CyberRogue

How big is a square? How far can I throw this knife? How far away is that thug and can I hit him from here with my rifle?

All very good ques­tions, and all cause issues when it comes to deter­min­ing scale within a rogue­like. What size is one “square”?

In Cyber­Punk, guns are nor­mal, a pis­tol is good for 100 yards, a rifle for over 300, and in some cases a sniper rifle is use­ful out to a mile or so. A map in CR is about 250 squares wide by 250 long, so if a square is a cou­ple of yards on both sides, that would involve a pis­tol fir­ing 50 squares, a rifle cov­er­ing half the map, and nev­er­mind the big­ger guns.

Not to men­tion thrown knives, grenades, etc. A grenade with a blast radius of 5 yards (prob­a­bly quite large?) would cover 3 squares in each direc­tion, what if you can’t even throw it that far? That’ll be messy.

So, best idea is for com­bat ranges to be styl­ized — it’ll still be deadly to get into a fire­fight, and grenades still go boom, but you’ll still be restricted to a rea­son­able range — pis­tols will still fire beyond your light radius, which is why flares will come in handy. Besides, you’re under pres­sure, you’re not going to have time to sit and aim for 30 sec­onds before you fire, you’ll be a sit­ting duck with a bul­let (or sev­eral) in you.