D&D 4E Miniless combat and retain tactical aspects of 4E?

[Angellis_ater]

So, I've been considering if it is even at all possible to retain the "tactical" aspect/feel of D&D4 and not use miniatures? Has anyone tried something like this? Any luck? Suggestions? Ideas to share?

 

[jester_gl]

For my first 4th edition game ever, I didn't use a map or minis. As an experienced dm I could maintain a complete map in my head and still know where all those shifty kobold were, but only 1 of the 5 players knew what was going on.

For another group I scribbled a map on a piece of paper, noted their position on the field and the position of the monsters. For most battle, and most group, this would be enough. Just give a little leeway to your player when they want to flank someone or whatever.

For another of my group who actually HATE the idea of using minis, I designed another type of battlefield. It's actually a variant of the old Final Fantasy games where the monster start on the left and the player on the right. They can decide if they start on the front or the back row, monsters start in some row (e.g. artillery on row 4, big reach monster on row 2 and soldier row 1) and changing row is a standard action. A lot of power and abilities had to be reworked (slow does nothing, shift as part of an action is really powerful, burst and blast power reach what exactly) but my players really like the feel of thing in this "little" variant.

In the end, playing with mini is not obligatory. It sure helps some player/dm visuallise the battle and for some fight might actually be necessary, but I did game for 15 years before and never HAD to use mini.

 

[RangerWickett]

I see three options.

1. Play with minis first so everyone has a sense of how the game works, then ditch the tactical map and wing it.

2. Start without minis, and either discourage movement-based powers, or gloss over their effects.

3. Create an elaborate variant ruleset that eliminates the existing powers system and institutes a version of 4e that doesn't require minis.

I chose option 3.

 

[abyssaldeath]

Someone posted a pretty decent house rule set for miniless combat in the WotC forums a while back. Take a look and see if it is something you could use or improve upon.

Sep 27, 2009 -- 8:54AM, wrecan wrote:


I've done it.

Here's how you do it.

Characters' relationships to one another are described thusly:

• Next to
• Near to
• Close to
• Far from
• Beyond (this means so far away, you can't attack it, even though you can see it)

Once you narratively establish everybody's position to one another, use the following rules:

• You can only make melee attacks against characters "Next to" you.
• You can make reach attacks against characters that are "Near to" you.
• Ranged attacks with a range of 5 or less can attack creatures "Close to" you
• Ranged attacks with a range of more than 5 can attack creatures "Far From" you.
• Burst and blasts with a radius of 1 affect creatures next to the center.
• Burst and blasts with a radius of 2 or 3 affects creatures "near to" or "next to" the center.
• Burst and blasts with a radius of 4 to 5 affects creatures "close to" or closer the center
• Burst and blasts with a radius over 5 affects creatures "Far From" the center.
• Blasts only affect enemies and allies "Next to" enemies.
• If a creature is "Next to" two or more enemies, that creature is flanked.
• A move action can change your relationship to one other creature by one category. The DM then decides how this changes your relationship to other creatures.
• A shift allows you to change one enemy from "Next to" to "Near to". The DM then decides how this changes your relationship to other creatures.

This works reasonably well. However, the players need to make sure they don't abuse this. 4th edition is tactical, and some powers are greatly strengthened this way. Depending on the DM, this can make Warlords and Swordmages (whose powers inordinately depend on moving people around the battlefield) either godlike or useless.
​

 

[Amaroq]

When I first started playing, we used graph paper and pencil instead of minis - you still get the exact same tactical options, without investing in minis, etc.

My current group uses minis - but on top of a simple graph board, which we use dry-erase markers on, so you could certainly pull the same trick on the larger board (might be easier to see than passing a sheet of graph paper around). There's also a lot of cheap paper-based "cutouts" which you can use instead of 3-D minis.

Depends on what you're going for - e.g., why don't you want to play with minis? If its a cost thing, but you want the exact tactical feel of having minis, any of those three will work. If you just hate the mechanical feel of moving minis around, then the previous posters have plenty of great ideas to feed your imagination.

 

[Angellis_ater]

The greatest reason is because miniatures, atleast in MY group, tends to mean such a stark contrast between "combat" and other forms of gaming that it becomes jarring, dividing the gaming experience into two separate "parts".

I prefer that it all runs "smoothly".

So, tell me about any "Option 3's" that exist - what elaborate subsystems can be made to help with this problem?

 

[Amaroq]

It sounds like wrecan's system above might suit your group, if they all tend to prefer an abstract/narrative approach.

There's a flip-side-of-the-coin option which you might consider: our group always has the mini's on the table .. for example, last night's adventure saw the Ranger in a frenetic escape scene - some DM's might have run this as a "skill challenge" approach; we ran it with mini's on the table, and the DM drawing terrain as he encountered it. The player wound up utilizing Athletics, Acrobatics, Endurance, Nature, and Stealth - not to mention plenty of excellent use of terrain - before eventually losing his pursuers. Initiative was never rolled, and movement wasn't handled by the combat-round rules .. There was plenty of narrative from both player and DM describing the scene in tense detail .. but seeing just how close his pursuers were as he tried to hide from them added plenty of suspense.

One of our DM's even has some great bartender / bar wench minis which set the traditional "evening at the inn" scene in living detail in front of us ... handy if things degenerate into a bar brawl but equally entertaining if he drops a suspicious hooded mini at the back corner of the room, or a too-attractive-to-resist mini in front of our party rake.

 

[Alex319]

Someone posted a pretty decent house rule set for miniless combat in the WotC forums a while back. Take a look and see if it is something you could use or improve upon.

(snip)

It seems to me like that would be a horrible mess to keep track of. If there are, say, 10 creatures on the field, then rather than just keeping track of the positions of 10 creatures, you have to keep track of a matrix of 45 pairwise distance relationships, plus whatever auxiliary information you need to make judgments about how relationships change during movement. And once you add in all sorts of other possibilities (e.g. walls, zone effects like Storm Pillar and Grease, forced movement, figuring out if you have safe charge lanes, etc.) then things could get even uglier.

 

[Infiniti2000]

The greatest reason is because miniatures, atleast in MY group, tends to mean such a stark contrast between "combat" and other forms of gaming that it becomes jarring, dividing the gaming experience into two separate "parts".

Not surprisingly there's a stark contrast between actual combat and other forms of interactions, like meeting with someone. I bet you'd find it jarring if you were meeting with, say, the president of a local association (e.g. Toastmasters), and someone suddenly opened up with automatic weapons fire.