Flipping the Table: Did Removing Miniatures Save D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is doing better than ever, thanks to a wave of nostalgia-fueled shows like Stranger Things and the Old School Renaissance, the rise of actual play video streams, and a broader player base that includes women. The reasons for this vary, but one possibility is that D&D no longer requires miniatures. Did it ever?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

When Vivian Kane at TheMarySue interviewed lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, about the increased popularity of D&D, here’s what he had to say:

It’s a really simple thing, but in 5th, that decision to not require miniatures was huge. Us doing that suddenly basically unlocked everyone from the dining room table and, in many ways, made it possible for the boom in streaming that we’re seeing now.

In short, Crawford positioned miniatures as something of a barrier of entry to getting into playing D&D. But when exactly did miniatures become a requirement?

D&D Was a Miniatures Game First (or Was It?)​

Co-cocreator of D&D Gary Gygax labeled the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Gygax was a wargamer himself, which used miniature games to wage tabletop battles. His target audience for D&D were these wargamers, and so use of miniatures – leveraging Chainmail, a supplement he created for miniature wargaming – was assumed. Miniature wargaming was more than a little daunting for a new player to join. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:

Whether fought on a sand table, a floor or a yard outdoors, miniature wargames eschewed boards and the resulting ease of quantifying movements between squares (or hexagons) in favor of irregular scale-model terrain and rulers to measure movement distance. Various sorts of toy soldiers— traditionally made of wood, lead or tin, but by the mid-twentieth century constructed from a variety of alloys and composites— peopled these diminutive landscapes, in various attitudes of assault and movement. While Avalon Hill sold everything you needed to play their board wargames in a handy box, miniature wargamers had the responsibility and the freedom to provide all of the components of a game: maps, game pieces and the system. Consider that even the most complicated boardgame is easily retrieved from a shelf or closet, its board unfolded and lain across a table top, its pieces sorted and arranged in a starting configuration, all within a span of some minutes— in a pinch the game could be stowed away in seconds. Not so for the miniature wargamer. Weeks might be spent in constructing the battleground alone, in which trees, manmade structures, gravel roads and so on are often selected for maximum verisimilitude. Researching a historical battle or period to determine the lay of the land, as well as the positions and equipment of the combatants, is a task which can exhaust any investment of time and energy. Determining how to model the effects of various weapons, or the relative movement rates of different vehicles, requires similar diligent investigations, especially to prevent an imbalanced and unfair game. Wargaming with miniatures consequently is not something undertaken lightly.

D&D offered human-scale combat, something that made the precision required for miniature wargaming much less of a barrier. Indeed, many of the monsters we know today were actually dollar store toys converted for that purpose. It’s clear that accurately representing fantasy on the battlefield was not a primary concern for Gygax. Peterson goes into further detail on that claim:

Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.

James Maliszewski states that this trend continued through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Even so, it's worth noting that, despite the game's subtitle, miniature figures are not listed under D&D's "recommended equipment," while "Imagination" and "1 Patient Referee" are! Elsewhere, it is stated that "miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing." The rulebook goes on to state that "varied and brightly painted miniature figures" add "eye-appeal." The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though published five years later in 1979, evinces essentially the same attitude, saying "Miniature figures used to represent characters and monsters add color and life to the game. They also make the task of refereeing action, particularly combat, easier too!"

Gygax himself confirmed that miniatures weren’t required in a Q&A session on ENWorld:

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming. I don't believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.

So if the game didn’t actually require miniatures and Gygax didn’t use them, where did the idea of miniatures as a requirement happen? For that, we have to look to later editions.

Pleading the Fifth​

Jennifer Grouling Cover explains the complicated relationship gamers had with miniatures &D in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games:

The lack of a visual element may make spatial immersion more difficult to achieve in D&D than in more visually oriented games; however, this type of immersion is still important to the game. Without the visual component to TRPGs, players may have difficulty picturing the exact setting that the DM lays out. Wizards of the Coast's market survey shows that in 2000, 56 percent of gaming groups used miniatures to solve this dilemma…Because D& D combat rules often offer suggestions as to what you can or cannot do at certain distances, these battle maps help players visualize the scene and decide on their actions…Even though some gamers may get more interested in the visual representation of space by painting and designing scenery such as miniature castles, these tools exist more for showing spatial relationships than for immersing players visually.

