Image by David Mark from Pixabay

This is an article inspired by a bus stop.

As I got off the bus at my stop the other day, I briefly contemplated the fact that I had two different routes to choose between. I always choose one over the other as being faster than the alternative, despite having to wait for a ‘walk’ signal at the corner. If I chose the other direction at the Bus Stop, I would be able to cross the street without waiting. It’s not much farther – so why do I consider it the slower choice?

To start explaining, here’s a rough diagram of the street at the bus stop:

And here’s a rough diagram (not quite right in proportions) of the two routes:

In truth, the two are a lot closer in length than these illustrations make them appear. But that’s all right, this is good enough for explanatory purposes.

I always choose Path 1 and never Path 2 (unless forced to by circumstances).

It’s not because of length. It’s for this reason:

Path 1 involves a lot less uphill walking. The downhill is also shorter, but that’s not really a consideration in comparison. Even with a 2- or 3-minute wait at the lights (which I don’t always have, it should be noted), Path 1 is a little faster than Path 2 and a LOT less work.

I really don’t like sloping, hilly, ground. My knees work a lot better on flat terrain (they don’t like stairs, either – going up or down. It’s a question of cartilage – I have almost none in my knee joints, it’s been squeezed out like toothpaste from in between, pushing the kneecaps out and up at the same time.

So, anyway, I got off the bus, contemplating the two paths, and then realized that there was a potential post for Campaign Mastery in the thought.

Sloping Ground

You see, most GMs don’t like sloping ground in their games, either. They are complicated to describe, they add content without substance to descriptions of areas, they are (relatively) boring. “You enter a 20′ x 30′ space with a curved alcove at the far end of the room, which slopes 5 degrees up from right to left and 10 degrees up from far end to alcove….”

They are proverbially difficult to map, both for GMs and for players, so much so that KODT did a whole 5-page strip poking fun at the knots of precision you had to tie yourself into way back in issue #6 called “Wherever You Go, There You Are”, reproduced in Bundle Of Trouble #2 (which is still available, I think). This was offered as a series of webstrips in 2003, but sadly, no longer seems to be available.

In summary: A gaming session with a complex dungeon means that someone has to be doing ‘Mapping’. Bob complained that he was sick of doing the mapping. Dave and Brian both turned it down and tried to convince Bob that it was his duty. Sara volunteered, saying she did not mind the chore. Dave responds, “No Offense, Sara, but you take way too much time mapping. Besides, you didn’t bring your French Curve or T-square.” In the end Dave is made to do the unwelcome task, but his mapping skills are so atrocious that the Knights keep falling into the same 10′ spiked pit, though it takes quite some time for them to discover this. soon find that the dungeon isn’t riddled with spiked pit traps, but that they’ve been going round in circles and repeatedly falling into the same pit. When the realization sinks in, they confront Dave and examine his map:

A really badly drawn map, compass directions off, full of crossing out and question marks.

Copyright 2003, Kenzer & Co. Click on the image to purchase Bundle Of Trouble #2 (PDF).

…which leads to the inevitable outcome:

Mapping with ridiculous levels of precision, characters using survey markers, etc.

Copyright 2003 Kenzer & Co. Click on the image to buy Bundle Of Trouble #2 (PDF Format).

In truth, player mapping also introduces all those complexities of description, as well; the GM not only has to be prepare ‘sloping ground’ content, he has to communicate it clearly to the players. “The floor rises by 7.5 degrees for the first 50′ and then falls by 6 degrees for the next 60 feet.” “I’m a 3’2″ halfling, can I see over the ridge?” “Ummm…”

So why should a GM consider it?

Three Reasons To Bite The Bullet

I’ve got three reasons. How good they might be depends on a whole host of factors. One or more of them might be compelling for you. At the very least, this states what you are sacrificing in return for the benefits of clarity and speedier presentation of the tactical situation in-play.

    1. Slopes are natural

    Flat ground anywhere doesn’t happen by accident. Slopes are natural and normal. Even on ground that is nominally flat, minute slopes are present and cause rainwater to collect in streams and rivers, cutting channels and forming banks. The slopes might only be a tenth of an inch in a mile, a millimeter or two in a kilometer, but they are nevertheless there – and many places have ground that slopes far more seriously and notably.

