[FEAT] Customize Grid Ruler Behavior on Diagonals

[Craftidore]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

In DnD, rules-as-written, diagonals are always counted as 5 feet of movement or distance. The grid-ruler reflects this, treating diagonals as 5 feet of movement. Many people house-rule that instead every other diagonal is 10 feet of movement. Furthermore, systems like Pathfinder 2e make the every-other-diagonal movement an actual rule.

As I play Pathfinder 2e, the current rulers are not useful at my table and instead my Players regularly manually count squares with the ping tool.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would like a DM setting that changes the behavior of the ruler on diagonals between alternating diagonals and consistent 5-foot diagonals for the entire campaign.

Describe alternatives you've considered

N/A

Additional context

I'm planning to work on this after the origin marker is finished.

[develroo]

I think you are referring to grid mode no?

Screencast.From.2026-01-17.21-55-15.mp4

[Craftidore]

Yes, I'm referring to grid mode of the ruler specifically. No change needed for the normal line ruler or the hex-grid ruler. Edited title to clarify.

[Kruptein]

I do have a question on the diagonal alternate rules. From what I can tell the idea is that during your turn you keep track of the number of diagonal moves and every even count you count double.

For one big ruler interaction (with/without waypoints) in isolation this should be feasible. The main issue I have however is how to keep track of the count over multiple ruler interactions.

An example:
It's Bob's turn, they move 5ft west, and then 5ft diagionally nw. They tracked this using the ruler (either before moving their token or as part of their move). They now resolve some other actions and decide to start moving again and want to go further nw, which should now be 10ft as it's our 2nd diagonal move.

What's the issue:

• Outside of initiative there is no concept of turns, so there is no real way to know if this second batch of movement should continue the diagonal count or reset it
• Regardless of initiative, during the two moves in, Bob might want to count the distance between two points for the purpose of checking if they're in range or some spell, this should then ignore the current movement diagonal count.

Can I just assume that every interaction with the ruler can start from a diagonal count of 0? I don't know how other vtt's do this, but it kind of feels necessary unless the entire game is codified.

[rexy712]

In Pathfinder 2e at least, each action spent on movement is counted as entirely separate from previous or future movement. So having the ruler track the previous status of diagonal movement is unnecessary and actually doesn't follow the rules for that system. Essentially the first diagonal square would always be 5ft for any given independent measurement.

To follow the example, Bob moves 5ft west, then 5ft diagonally nw. He performs other actions at that location. Then later performs a movement to move nw again by 1 square, which would be a 5ft movement because it's the first diagonal of that move. Lets say he stops movement there. Next turn he decides to move nw even further, this time 3 diagonal squares. His first square would still be 5ft, his second would be 10ft, and the final 5ft.

Can I just assume that every interaction with the ruler can start from a diagonal count of 0?

For the systems I'm familiar with, yes.

[Kruptein]

Ah I based myself on this pathfinder 2e info which mentioned tracking movement across your entire turn.

[rexy712]

I guess I've been playing the system wrong haha. Its one of those rules I've done a certain way for so long that it feels more correct to me than the correct answer, but yeah I was wrong.

I still think that having ruler memory beyond a single measurement isn't really necessary. Having alternating diagonals is still much closer to RAW than current. And in PF2e, you'll be at most 5 feet off per turn if you use all 3 actions for movement. The current version can be up to 30 feet off per turn with 3 separate Strides at a speed of 25 (average speed).

[Craftidore]

Having more recently been rulebook-reading, yes, pf2e tracks diagonals across an entire turn. However, I think that's well outside the scope of such a ruler and just has to be on players to keep track of.

The only place where the ruler memory should matter is with waypoints, since the current method of implementing waypoints is to simply track the current distance up to this point.

[Craftidore]

Thinking about this more, I specifically don't want this alternate ruler behavior to care about turns or other PF2e-specific semantics. While my specific use-case for this is playing PF2e, this also exists as a common house-rule in D&D and is rules-as-written in older editions of D&D, like 3.5.

One of the big reasons I was drawn to PlanarAlly was the fact that it didn't know what system I was using and didn't care. I don't want my VTT to know the ins and outs of the rules of the system for me; that's part of the fun of playing the game. The alternate ruler behavior, while a PF2e specific rule, is not limited to PF2e and having that as an option makes the VTT more generically adaptable to any system. I wouldn't want to bog that down with any more PF2e semantics than needed.

[rexy712]

For reference, I looked at how roll20 handles these things. They have a number of options for how diagonals work, but none of them have a memory built into the ruler for counting 5/10/5. Their Pathfinder setting measures diagonals as 1.5 grid squares then rounds the result down. eg moving diagonally 3 times would result in 1.5/3/4.5 then round to 1/3/4 in grid squares