Give an inch, Take a mile
You get an inch for yourself. You can move six inches in a turn. The majority of things you encounter take up an inch. This is your world, a flat land of marked off 1-inch squares. You could be a ring, a trinket, or even a four-sided die that hardly anyone uses. The things that you encounter are coins of various sizes, all taking up the same 1-inch square of space that you do. Rally your comrades. We’re going to war.
It’s really hard to make it sound dramatic when you boil it down to the physical reality. I mean, this is what you’re up against:
Scary, right? Tabletop gaming involves combat, and for combat to be fair and structured there must be some sort of system to govern what is allowed, and what isn’t. Large grids of 1-inch squares denote the field in which you are fighting. The same grid can be used for outdoor scenes, indoor scenes, dungeon crawls, or air fights. Pretty much anywhere you can swing a sword; you’ll use the same piece of vinyl.
Movement becomes limited, yet somehow unhindered. Each square represents five feet of space. Most characters can move 30 feet in a round (Quick Math: That’s 6 squares). Now, for anyone that needs to be up close and personal in order to do any damage (anyone with a melee weapon), they would need to calculate the best way to use their space in order to effectively help the group.
The most interesting thing about all of this, in my opinion, is the way in which the created reality is put in contrast with the physical reality on the map. While movement can be awkward and linear in the physical reality, not much mention of it occurs in the created reality. The path is created to get from point A to point B. Very rarely does anything in between matter more than as a means to the desired end.
As I said before, the most common placeholders for enemy squares in my gaming experience are coins. Back home, we had a giant coin jar that we’d drag out to the dining room on game nights. Whoever was running the game would grab a fistful just to intimidate us, or make us wonder just how much they planned to toss our way. I carried this tradition over to my gaming groups in college. The bag which holds my dice also keeps about $1.70 in change – mostly pennies, but a few odd coins here and there. My group refers to them as “Penny Monsters” which creates an odd mental image, unless you understand the rhetoric of the game.
Space means everything on a tabletop roleplaying battle grid. The size of a creature depends on how many squares it takes up, but for some players, there are other factors that change the perception of what they’re going up against. For example, the most common coin used in my games is the penny. For some reason, if I use anything else, the players will automatically assume that the creature is larger, more powerful, or in some way scarier than anything else on the board. A penny and a quarter take up the exact same amount of squares on the grid (Just one). Therefore, they are both considered Medium sized. The perception of the coin’s worth and size alters the reality in which the players have created, however. The grid rules are forgotten and replaced with a perception of space and size determined by their collective creativity.
Even in the structured aspects, the rhetoric of tabletop gaming is created entirely on a case-by-case basis of the players involved. The game in its nature forces perceptions to be turned and twisted until a newly accepted norm is formed.
