First things first, hello you there my dear reader! Hope you're having a good day.

My current project is somewhat on the lines of a class-based Hero Shooters ttrpg, basically Overwatch or Valorant, modern high-tech hero shooting down robots and terrorists for justice. It's something I've put down for a bit, but I've been fascinated by an idea recently and I want to see what's your thought about it.

Combat, Shooting and Battlemaps

First, I think that the genre does require a good amount of combat rules, mostly gun-based, and positional tacticality. It needs to be at least as crunchy as DnD 5E (that is a lot for my current standards), but things like shooting, cover, range and suppressive fire need to be very very easy to be handled, since those are supposed to be the core of the actions characters will make. I tried Lancer, but I'm not fully satisfied how those are handled there, for example. Also, I did want the system to work for 'interesting' battlemaps, the multi-stored exotic places you could commonly see in those games.

Last year I built some characters with cool abilities, I adapted a dice system and I brought the system as fast as I could to my players/testers' table to see if it was fun. A disaster.

• I tried the game by using a square-grid battlemap, stripped out of 3.5E. It did work tactically, but the rules for cover (which traditionally required to check if there was an uninterrupted line from one mini to the target) do require too much fiddling for battlemaps as complex as the ones I was aiming for. Also, it was very difficult to make a map on the fly as I'm used to.
• I tried the game by using zone-based battlemap, stripped out of Fate. Battlemaps did become more interesting/dynamic and range/cover did become more easy to determine, at the cost of having almost zero tactical choices.

I did try to fiddle with the rules a bit, but I dropped them as soon as I saw that I was struggling to make it work.

Unmatched, the Board Game

Long story short, this weekend I sit down to play this board game with some friends I didn't see for a long time and I had an epiphany. This may be the way to hybridize between the two systems easily.

This is Unmatched gameboard, for reference. Pieces can move through a fixed amount of spaces and they target all spaces with ranged attacks with the same color as theirs (it's said to be "in the same zone"), since they are adjacent and do share properties... and that's it.

I've used point crawls as a way to map out open places and dungeons (or whole adventures in Mouseguard), but I've never thought about bringing the whole concept to small-sized battle maps. Notice that it didn't really require to be put on top of a "real battlemap" and something like this (naturally setting appropriate) is virtually possible to be put down.

As a neat plus, they seem robust enough to potentially support Fog of War, Stealth and Explosion rules.

Considerations

Now, I've yet to playtest it with the new battlemap underlying structure, but I'm confident it may solve my previous issues (or create new ones?).

• Does some of you have tried something like this for their games?

• I'm not too keen about color-coding, since I'm color blind. What do you think a good alternative to color-coding zones would be?

  I'd love to hear your thougths!