MOVEMENT & POSITIONING

Characters can scale walls, cliffs, and structures using dedicated traversal mechanics — handholds, stamina-limited free climbing, or context-sensitive grabs.

A burst of rapid movement — a dash or sprint — used for repositioning, closing distance, or evading, usually with a cooldown or stamina cost.

Terrain types that cost extra movement to cross — mud, rubble, deep snow, water — making the map's surface a tactical variable rather than uniform floor.

A quick evasive roll with invincibility frames, usually costing stamina.

Height as a tactical and traversal dimension — high ground bonuses, cliffs that gate movement, multi-level maps where the Z-axis matters as much as X and Y.

Rules governing entering and leaving combat contact — attacks of opportunity when you retreat from melee, zones of control that stop movement, disengage actions that trade tempo for a safe exit.

Which way a unit or character faces as a mechanical property — backstab bonuses, shields that only block frontally, vision cones, turn costs for rotating.

Sustained aerial movement — gliding, jetpack hovering, true flight — that lets the player traverse vertically and over obstacles that ground movement can't cross.

Abilities push, pull, or throw units to new positions, making an enemy's location a thing the player can control rather than merely react to.

Units in a group maintain a spatial arrangement — line, wedge, column — that affects their combat effectiveness, movement speed, or vulnerability to attacks from specific directions.

Unrestricted analog movement through space — no grid, no nodes, no movement points — where position is continuous and the player steers directly.

A tool or ability that pulls the player toward a target point or pulls objects/enemies toward the player, enabling swinging, climbing, or rapid traversal across gaps.

Space is divided into discrete tiles and units occupy and move between them — the board-game abstraction underlying most tactics games.

Contextual traversal moves that let characters leap gaps, hop obstacles, or vault over low barriers, often automated or semi-automated to keep movement fluid.

Attacks or effects displace a target's position, sometimes as pure crowd control and sometimes as a win condition in itself — Super Smash Bros.'s entire victory condition is knocking opponents off-stage rather than depleting health.

Movement that carries physical weight — acceleration curves, preserved velocity, drift under direction change — where current speed is earned state rather than instant response.

Movement as a spendable per-turn budget — each unit gets points, terrain costs vary, and spent points are gone until next turn.

Postures that lower the character's profile and movement speed in exchange for reduced visibility, improved weapon stability, or access to low crawlspaces.

Grappling and pulling as movement and combat verbs — hookshots that reel you to walls, grapples that yank enemies to you, tethers that swing you across gaps.

Movement mechanics tuned for avoiding detection — crouching, sneaking, using cover and shadow, controlling noise — that trade speed for concealment.

Abilities and mechanics that exchange the positions of two entities — teleport-swaps trading places with an ally or enemy, unit-switch moves in tactics grids, puzzle mechanics exchanging tiles or characters.

Water as traversable volume — swimming on the surface, diving through depth layers, underwater movement with its own physics, breath, and threats.

Instant relocation to a nearby point, bypassing normal movement, usually with a short cooldown and used for repositioning, escape, or surprise attacks.

Different terrain charging different movement — roads at half cost, forests at double, mountains impassable, swamps that swallow a turn — making the map's surface a pricing structure for motion.

A traversal ability letting the player run along vertical surfaces for a limited duration, chaining momentum from a horizontal sprint into a temporary vertical or diagonal path across walls.

Units projecting influence over adjacent space — the tiles around a unit that halt enemy movement, engagement auras that lock passers-by into combat, the wargame rule that you cannot simply walk past a hostile army.