Rules Hacking: Combat, Reach, Facing, and Areas of Control

I’ve been working on my FATE-inspired fantasy rules project, and got to thinking about combat yesterday. The ideas I was having were a bit too crunchy for my current project, but they should work as a tweak to d20-based games, 4e, or other games that use a similar minis set-up.

The basic idea is that everyone has an Area of Control (AoC). This replaces reach, attacks of opportunity/opportunity attacks, flanking, and a few other things. The basic AoC looks like this:

The space taken up by the creature (G) is green. The AoC is blue.

• G gets a free attack on anyone moving out of a blue square.
• A melee attack on G from anywhere outside of a blue square is at +1. An adjacent attack on G from anywhere outside of a blue square is at +2. This replaces flanking.
• Reach weapons change a characters AoC dramatically. A longspear, for instance, might give a character an AoC like this:

• A character can change the orientation of their AoC on their initiative.
• A flat-footed character has no AoC.
• Large+ creatures can have uniquely shaped AoC (and take up non-square spaces) to reflect their physiology and abilities.
• Feat ideas:
  • Most feats building off of flanking, reach, etc. will have obvious correlates.
  • Allow a character to change the orientation of their AoC as an immediate action in response to a successful attack.
  • Allow a flatfooted character to have an AoC of one adjacent 5′ square.
  • Allow a character to treat one extra square adjacent to them as part of their AoC.