Handling Distance

How are you guys handling distance? Clearly things happen in different places (rescuing Argent Adept in Akash’Flora, it wouldn’t make sense for Wraith to throw knives at an enemy on the ground not next to the tree), and part of Tachyon’s Principle of Speed is that she gets to end up anywhere in the scene, which implies that other heroes can’t just jump around willy nilly.

I’ve been using cards to represent different areas (in the tree, downtown, etc), and I’m letting my players move from one card to another adjacent card on their turn if they want. These cards are placed in relation to the heroes, by the players. ie, if someone says they’re going to check out downtown, they can put the downtown card by Freedom Center. If someone else wants to check out the piers, they can choose if piers are next to downtown or next to freedom center.

What do you all do?

So far, "location" has only mattered for my Tachyon player where I need to restrict them so they don't say they want to attack everything with Hypersonic assault. I've broken up my enemies onto separate index cards that are labeled/positioned with heroes, so I can keep track of how many enemies attacked who most recently, which seems to handle minions/Liutenants for the most part. I'm normally all about putting meeples or minis or tokens in "relative" locations on the table, but it's been much easier for me in this system to simply re-state where each character is at the start of their turn(as turns go fairly quickly in this system), with a few players actually writing their own locations on index cards/post-its.

I have some internal red flags when a player says that their character is going to try something that shouldn't quite fit spatially, and I'll let them know when their attempt is impossible or merely putting their Major or Minor twist in my hands. (Legacy wants to fly to where he hears a baby screaming, half-way across the city, to save it from falling? His reckless speed could clip a helicopter, crane, parade balloon, or the biggest swarm of gnats ever!) In all earnestness, this is more or less what Risky Actions are made for, IMO. If a player wants to overcome to do a thing in an area where they're not quite there, Risky Action for a minor twist, and let them try it anyway(which might incur its own twists)!

I like your set-up, especially as it keeps the theme that the players are editors/writers of the books very well. Of course a writer is going to bend canon just enough so that it's "reasonable" that a character could get to the next place they want to go in the same amount of time another character punches a bot. Depending on how much "Because Comics" you're willing to lean on, you may not even need to keep any layouts between issues. Since when has a writer paid attention to such paltry things as the location of that one bodega that Tachyon likes snacks from? It is where it is in this issue, and it's up to the Editor-in-Chief to decide if it's too different from the depiction from several issues ago.