In essence, Third Edition rules that involved distances seemed to encourage grid-based combat and miniature use. But the rise of Fourth Edition formalized grid-based combat, which in turn required some sort of miniature representation. Joshua Aslan Smith summed it up on StackRPGExchange:

The whole of 4th edition ruleset by and large is devoted to the balance and intricacies of tactical, grid-based combat. There are exceptions, such as rules for skill challenges and other Role Play aspects of the game (vs. roll play). To both maximize the benefits of 4th edition and actually run it correctly you need to run combats on a grid of 1" squares. Every single player attack and ability is based around this precept.

This meant players were looking at the table instead of each other, as per Crawford’s comment:

Part of that is possible because you can now play D&D and look at people’s faces. It’s people looking at each other, laughing together, storytelling together, and that’s really what we were striving for.

It wasn’t until Fifth Edition that “theater of the mind” play was reintroduced, where grids, miniatures, and terrain are unnecessary. This style of play never truly went away, but had the least emphasis and support in Fourth Edition.

Did the removal of miniatures as a requirement truly allow D&D to flourish online? Charlie Hall on Polygon explains that the ingredients for D&D to be fun to watch as well as to play have always been there:

Turns out, the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be extremely light and easy to play. Several Polygon staff have spent time with the system, and in our experience it's been a breeze to teach, even to newbies. That's because D&D's 5th edition is all about giving control back to the Dungeon Master. If you want to play a game of D&D that doesn't require a map, that is all theater of the mind, you can do that with Skype. Or with Curse. Or with Google Hangout. Or with Facetime. Basically, if you can hear the voice of another human being you can play D&D. You don't even need dice. That's because Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games that came after it, are all about storytelling. The rules are a fun way to arbitrate disputes, the maps and miniatures are awful pretty and the books are filled with amazing art and delicious lore. But Wizards of the Coast just wants you to play, that's why the latest version of the starter rules is available for free.

D&D’s always been about telling a good story. The difference is that now that our attention – and the camera or microphone – can be focused on each other instead of the table.

“What 5th edition has done the best,” according to game designer Kate Welch, “is that idea of it being the theatre of the mind and the imagination, and to put the emphasis on the story and the world that is being created by the players.” That’s the kind of “drama people want to see,” both in their own adventures and on their screens.

If the numbers are any indication, that makes D&D a lot more fun to watch.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

My point is that I don't think it can be true both that "4e had the heavy hand of the game designer" and "the description of the Fireball spell is very close to the Moldvay basic one." The latter is true; hence the former, it seems to me, must be false.

I think you're cherry picking my quotes and making a false dichotomy. 1E fireball is one example of a clearly often problematic spell hence it got a ton of rulings. 4E had a very heavy hand of the designer all over the place. Clearly some people really liked it and others didn't, but the whole fact that 4E is a pretty radical redesign of what had been a fairly static system in many respects for a long time.

As to fireball in Moldvay Basic... wait, how is that even in there? Basic only covered levels 1-3. (I don't have a copy of it anymore... long gone.)

 

[pogre]

I played some Theater of the Mind D&D this past week while on vacation at a fishing cabin. We had a great time, but there were several times folks commented they missed the terrain and miniatures. I think it is great D&D is broad-shouldered enough to support both types of play.

 

[MichaelSomething]

So some people just want to play Calvinball?

 

[Ted Serious]

My point is that I don't think it can be true both that "4e had the heavy hand of the game designer" and "the description of the Fireball spell is very close to the Moldvay basic one." The latter is true; hence the former, it seems to me, must be false.

Another way to put it: I don't think the hand of the game designer becomes "heavier" because insstead of describing fireball as a 20' R burst of fire that does damage to creatures within it, the game describes it as an Area burst 3 that targets creatures.

To me, this makes the contrast in terms of the "heavy hand of the game designer" harder to follow.

The result of someone else's play experience - eg a ruling that Gygax or some other earlier GM made while playing the game - is being presented as input for someone else's play. So instead of playing your own game like Gygax et al did, the rulebook invites you to sing along with thepoay they already engaged in.

