Distance
I can say my game is a bit of a distance from our reality. True, the solid base of it is based off of the real world that we all live in, but in the lore there was an incident that happened which essentially changed the world from what we have now. There's things that exist that we don't have now, either from the past or the future. That's one measurement of distance, but not the only one I want to talk about.
When I had originally created this game idea, I was told that I couldn't base it off of real places; that cities were copyrighted. That didn't stop me from working on the idea. I wanted to work on something that I could associate a distance with. Turns out, those people were wrong. Obviously there's some parts of a city that you can't just blatantly recreate, like sculptures or trademarked logos or even the city name, but overall if I wanted to recreate a city I was familiar with, I can. In doing so, it gives me a point of reference for events and layouts of things that are encountered in the various expeditions. I mean, the reality of our world right now and the fictional world of my game would change all of those things. I want to know the distance to provide my players with on how far they need to run away from the nasty creature that is hunting them.
Take a real stretch of a road I know, such as Prospect Avenue. I know where one of the bookstores were, the path it took from that place to the mall. That distance is about 1 kilometer, so more than enough for them to look at utilizing the various buildings that are along the way provide escape options or maybe even a better advantage to fight. Now my players have a better idea of what they are working with when I can provide them solid descriptions of what they see in the vicinity.
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