D&D 5E Theatre of the Mind or Miniatures?

[Tony Vargas]

D&D is significant in the generation gap between a ‘literate’ culture that reads books and a ‘post-literate’ culture that interacts faster and more visually via computers.

Oh, please, that canard has been around for going on a century now. First radio was going to render the masses illiterate, then TV, now, somehow, mobile devices even though they're used for texting. As much as it appeals to pseudo-intellectual elitism to think about one's generation as the last gasp of literacy or liberal education or whatever before the fall of civilization, it's never been borne out.

The rules for precise positioning became ubiquitous - in every spell, in every space.

The need for precise positioning and calculation or range and area goes all the way back to the space-filling fireballs of classic D&D. It's not a new thing.

In my experience, 3e made the grid ‘mandatory’.

'Mandatory' would be a universal claim. Your experience, alone, can't prove that claim. OTOH, any counterexample disproves it. In my experience, in no version of D&D (nor any other game I've run) is the use of a minis with a grid or other play surface 'mandatory.' 3e did not make the grid mandatory.

What 2e C&T and 3e /did/ do, though, was present a system that could use a grid to make movement, range/area and positioning quicker and easier than measuring distances or doing without any sort of visualization aids at all, with only a modest sacrifice in granularity.

I cannot play 3e well without a grid.

I can. I can also run it more easily with one. A grid is /just/ a useful tool.

Regarding 1e-2e, I never saw anyone using string to measure out mini tactics even if an occasional encounter made use minis and coins.

And, I did. Maybe there were just more old-school wargamers in my area. :shrug:

The only time, I ever used a string was in 4e, once, in a dispute about precise positioning during aerial combat. The DM forgot that counting squares diagonally also included upwards, meaning the mini of the hostile who was very far away was in fact within the number of squares of damage spells. Unhappy with the situation, the DM insisted on geometry.

In other words, it was when the DM chose to run 4e more like 5e.

None of these positioning requirements is conducive to my ability to play mentally.In my own experience, *I* can play mental D&D in 1e-2e. *I* cannot do so in 3e-4e.

I'm sure you could learn to overcome that disability if you applied yourself.

Running a game with precise range/movement/positioning/area rules like 1e, 2e, or 5e "TotM," is, as you mentioned, largely a matter of hand-waving that precision away. You can do that with any system, regardless of the units or granularity involved. There is no meaningful difference between handling a 1e 'parting shot' or 5e AoO and a 3.x AoO in TotM: both require you to do nothing more than keep track of who is adjacent to whom.

 

[Patrick McGill]

Funnily enough, I used to be more into Theatre of the Mind, but have lately come around to using minis. My preferred way is when a combat scenario happens, I draw out the immediate area with a wet erase marker on my battlemat. Small combat situations I will sometimes just play out without minis, though.

5e made minis a little more fun for me. It got to a point in our 4e games that when a combat scenario came up and the battlemat/dungeon tiles were brought out I would inwardly groan. Of course, having a party composed of more than two leaders will do that to combats.

I'll even want to use the battlemat in games like Vampire these days. It just helps so much to set the scene. I try not to let it make me lazy, though. I still try to fully narrate the scene.

 

[greylurk]

It depends on the combat

I would say that 80-90% of the combats we run without minis, just describing it. Probably about one combat per session gets the "Tactical" treatment with minis on the map.

 

[Kaato]

At the moment I'm spending the majority of my time with the child, the wife and work on the house so although I'm still reading up on everything d&d related I'm not really playing.
Having said that. In 4th edition I played with miniatures and had a blast. When I started out with 3rd edition however I didn't have the money yet for miniatures and we played using just paper where we drew the tactical grid which became less detailed to speed up play. They were actually just sketches to give the players something of a general idea. I much preferred our method in 3rd edition. If I would start playing 5th edition now I would undoubtedly drop the use of miniatures.

 

[Li Shenron]

Minis but gridless.

 

[alexrawlins]

Both

Really I do both about equally. I may display a map but on a sheet of paper and run it as theatre of the mind as often as otherwise.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

I will do both, but when running 7 PC and 15 enemies having minis out there just to give a feel for the layout is quite nice. I tell the players to consider them a rough map of the area and not "well he took a 5 foot step and that should let me do a coup de grace....". But wit the less tactical combat nature of 5e it all works well together.

 

[Warmaster Horus]

I prefer minis. My first DM was not good at conveying relational info during battles and I found minis to clarify them significantly. The downside to minis is that they can take improv maneuvers out of the game.

 

[Louis Brenton]

Merric-
I'm not sure how to reply to the survey. We 100% never use miniatures, but we use paper maps or drawn maps on graph paper with written pencil notations, erasing & rewriting as people move around. I wouldn't really consider that theater of the mind. It's map-based, tactical movement & environment interaction, but no miniatures & on a much smaller map than the 1 inch square scale maps.

 

[DMCF]

When the party is travelling, in town or about to siege a fortress I make everyone stand up and go outside. We being d20's and if I have a map I will pass it around.

Battle is done with Minis but sometimes (large army battles) a strategic map and mostly theatre of the mind suffices.