D&D 5E Battlemap Vs. Theater of the Mind

[Grainger]

Gygax thought of RPGs as separate from wargames on a fundamental axiom level. Arneson did not; he explicitly saw them as part of a spectrum. Barker did, eventually, see them as separate, based upon the introductory material in later editions of EPT. Mentzer seems to see them as part of the same spectrum, but very distinct ends.

I'm not arguing here, but the original D&D bill did itself as "rules for fantastic medieval wargames" and although Arneson was key in the development of early D&D, the actual published material was more Gygax's domain. Are you saying that Gygax consciously used the term here for marketing purposes, but actually thought of D&D as not a wargame? And perhaps later changing what he thought of it as?

The impression I got from Playing at the World was that people initially thought of it as a "new type of wargame", until (in the player community) the concept emerged of there being a new category of game: RPGs. So rather, it seems that early on, people hadn't yet thought of it as not a wargame, if you get my drift.

 

[The Human Target]

He didn't want Tolkien in D&D and yet he added elves and dwarves.

Gygax was a businessman for good and ill.

 

[aramis erak]

He didn't want Tolkien in D&D and yet he added elves and dwarves.

Gygax was a businessman for good and ill.

Tolkien was in Chainmail before D&D was written. Gygax probably realized that the Tolkienian battles were good fodder for minis games, especially since the 1960's saw a surge in US readership of the professor's works, specifically LOTR and The Hobbit. Chainmail wasn't the best set of minis rules of the 1960's (it's decent), but it had the Tolkienian races in the "fantasy appendix" in even the 1st (1971) edition.

Note that the Chainmail game rules, predate the publication of chainmail by months, if not years. The chainmail rules themselves mention their prior incarnation as the Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association Medieval Miniature Rules. (Chainmail, Page 8)

 

[Grainger]

Plus, it's not just the presence of Dwarves and Elves (and Hobbits) that indicate the Tolkein influence in early D&D. There are magic items, monsters, etc. There were certainly many other influences on D&D, but I think Tolkein was always a key influence, not just for business reasons. My understanding is that Gygax just played it down later for legal reasons.

 

[Fralex]

Last time I played, I actually used what I will call "Theater of the Mat." I draw out the battle area, but don't use a grid. I draw some circles with letters inside to show character position, and when someone moves I draw a line leading to the new position. I took a slip of paper and folded it into sixths to represent how long 30 feet of movement is.

 

[fewilcox]

I think it's a wash. There's needing to move minis around with a battle mat, but there's sometimes positioning questions from the players without. I play with minis in my 5e game, and without in Savage Worlds game. I see it just more as a preference.

That's largely been my experience as well.

So over the years our default mode in GURPS, and which I used last season at Encounters as is this season's GM, has become a sort of a hybrid of the two. We set up the minis so that everyone starts off with a good idea of the relative positions of all of the combatants, and proceed into TotM from there, only bothering with the minis if someone's position changes significantly or when an enemy is defeated. Hybridizing the process speeds it up quite a bit, allowing us to get through more combats each night, which is good since the GM's work schedule and the store's hours mean we only get about 2 hours each week.

GURPS lends itself very well to free-form descriptive combat in a way that D&D 4e could never hope to, so our hybrid combats work better in it than in some systems. One of the things we like about D&D 5e is that it also lends itself to our favorite style of combat. On the other hand, we also enjoy combat that is closer to Mage Knight or Final Fantasy Tactics, so we tend to crack out my MegaMat and the Vis-a-vis and do a proper map battle for big or important fights. My wife, who runs GURPS exclusively (unless I talk her into running HM5e so I can play it for a change), also uses the hybrid system almost exclusively. I honestly can't remember the last time she used full-on tactical combat, not even in her current fantasy supers game which has had me in the form of a giant earth elemental joining in the fight against a dragon, which was ultimately taken down by the ferro-kinetic bounty hunter from near-future Earth. That was pretty epic.

We first started playing like that in an OVA campaign seven or so years ago because, being intended for anime games, it dispenses with range and movement distance entirely, assuming that anyone can get into melee with anyone, unless you obviously can't (like when one character is on the top of a wall and the other is at the bottom). Attacks are either ranged or they're not. So now in GURPS and D&D 5e we tend to be a bit handwavy with ranges, treating things as having ranges like short, medium, long, and absurd, rather than actual numbers.

One game in which that does not work is HackMaster 5e, but its combats are so fast and engaging that it doesn't matter. Since HM5e dispenses with rounds in favor of second-by-second combat, it's important to track precisely how far each character can move in one second, and doing that means going mapless would multiply the workload rather than reducing it. Of course, HM's Count Up system and use of opposed rolls rather than DCs are precisely why we love the game, so we only use it for campaigns where we want to enjoy its particular flavor.