    2. Higher Ground

    Not all changes in floor elevation take the form of slopes. There are steps, shelves, and all sorts of other descriptive terms that can be applied to the landscaping. One of the reasons for such variety in descriptive language is because differences in elevation proverbially confer a combat advantage. So instantly recognizable is the concept of higher ground that I was able to use it for the title of this article and everyone would have instantly understood the subject.

    3. A Grasp Of Complexity

    Players often like black-and-white simplicity. “Is this proposed act an alignment violation?” “What’s the difference between good and evil?” “Is it as simple as Us Vs Them?”

    Real life isn’t like that, as many GMs have pointed out in discussing the D&D alignment system. Alignment should not dictate or confine choice of action, it should merely classify those actions. Alignment should be more robust than a single choice; instead, it should drift, naturally, this way and that. Characters can, and should, take decisions when pushed into a corner (physically or metaphorically) that they would not normally countenance.

    A GM who can cope with sloping ground and the complexities that it entails is probably a GM who is flexible enough to cope with nuance and shades of gray, and the richness of characterization that it unlocks, and vice-versa.

    Of course, a whole different standard applies to running games for kids and younger teens. But, from an adult perspective, a GM who can cope with sloping terrain is more likely to run a complex and interesting game. It’s not a universal rule, but it’s a good starting point.

Is Higher Ground really such an advantage?

Of these three, the tactical considerations seem the most important in a number of ways. And, since I dislike relying on proverbs that may contain little more than a grain of truth, I think that motivation requires closer examination.

Mythbusters

Sometimes, the challenge in researching a particular subject is finding relevant information. At other times, it’s separating the wheat from the chaff. This is one of the latter occasions. A quick Google search immediately yielded a vast number of websites to use as sources, from which I quickly cherry-picked eight for closer examination.

Let me start here: In “Star Wars Special 2: The Myths Strike Back“, Mythbusters investigated the validity of the line from the third Star Wars prequel in which Obi-Wan declares that Vader has made a mistake and let him claim the higher ground. I always liked that line, because I saw a double meaning to it – the physical, and the moral, making it nicely symbolic of the whole “Light Vs Dark” theme of the entire franchise.

In an interview with the L.A. Times in 2015, Adam Savage said, “There are plenty of military reasons that higher ground is great, but most of them are about being an army. High ground allows you to see your opponent coming. It allows you tremendous advantage in a battle, but Obi-Wan says it as a one-on-one thing. So the first thing we wondered was, ‘Does this matter in sword fighting?’ …we reached out to some sword fighters, (and these were fencers who used double-edged weapons as medieval reenactors) and none of them had solid reasoning or referred to some tactic where the higher ground is always better.”

Their testing argued that in a lightsaber duel, higher ground did not present a convincing advantage. Lower ground won 26 duels, higher ground 24. But I found it significant that the weapons involved didn’t weigh very much, that many of the victorious blows were touches on legs and ankles that might or might not be lethal against armored enemies when using traditional weapons (which do have significant weight), and that a touch was enough to disable, maim, or kill with a lightsaber – significantly more effort would be needed with those traditional weapons.

In a “What’s New With Phil And Dixie” strip in the back of a Dragon issue, many many years ago, it was suggested that the best way to simulate real combat from a fantasy game in real life was to get two telephone directories, hold them out at arm’s length, one in each hand, and bang them together with the arms outstretched as hard as possible for five minutes.

It’s a harder test these days, because most telephone directories are now online, but if you just try waving a hardcover book around at arm’s length for a few seconds, you’ll quickly realize that it’s a LOT harder than it sounds.

In short, I was far from convinced that the Mythbusters results could be extrapolated to cover all situations.

Historically

From Wikipedia’s page on High Ground:

“The military importance of the high ground has been recognized for over 2,000 years, citing early examples from China and other early-dynastic cultures who regularly engaged in territorial/power struggles.”

In Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, military leaders are advised to take high ground and let the enemy try to attack from a lower position.”

The whole point of castles and forts was to elevate troops into positions where they could strike the enemy more easily/effectively than the enemy could strike them.

“…Getting the high ground is not always advantageous. In the Battle of Jieting of the Three Kingdoms period of China, Shu Han forces occupied a hilltop, which Cao Wei forces soon surrounded and isolated the Shu forces from water supplies and reinforcements. The Shu forces suffered a humiliating defeat, and the Shu northern expedition had to be aborted.”

