Tell Me About Your Experiences with Theater of the Mind 5E

Saelorn said:

Since opportunity attacks basically don't exist, and flanking is pointless, you can just say that all of the melee people run forward and all of the ranged people hang back.

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Why do you say that OA don't exist? I think I've always used OA in TotM. Even without tracking positions or distances exactly, it's trivial to know who is in melee range. In fact, OA are part of the "mandatory" core rules of 5e which do not assume miniatures.

Flanking is presented as an option rule with miniatures only, but it's not difficult to use it also in TotM. You only need to say which 2 creatures are on opposite sides of a target. Whenever a creature has a turn, if it moves then the flanking conditions can change: a flanking creature and its flanking partner can lose their flanking position and/or a non-flanking creature as well as another who is also non-flanking the same target can become flanking. Still at any given time you have flanking in pairs (at least when everyone is medium size... rules are a bit foggy when they talk about "opposite sides" of a large target, or at least the visual example in the DMG can be misleading).

I have never used minis when running D&D; when I want to play a fantasy RP board game I whip out my old HeroQuest set.

The game works fine with TotM. As others have said, you can be as tight or as loose with rules as you like and it works both ways. MAKE SURE YOUR PLAYERS UNDERSTAND AND ARE ON BOARD. Sorry for yelling, but that's a hugely important point. Even after explaining TotM to the people who would become my group over the course of a few days, one absolutely misunderstood and was baffled and upset that I didn't have a mat and figures. No bad blood, but unfortunate miscommunication.

What I have noticed playing TotM vs. using minis (which the local AL games in which I participated did) is that combat becomes far more varoed and exciting. People don't count squares and move the piece around; they ask about terrain and walls and barriers, and ask about jumping over foes and climbing walls. So ironically, combat is much more 3-dimensional. A game board tends to limit people's perceptions and thoughts to what they can see instead of picturing what their character can see and do.

YMMV, of course.

So I'm always using a mix between TotM and grid. That means, for each encounter, at the very start when I establish positions, I think of what's "most fun" for the current situation. When exact positioning seems strategically important and might determine the outcome of the battle, I usually go for grid, otherwise I often go for TotM.

As for TotM I have the advantage that I play-by-post, so it's in text format and I can give my players a "Status screen".

Most notably I usually provide the following info:
- Distance to a fixed spot
- General area (most of the time it's just one, but I might also differentiate between North/West/South/East or Region A and Region B)
- Melee links (whenever someone attacks someone with a melee attack, a melee link is created, if a melee link points from or to you, you are considered in melee range, that way I easily determine opportunity attacks)
- Special rules for the current combat, like for e.g. "There's an occassional tree or stone you can take cover behind, but moving to it costs you 10 feet of movement" or "Getting from one general area to another costs x feet of movement" (if my players got clever ideas or questions, I add those rules on the fly)

So for example it might looks like:

PC [300] > Goblin A
Goblin A [295] > PC
Goblin B [295]
Goblin C [235]

That would mean that PC is in melee range with Goblin A. Goblin B is close, but not in melee range. Goblin C would still need 60 feet of movement to be able to attack melee or has 65 feet distance when doing a ranged attack.

You cannot force roleplay onto your players. Listen to the players, and give them a LITTLE BIT of what they want. You will be amazed how much more roleplay you will get at the table if the players think that the adventure is allowing them to develop in directions they want to.

Combat is much faster in theater of the mind. It also really helps for you as DM to have a basic sketch of the dungeon if the party is dungeon crawling.

A notebook with the basic stats of each respective monster within the encounter can really help to differentiate between the individual monsters as they each take different amounts of damage during any one round.

Reynard said:

Do you reduce the importance of combat generally?

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We usually have only one or two fights per session, although one of them is always a significant melee.

Reynard said:

Do you just wing it, or do you use a "concrete" TotM system?

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I wing it. I usually illustrate the scene with a picture, and then people describe where they are and what they are doing each turn. "Can my fireball catch all of them?" "Hmm. about three of them."

Reynard said:

Do you sometimes use minis (for "important battles, for example) or have you sworn off them entirely?

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No miniatures. They tend to reinforce a grid mentalitiy.

Reynard said:

Have you changed the combat rules in other ways to enhance the use of TotM? Have you changed the non-combat rules of the game as well?

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Nope.

Reynard said:

What do you do about "builds" (such as they are in 5E) that rely on 5 foot squares and other gridded movement/fighting rules bits?

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If they like theatre of the mind, they roll along with the vagueness. If they are hex-counters or min-maxers, they might not continue playing with our laid back crowd.

I have good experience with theater of the mind both as player and as DM. I also have bad experience as both.
Sometimes it realy helps to draw a vague map or put up some dice to better remember the general positioning or marching order to make it clearer where anyone is.
The better you describe the size of your battlefield and possible obstacles, the easier it is to play with it.
The rest boils down to trust in your DM to adjucate fairly and your players to use their abilities correct.

As a player I ask how many enemies fit into the area of my spell. As a DM I often give options or allow you to take risks to hurt teammates when trying tonplace it perfectly.

Tallifer said:

I wing it. I usually illustrate the scene with a picture, and then people describe where they are and what they are doing each turn. "Can my fireball catch all of them?" "Hmm. about three of them."

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Just wanted to highlight this, because I'm doing that as well.

There's no need to do all the math in TotM. Just let the players tell you what they want and then you tell them if that works (or works to some extend or why it doesn't work). That's easy to do and I never had anyone complain (remember, the DM is not the enemy of the players). In fact it even encourages the players to be creative: "What if I do this and then that, does it work then?" "Hmm, clever, okay I'll allow it." "Yay!"

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We recently took on a boardgamer/wargamer and he seems to have an issue with TotM.

But I'm confident we will break him.