Here's the text of the AD&D fireball spell; I've bolded the bits that olveraps with 4e and Basic D&D:

A fireball is an explosive burst of flame, which detonates with a low roar, and delivers damage proportionate to the level of the magic-user who cast it, i.e. 1 six-sided die (d6) for each level of experience of the spell caster.[/b] Exception: Magic fireball wands deliver 6 die fireballs (6d6), magic staves with this capability deliver 8 die fireballs, and scroll spells of this type deliver a fireball of from 5 to 10 dice (d6 + 4) of damage. The burst of the fireball does not expend a considerable amount of pressure, and the burst will generally conform to the shape of the area in which it occurs, thus covering an area equal to its normal spherical volume. [The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]. Besides causing damage to creatures, the fireball ignites all combustible materials within its burst radius, and the heat of the fireballwill melt soft metals such as gold, copper, silver, etc. Items exposed to the spell's effects must be rolled for to determine if they are affected. Items with a creature which makes its saving throw are considered as unaffected. The magic-user points his or her finger and speaks the range (distance and height) at which the fireball is to burst. A streak flashes from the pointing digit and, unless it impacts upon a material body prior to attaining the prescribed range, flowers into the fireball. If creatures fail their saving throws, they all take full hit point damage frqm the blast. Those who make saving throws manage to dodge, fall flat or roll aside, taking 1/2 the full hit point damage - each and every one within the blast area. The material component of this spell is a tiny ball composed of bat guano and sulphur.​

There's a lot of text there that, in my view, manifests the "heavy hand of the game designer". What does it add to the game to have a rule that the fireball detonates with a low roar? What causes the roar if there's no pressure? Why does this spell have its verbal and somatic components specified, when very few others do?

I don't see how 4e can in any way be conisdefred more presecriptive than that.

It adds nothing to the game, but it adds to the world in which it is set. It's a world in which sulphur and bat guano are strategic commodities. In which fortifications employ vents and baffles to mitigate the spread of fireballs and cloudkills, and have minimum wall thickness standards for making lightning bolts rebound and lead sheathing to block ESP.

And a world where pointing your finger isn't just rude, it's assault.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Bits of them doubtless did, but FWIW, 3.x declined to tag Stunning Fist as such, no (SU) - maybe because they /did/ make it a fighter bonus feat. So we can't say D&D has never dropped the 'daily' on a non-caster ability. It's a matter of scale & effect. A fighter taking Stunning Fist wasn't suddenly the equal of a mage.

I suspect they didn't have it Su tagged so it wasn't dispel-bait or subject to Spell Resistance but I don't really know. Monks to me always felt pretty Su. Certainly there were daily powers before but they weren't a core part of most classes.

I can't say I was ever a big fan of n/day limitations, myself, even, or especialy, in the form of Vancian magic. Early on, I did appreciate it, however ironically, on what I guess today would be a 'gamist' level - there was a challenge to picking the right spells and using them at the right time. That challenge diminshed rapidly in later eds, when you could make/buy bushels of scrolls, or cast spontaneously, or, now in 5e, prep spells /and/ cast them spontaneously (if the 3.5 Wizard could've done that, it'd've cracked the mythical Tier 0).

In 2E I long ago dumped the "Vancian" preparation rules and let people prepare and cast freely, with clerics being able to cast whatever they wanted off their domain lists, rather like 5E but even freer. It didn't break the game because characters only had one spell a round and they could be interrupted without being careful.

It's as much or more the 'except for magic' than the 'daily sux' part that I disagree with on a philsophical level, I guess.

Fair enough.

Seriously, though, the idea of 'choose when to be awesome' is implicit in a limited use/higher-power ability. Casters had been doing it for decades, so nobody cared, but the fighter gets to do it? Casus Belli for an edition war.
I think that just cycles back around to familiarity and expectations. Even those of us who don't care for n/day limitations (which, ironically, is both of us), got used to Vanican.

Heh.

I guess the thing is for me I felt that for a caster that was part of the game. If I didn't want daily powers, I played other things. In the early version of 4E I didn't have a choice because every class had AW/E/D. (More about this below.)

Vance was one of the greats of Science Fiction, The Dying Earth was actually very inflluencial in the genre, MZB's Darkover, and Wolfe's Urth both owe a huge debt to Dying Earth... of course, neither of them used Vancian /magic/.

They didn't. Basically nobody else used that. Vance didn't really have a system, per se, that was really Gygax running with it.