This brings up an important point – the degree of elevation change is significant. The answers change with elevation beyond the reach of melee weaponry. Or do they? Another question to be explored as I proceed. I’ll save it for ‘fired weapons’, because it seems most relevant there.

An RPG Player’s Answer

One of the websites that came up in researching the subject was Role-playing Games Stack Exchange, where “user4000” wrote, way back in 2012:

“I just don’t understand how attacking someone from higher ground is an advantage in melee combat. I always think of two examples where I can’t see this to be an advantage.

  • “Example 1: A kung-fu fight in a room. If I stand on a table but my opponent doesn’t, how is this an advantage? I increased the reach between us, punching him requires me to bend, and a kick coming from higher up is not harder to block or dodge.
  • “Example 2: In a sword fight, a knight is on a rock. You can strike me from above, yes, but I can strike your legs more easily. Again, you’ll have to bend over to block and attack. Again, the reach between us is increased.

If small opponents get bonuses to attack and defense because they’re small, what sense does it make that becoming ‘taller’ (i.e., having higher ground) suddenly gives me an advantage over you?

Most systems I know give you an advantage if you are on higher ground – why?

The most popular of the 5 responses was from a regular user of the site, Tynam:

“I’ll deal with your first example first: standing on a table in that situation is not particularly an advantage. It’s also, therefore, very unlikely behavior for a martial artist. (Not counting Feng Shui players). Standing slightly up from your opponent, on the other hand, is an advantage for many of the reasons below. It brings your kicks to better target points with less effort, while costing you nothing.

“Historically, however, standing on tables or fighting indoors is an unlikely scenario. Let’s discuss the more common swordsman (or in your example, armored knight) fighting uphill against similar opponent. In this case the higher-ground advantages are huge.

“(To help make examples clearer: our swordsmen are on a hillside. Tom is higher up, Lowry is lower down and facing uphill.)

  • “The assumption that Tom needs to ‘bend over’ to block is false. The leg guards work perfectly well while standing in a normal fighting crouch, regardless of the origin height of the attack – it has to be at Tom’s leg height regardless. At worst Tom ducks slightly.
  • “Lowry, on the other hand, gains defense for his legs but loses it at the head, and loses access to attack Tom’s head. Is this a fair exchange for Lowry? No! (Hint… which would you rather lose, leg or head?)
  • “Endurance matters! The defense advantage for Tom is large. Tom needs to guard his legs and abdomen more… some of the least tiring guards, because your arm drops low. Lowry needs to guard his head more… needing him to lift the weight of his weapon more often. And he has to block against greater force, because Tom has gravity aiding in the downswing.
  • “On this theme, gravity is Tom’s friend. Most styles use more cuts down than up, for a reason – those cuts have more power with less muscular effort. (And for the beginner, cuts down are also easier to execute and to feint with.) Lowry also has to lift the blade more to perform equivalent cuts and thrusts.
  • “Footwork matters! In a duel both fighters move in all directions. Stepping backwards uphill leaves you less likely to trip than stepping backwards downhill. And more likely to catch yourself before dying. (In a massed formation during battle the rules are different, but that applies to most things.)
  • “Balance matters! If both are competent, neither fighter will particularly lean forward or back… or they’ll lose. (Tom ducks down, not leans forward, to strike the head.)
  • “Reach really matters… but only to the key target points. All else being equal, on a mutual thrust, Tom hits the head while Lowry hits the calf. Guess who’s limping away from that fight?
  • “For armored knights with swords the situation is even worse, because the legs and chest are very hard to injure on a man in harness. (That’s what the armor is for, after all.) The good target points on a suit of plate armor are mostly upper body. (Although this match is historically unlikely outside competitions; poleaxes would make more sense, and are slightly more even because of the leverage advantages they grant.)
  • “Vision matters! As wraith808 correctly says, looking up is harder than looking down. And it’s a lot harder if you’re wearing a helmet. Lowry has to work harder to keep his eyes on Tom. And can more easily be distracted by attacks coming at the head.
  • “Speed matters! When Tom attacks he’s closing the distance downhill, with gravity aiding his strike. Lowry is climbing to do the same.

“All this only applies if the height difference is a couple of feet, or a not-too-steep-hill. At more than that this isn’t a swordfight as such; Tom is hacking down at a climbing opponent.

“This is a summary of a complex issue… but the purpose of game mechanics is to summarize complex issues. A flat bonus is not an unreasonable representation of this effect.”

