Alternate Combat: One Foot Squares

I've been doing some thinking about how to square realism and playability without breaking the game too badly, partly inspired by Bret Devereaux's recent post on ancient and medieval heavy infantry spacing, partly by this gallery of HEMA fighters in 5-foot squares, and partly by some of my frustrations with both oldschool and 3.x positioning and their implications in different-size rooms. The post title gives away the short version of the answer - one foot squares, with man-size characters occupying a depth of two feet and a width of two or three feet (depending on armament). 

From there, weapon reach becomes important - the front lines are no longer necessarily immediately adjacent, since a spear is going to let a combatant reach 6 squares beyond the space they're occupying. On the other hand, it might not let them effectively attack someone immediately adjacent, making daggers advantageous in wrestling range. The issue then is that the spearman wants to keep the dagger wielder at bay, while the dagger wielder wants to close through the spearman's effective range. The obvious solution here is to borrow attacks of opportunity from 3.x - the spearman gets to make an attack as the dagger wielder tries to pass through their range, and on a successful attack, they not only do damage but also prevent the dagger wielder from closing. Adding the option for the swordsman to retreat would also make the system somewhat more realistic, while giving a major advantage to longer weapon. So far so good, at least if we're looking at a duel on a fencing strip.

Of course, adding more combatants and widening the field complicates things. Sticking to a one-dimensional fight, the second rank on each side needs to leave some room for their front rank to retreat. Row depth isn't super well-attested, but giving 2 or 3 squares behind the front line ends up pretty close to the 4.5ish feet the Roman legions preferred. For file width, each character is going to need at least the width of their shield to fight in, or 2 feet if they have none. That's going to give you a minimum of 3 squares of width with full-size shields, and more like 4 or 5 if you want some room to move around. Again, 4 or 5 feet lines up with the Roman model, but 3 feet of file width seems to be right for the Greek hoplite phalanx. In an open space at skirmish scale, there's advantages to a bigger file width and thus a wider overall formation allowing you to outflank, and to a narrower file width giving you a numerical advantage in a given frontage, so I'm not too worried there. In the dungeon, however, you're going to be limited by the corridor or room you're fighting in, so wider files may not be as big an advantage. That might be OK - you're going to want close order in corridors, letting you jam three to five frontliners into a 10' frontage, and a wider order in rooms, covering more area. In a really large room, you get back to the same situation you'd have in an open-air skirmish, where outflanking becomes an advantage.

The last bit of the melee model that really needs to be fleshed out is how reach weapons are handled. In both the oldschool and 3.x models, characters from the second rank armed with particularly long weapons are able to attack into the space beyond the front rank. The issue here is that historically this isn't really how things worked. Generally speaking, formations either used very long spears (10+ feet) for the front few ranks or didn't use them at all. The obvious issue here is that a shield wall is going to block your very long spears, but there's also the problem that if someone in the front line is injured or killed, the pikeman in the rank behind them isn't going to be able to step up and fill the gap effectively. To address all of this, I'm thinking that "reach" weapons will be handled with a line-of-effect model: you can't attack through the space occupied by another combatant, because either their body or their shield is in the way. Exactly how line of effect is measured is still an open question, but I think what this incentivizes for pike formations is going to 3 foot spacing with either no shield or small shields, and using the fact that the front line is only occupying two of the three squares to let the back ranks poke their spears up. This lines up really well with the Macedonian model, so that's nice.

Of course, pikemen in the dungeon isn't really a viable option at all, as soon as you do the math on spear length accounting for space between hands and length behind the rear hand, and realize we're probably looking at a minimum 14 foot weapon length to let the second rank be effective, and probably more like 20 for the third rank to be really helpful. I'm not totally convinced of the viability of 10-foot poles when it comes to walking around a dungeon, but 14-foot pointy poles are going to get you awkwardly stuck in doors with alarming frequency, especially if corridors come any narrower than 10'. Best to leave the pikes outside, I think.

The next big question is how you handle ranged attacks. I think the best answer is to do line-of-effect, with no penalty for firing into melee. That gives you some incentive to do looser formations even in corridors, since the second rank would be able to attack the enemy frontline with ranged weapons. The alternative rule is to give a penalty for firing into melee but ignore line of effect. I don't really like that - if there's a solid wall of shields, you're trying to thread the needle between them, but if there's a solid wall of bodies, you're likely to hit an ally. In any case, the second line is also also putting themselves at a disadvantage if the front line goes down, since they have to drop their ranged weapon and draw a melee one.

Overall, this ends up giving a somewhat different vision of dungeon combat and party composition, at least in the oldschool large-party model. You've got a core group of at least three heavily armored fighter-types who'll make up your frontline in a corridor, or the center of your line in a wider space, possibly in a looser order. Then there's some secondary combatants, such as thieves or clerics - not who you want taking the brunt of combat consistently, but who can take over for a frontliner in a pinch or fill out your width in a wider room. Finally, there's your nonmelee types, like wizards and torchbearers. You don't want them in the frontline, and you'd probably try and get into some sort of multi-directional formation rather than put them there. Additionally, you might want a rearguard of melee combatants, depending on who you've got to spare.

In a more newschool environment with the classic four-man band, you've got a bit of a different scenario. In open areas, the frontline needs to fill space and prevent enemies from getting to the wizard, but they can't fill space with bodies since there's only two or three melee combatants. Instead, the fighter and cleric are likely to be armed with (shortish) polearms to get more reach without being too vulnerable up close, and the rogue either fills in gaps or goes for flanks. More or less what you'd see in a standard 3.x party, but with a less compact frontline.