Not a valid definition, IMHO. You're defining a goal: game that works, essentially, by what you fear it will have to give up to get there, rather than by what it will have to do to get there.
For instance, right in the old DMG, EGG said that the 'relatively short spoken spell' of Vance's Dying Earth was chosen to make the magic-user playable as a PC, as opposed to the long rituals & elaborate materials that were more typical of magickal traditions & folklore. It was a gamist reason. Yet, now, it's enshrined as an 'in-world rationale' (that, I guess, is a post-hoc rationalization). And, remember, the Vancian 'memorization' has long since been dropped in favor of another post-hoc rationalization, 'preparation.'

Gygax-Vance (probably a better name for it) memorization was always a bone of contention among people. Over and over people were bugged by it and constantly tried to come up with different systems and/or rationalizations.

My issue with gamism isn't that I disagree with the fact that systems need to be elegant and playable. My issue is when gamist concerns become the first concern.

Liberating is not the word I'd use: Easy. DMing 4e was just straight-up easy. I saw brand-new players transition from playing to running in a fraction of the time it had seemed to take in prior eds.

The person who used liberating felt that prior editions left too much up to him to decide so he meant it in the sense of "easy" as in "liberated from the burdens". He liked the fact that 4E built in the rulings right into the monster card for the most part and took care of most of the rulings for him. By contrast, I felt 4E was horribly confining as a DM; I seriously disliked running it.

One reason for the vehemence of the edition war, I think, is the dominant position of D&D. It's easier to find a current-ed D&D game than anything else, by, like orders of magnitude. I could play 5e four nights a week around here, no problem. If you want to play Night's Dark Agents, you'll have to know somebody who knows somebody who might be able to get you in next year...

Yes, 100%. It was basically the only game in town. When 4E was coming out, White Wolf, the next biggest competitor, was dying out. Of course, Pathfinder came out.

Yep, I know it sounds crazy, but in a game where the primary activity of the player is making decisions for his charcter, a well-balanced game will give every player similar opportunities to make decisions...
...and some players are just annoying. ;|

You're 100% right that some players are just annoying or slow.

Oh sure, I don't mean to imply it's not decisions. I have no problem with decisions, though I do think there is a role for having one or two class archetypes that are intentionally simple, like the Champion Fighter, for the kind of player who doesn't like making a bunch of power choices but mostly just wants to roll to hit and damage.

I think the issue is that the decisions felt very much the same to me across classes in a way they really hadn't before: "Which of my consumable resources do I use now or should I wait and just use an AW?"

Without that same structure for classes without dailies or encounter powers, say one that has some interesting At Wills that are situationally useful. For example, in my heavily house-ruled 2E game, we'd devised combat maneuvers to make fighters more interesting that were rather feat-like. None of them are limited use; all are situational. For example, one allowed someone to Tumble (hence improve AC and disengage from a fight easily) but make an attack. Sometimes you needed to turtle so you'd Tumble to avoid being attacked but to be able to attack once was helpful. Another one allowed for a retaliation strike when an enemy rolled a natural 1. I'd let people make up their own maneuvers to support their character concept. One character is a swashbuckler type who likes his flintlocks. In general they kind of suck in D&D, of course, but we devised a maneuver, Pistolero, which let his character draw pistols from his bandolier as long as he has a hand free and use them as part of his extra attacks, with no off hand penalty. It's not really a boost in power but it supports the character's theme.

I think 4E would have been quite hard to manage given all the dependencies and interconnected strings. It wasn't impossible, of course, but it would have been much more difficult IMO.

Later on, Essentials had some pretty cool examples where they broke with the general pattern of everyone having the same number of AW/E/D, say with the Protector Druid having their dailies all be summons and most of their other abilities AW (I think---it's been a while). IMO Essentials was just much better than the original 4E classes, which is one reason I would have banned all pre-Essentials classes in any game I did had 5E not come out. In many ways I see 5E kept a lot (though not all) of what was good about 4E's later incarnation. I did like the Protector Druid a lot, and think that would have been a good druid build in 5E. It was not a shapeshifter but really a caster.

I missed the transition from problem players to DM-proofing. Balance /does/ help with certain types of player problems, and it makes the DM's job easier, rather than making the game immune from him doing his job.

I might have lost my train of thought there. DM proofing removes a big part of the DM's job, at least a lot of the parts I like, such as world-building and tailoring rules support my concepts. By making things easy it got rid of the parts I actually like!

I can't say I've seen barbarians & avengers taking excessively long turns - often, it's a particular player, regardless of what they play. I guess it's what those players were playing in your group at the time?

They spent a lot of time rolling damage and extra attacks with more damage. Leader types, by contrast, seemed to have very quick turns: Minor action healing, attack, move, done.