That seems fairly comprehensive and definitive. Nevertheless, there are a few things to add to it.

Advantage Q1: Stabbing Weapons

Pikes, spears, polearms, and swords are some of the staple weaponry of fantasy gaming.

Thrusting down, gravity pulls on the arms, and the armor on them, and the weapon, increasing the effect that it has. Whether or not the addition is enough to overcome head protection is different question; but you have a better chance of success with that assistance than without it.

When thrusting upwards, gravity is your enemy – and you will probably have to elevate your arms above the horizontal, so you not only have to fight gravity, you have to fight it harder. The weight of your arms, and their armor, and the weapon, all have to be pushed upwards with force against the power of gravity, repeatedly.

For an unknown number of thrusts, the benefits might be minimal, but over time, they would become overwhelming. Fatigue matters!

Even if your combat system doesn’t track fatigue, it seems only reasonable to reflect this situation with a bonus – initially, for all the reasons listed by Tynam, but inevitably for all those reasons plus fatigue.

Advantage Q2: Slashing Weapons

This is probably the most ubiquitous weapon type in fantasy gaming, if you include crushing weapons that are wielded in a similar manner, like morningstars, maces, and hammers.

Analyzing these has to be done separately by stroke type; while overhead blows are spectacular, there is often less muscular effort involved in a horizontal strike or ‘sweep’ (and they tend to be harder to dodge and faster).

So, an overhead strike: you have all the effort involved in getting the head of the weapon over your head and swinging downwards. But, once you reach that point, gravity does the rest; all you have to do is hold on. If time is an issue, you might achieve greater effect by continuing to add muscle power to the blow, but you are probably better served by saving your strength and simply steering the downward blow toward your enemy.

The greater probability is that your blow will land on the head, shoulders, or back of your enemy. Head is bad; shoulders not much better; a blow to the back is probably the best choice, from your enemy’s point of view. Better still, they might be able to use a shield to protect themselves – but that involves lifting that to head height or more and holding it there, a considerable physical effort. When he attempts to strike back (he is going to fight back, isn’t he?), natural human kinesthetics means that the shield will be lowered as a counterbalance, increasing the thrust and speed of the weapon. Nevertheless, the vital organs of his foe are more likely to be accessible by only the tip of his weapon and not the blade; so the effectiveness of most weapons is diminished by the design under these circumstances. And then, the shield has to be raised again.

Higher ground definitely seems to confer an advantage in this situation.

How about with horizontal sweeps? This seems a little more problematic. The uphill character is fighting gravity to hold his weapon horizontal, even if the weapon is designed to be used this way – for example, a scythe. But “horizontal” might be something of an oversimplification; I can easily believe that you would start with the weapon slightly elevated, would send it along a somewhat-horizontal arc, with a rising follow-through, like this (vertical scale exaggerated):

Gravity assists with the strike, and – assuming that enemy flesh or armor doesn’t bring the weapon to a complete stop – then slows the stroke to a stop and then commences returning it to the ready position ready for the next stroke.

Once again, we have gravity working in favor of the character on the higher ground. Even if the converse is not true (depends on the weapon), that’s still an advantage; only the scale would vary.

Advantage Q3: Thrown Weapons

Thrown weapons are an easy one. You get increased range from elevation, and therefore, diminished range from a lack of elevation. It doesn’t matter too much if you’re talking darts or grenades.

Advantage Q4: Fired Weapons

For this one, I’m going to defer to a Quora answer from Bob Kinch to the question “Why is having the ‘high ground’ a tactical advantage in a gunfight?”. Bob is a former soldier, Combat Engineer, and Competitive Marksman in the Canadian Armed Forces with 42 years experience. His answer is:

“It’s so important that when the pre-eminent historian of his time, Liddell Hart, wrote his seminal book about what the Germans did during WW2, he called it ‘The Other Side of the Hill.’

“The reason that officers got horses, wasn’t because they were lazy, but [because] it allowed them to see over top of the front ranks and see what was going on beyond it.
Hills work like that too.

“Lets pretend you and I are fighting and you are on the top of a hill. You can duck down, go on the left side, pop up, fire a shot, swing around to the right and shoot again. I can only shoot at your head. You can shoot at my entire body.

“Am I fighting 1 soldier or 2, or 10?

