shining, irrelevant moment online!

It is all just a basic framework