 

[Lanefan]

Here are two links to relevant posts/threads. It's about post 100 onwards in the second of those that you can see eg people saying that it would be a house rule for a Burning Hands spell to have a chance of setting fire to a scroll that an enemy wizard is holding.

But in any event, if it's a "facepalm" moment or "not doing it right" in 5e to ajudicate fireball in that fashion, it must follow that all those during the 4e era who attacked that edition because (eg) its fireballs don't set things alight (depsite haveing the fire keyword, which - per the PHB p 55 - indicates "[e]xplosive bursts, fiery rays, or simple ignition") were wrong too.

If 4e fireballs also didn't cause flammable things within them to (more or less likely, depending on the material) catch fire, then my face and palm meet yet again.

Lan-"then again, this is 4e, which sometimes had a rather distant relationship with logic"-efan

 

[MichaelSomething]

If 4e fireballs also didn't cause flammable things within them to (more or less likely, depending on the material) catch fire, then my face and palm meet yet again.

Lan-"then again, this is 4e, which sometimes had a rather distant relationship with logic"-efan

Did you ever destroy a wizard's spell book and/or scrolls whenever they got hit with a fireball?

Though I admit most people handwaved it for convenience more so then a disregard for realism.

 

[Lanefan]

The result of someone else's play experience - eg a ruling that Gygax or some other earlier GM made while playing the game - is being presented as input for someone else's play. So instead of playing your own game like Gygax et al did, the rulebook invites you to sing along with thepoay they already engaged in.

Or it tries to save you having to go through all the same rulings headaches they already hit and solved.

Here's the text of the AD&D fireball spell; I've bolded the bits that olveraps with 4e and Basic D&D:

A fireball is an explosive burst of flame, which detonates with a low roar, and delivers damage proportionate to the level of the magic-user who cast it, i.e. 1 six-sided die (d6) for each level of experience of the spell caster.[/b] Exception: Magic fireball wands deliver 6 die fireballs (6d6), magic staves with this capability deliver 8 die fireballs, and scroll spells of this type deliver a fireball of from 5 to 10 dice (d6 + 4) of damage. The burst of the fireball does not expend a considerable amount of pressure, and the burst will generally conform to the shape of the area in which it occurs, thus covering an area equal to its normal spherical volume. [The area which is covered by the fireball is a total volume of roughly 33,000 cubic feet (or yards)]. Besides causing damage to creatures, the fireball ignites all combustible materials within its burst radius, and the heat of the fireballwill melt soft metals such as gold, copper, silver, etc. Items exposed to the spell's effects must be rolled for to determine if they are affected. Items with a creature which makes its saving throw are considered as unaffected. The magic-user points his or her finger and speaks the range (distance and height) at which the fireball is to burst. A streak flashes from the pointing digit and, unless it impacts upon a material body prior to attaining the prescribed range, flowers into the fireball. If creatures fail their saving throws, they all take full hit point damage frqm the blast. Those who make saving throws manage to dodge, fall flat or roll aside, taking 1/2 the full hit point damage - each and every one within the blast area. The material component of this spell is a tiny ball composed of bat guano and sulphur.​

There's a lot of text there that, in my view, manifests the "heavy hand of the game designer". What does it add to the game to have a rule that the fireball detonates with a low roar? What causes the roar if there's no pressure? Why does this spell have its verbal and somatic components specified, when very few others do?

Easy one first: a great many 1e spells, particularly arcane, specify their material components.

As for the low roar, why not?

There's no denying the same information could be given in fewer words, but having all the info there is both useful and flavourful. I'd rather have that than no guidelines at all.

I don't see how 4e can in any way be conisdefred more presecriptive than that.

No more prescriptive, but a lot less flavourful and a lot less exciting (that 1e fireballs filled to a volume no matter what led to some wonderful unforeseen - and at times painful - results).

 

[Lanefan]

Did you ever destroy a wizard's spell book and/or scrolls whenever they got hit with a fireball?

If the wizard (or anyone else) fails to save then anything carried also then has to save, as per the 1e DMG. And yes, this has caused loss of all kinds of things, spellbooks and scrolls among 'em.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Did you ever destroy a wizard's spell book and/or scrolls whenever they got hit with a fireball?

Whenever you failed a save vs anything damaging, technically. One of the most-ignored rules in D&D history, right after weapon v armor adjustments...