“If I’m wounded, you can shoot me again. If you’re wounded, you can bind your wounds, and I won’t even know you are hurt.

“If I see dust behind you, are you being reinforced or are just kicking up dust to fool me? (Rommel used that trick in the desert) If I get reinforced, you can see it from miles and leave. And I won’t know it until I get there.

“And yeah, fighting uphill sucks. An old Arctic warfare trick is to throw water on the snow, so now you are fighting uphill, on ice. You can’t fight well and I know where my kill zone is.

“Your grenades fly farther. My grenades fly shorter.

“You can see exactly where your artillery lands. I can only guess about mine.

“I think you see the point.”

Once again, that seems like a fairy comprehensive and definitive response.

Several of those advantages only scale with greater height. If your enemy is at the top of a castle wall and you are not, you’re in a very bad place. Those on the top of the walls can rain anything from molten lead, boiling oil, or arrows down on you. Elevation again increases their range, while reducing yours, so you will be under attack for some period of time before your attacks can even reach the enemy – assuming parity of weapons and that they open fire as soon as you come into range.

Accuracy becomes a little harder to judge, though.

One of my favorite computer games many years ago was a golf simulation. Like most such, there was a meter that moved when you actuated a stroke which you stopped when it indicated that the stroke would be made with the power desired. Firing at an “uphill” target is like playing that golf game with the meter hidden – you can only estimate with each shot how far you are pulling the bow back, and minuscule variations are amplified through ballistics into considerably larger deviations. Only the most expert of archers can hope to deliberately hit a target; the rest simply fill the air above the target with arrows in the hope that they hit something worthwhile when they land.

Those attacking ‘uphill’ have the same problem, compounded by reduced range.

Of course, the final extract from the Wikipedia page quoted earlier should not be forgotten; elevation is not the be-all and end-all; siege techniques can still produce an eventual victory. But it’s not easy and not all that dramatic.

Advantage Q5: Tactical Awareness

This was explicitly raised in the answer from the RPG Stack Exchange, and mentioned in passing in a number of other sources. Height makes it easier to get an overview of the current tactical situation, permitting resources to be targeted where they are most likely to be effective. Most tactical simulations adopt an overhead perspective for a reason!

The Short Answer

Having considered all the possibilities, the only viable conclusion is “yes”, elevation confers a marked advantage in combat; the only questions are ones of magnitude.

Revisiting The Issue

But that brings me back to the question of whether or not GMs should worry about slopes and elevations – are they, in fact, too important to be set aside so casually?

Definitive answers are hard to come by, when discussing broader areas of game mechanics and GMing style, but I think that the demonstrated importance of elevation makes a solid argument for this answer, too, being ‘yes’ except when contraindicated by genre and setting.

The realism, for example, might get in the way in some superhero campaigns, or could contradict the combat ‘rules of genre’ in a pulp campaign. Those are cases in which elevation effects should be restricted only to the most overt. Spiderman’s swings can always defy gravity enough to get him to another rooftop, at least in an urban environment; in fact, I remember one issue in which he had to pursue a villain into the suburbs, finding himself a fish out of water in the new environment.

But we have now reached the point where GMs need to have a good reason, one that they can clearly articulate, in order to justify this simplification of real world geometry. Slopes and steps and shelves and all the other mechanisms of the rise and fall of natural and artificial elevations should be the default, not the exceptions that they are now.

Simplifying Implementations

If elevation changes can no longer be obfuscated out of descriptions and deemed an unnecessary complication, then the only thing to do is to look for ways of simplifying our way out of the complications that ensure from it’s inclusion.

There are four ways that I can see of doing so. If mishandled, they can be mutually exclusive, but managed properly, they should go a long way to alleviating the problem.

The Trivial Change

In smaller areas, or in appropriate terrain, you can define elevation changes as negligible. One thing that I like about this approach is that it implicitly defines elevation changes under other circumstances as not being negligible, making this a ‘soft’ way to introduce the new approach into a game.

The big difference is that this has to be done as a deliberate choice by the GM, not as the default assumption. That’s a subtle change, but an important one.

The Fixed Angle

The next technique for simplifying elevation issues is to exclude anything more than a foot or two as a separate tactical issue. You can then define these as relative to a base of fixed angle across the entire area to be mapped.

For example, you might define the ‘natural slope’ as being 1′ every 100′ from one side of the dungeon to another. To all intents and purposes, and local variations notwithstanding, there is a significant slope but in any local region of the map, the terrain is effectively flat.

You could measure the slope from one corner of the map. Or from a specific high- or low-point within the bounds. That’s up to you. So long as you don’t provide exact measurements, just subjective impressions, you marry the realism of incorporating slopes and tactical considerations to the abstraction necessary for simple terrain and roleplaying action.

What’s more, this can be used to permit more extreme slopes for dramatic effect. Picture a dungeon in which there is a 20-degree downslope:

Such a slope would leave the players in no doubt whatsoever that any room which was flat would have been constructed that way deliberately. Of course, humans tend to do that sort of thing automatically; other cultures might have different ideas. In particular, I can see Dwarves as being “respectful of the earth” or some such, justifying some pretty immense slopes.

How immense? Well, the steepest grades that cyclists traverse in the Tour de France are about 20%. That’s a percentage of 45 degrees of incline. Twenty percent of 45 degrees is about 9 degrees. So this angle is more than twice as steep as something a cyclist using muscle power would try to ride over.

But, at the same time, the steps in my apartment climb at an angle of a little under 45 degrees, a little more than 30. Call it 40° for convenience. These are fairly typical steps, as you might find in any staircase. The change in elevation each step represents is a little more than half the length of my foot, to put it another way.

So the slope of the proposed area is only half of that. It’s not an area full of stairs up and down. You could just about manage this as a sloping terrain. The lower your center of gravity, the less trouble you’d encounter – so Dwarves and Halflings and Gnomes are just fine, the latter positively scampering back and forth. But the tall man-folk and elves, that would be a far less convenient story. Twenty degrees is quite enough to turn an ankle… and anyone who’s ever done that will know how much it can handicap you.

Or you could designate every room as being flat and level, and every corridor as being inclined by a 50- or 60-degree angle – a very steep staircase. Does it matter that every room is at a different elevation within the dungeon? Not particularly – but it puts a lot of earth above and below, which is good for the soundproofing, don’t y’know? So you can commune with nature in privacy?

The Changing Level

In fact, that’s my third technique – abandoning any concept of the flap plane of the map representing a flat plane on the ‘ground’.

Once you grasp this concept, there are all sorts of things you can do with it. Different levels in towers and lighthouses. Rooms and dwellings in a great tree with steps spiraling around the trunk. Rooms in which gravity twists along the length of the chamber until horizontal to the original ‘ground’ level. Space stations with “gravity plating” at odd angles.

The stepped approach

But my biggest trick for making elevation changes manageable is the Stepped Approach. This states that no slope is significant until it creates an elevation change of x (inches or cm, that’s up to you). As a general rule of thumb, 6 inches or 5 cm are the usual amounts I work in. When the slope makes that much difference, there is a “virtual step” which runs the full width of the exposed terrain – except on that line across the battlemap, it can be considered flat.

Depending on the slope, that might divide the room into bands of 20 feet, or 10 feet, or 50 feet, or even be like contours on a physical map of elevation, twisting and contorting into curved lines:

For the price of a few seconds thought when it comes to environment design, this really does present the best of all possible worlds – this is a very complex slope that has been reduced to a simple set of elevation changes. (For the record, this is a temple or alter (depending on the scale) that has been carved out of the side of a mountain, taking advantage of a natural fold. There may well be a hidden cave at the upper end. Of course, you have to climb up the slope to the altar/temple. This quick demo map took me less than half an hour to create – and five minutes of that were because I kept making a mistake on the layers, and drawing my elevation markers in the wrong places.

Depending on the scales chosen, each step might be anything from a few inches to a foot or two, and my usual six inches sits comfortably right in the middle of that range. If you wanted to make the place seem even more alien in design, you might even decide that these were actual steps, deliberately carved into these strange curves and preserved pristine.

The Final Word

Slopes and steps are underused in environment design for RPG adventures, and there is no good reason for it. The techniques described will open a third dimension to your creativity, if you let them. Go forth and slope!

And remember – the long way is the way with the lengthier uphill section. By which I mean that if you get used to handling slopes with smaller examples and situations, larger and more complex elevation situations can be taken in your stride; save this element for when it makes a huge difference and you can find yourself overwhelmed.

Like most things in life, you have to learn how to do the simple things before you can cope with the most difficult examples, but if you master the fundamentals, you can muddle through just about anything.


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