Point. I'd forgotten about Skills and Powers.
No worries. It happens to the best of us.
Hell, it happens to me, and I am about as far from "the best of us" as you can get.
And (as a professional statistician) I'd love to see the exact wording. Minis != battlemat.
There are links to the WotC survey to be found; I know that over the course of the last few years I have found it & linked to it more than once.
There is no way to keep in one person's head a visualisation of the interactions between the positioning of six a side combat. Let alone to ensure you are all on a shared narrative space. Mapless works (I run mapless with Feng Shui), but makes things like the lightning bolt's area of effect arbitrary and impossible to use accurately.
In short, to run D&D mapless you need to eviscerate a lot of the detail in D&D.
The problem is that you are conflating the original claim with specific locations on a grid (which are not, themselves, actually specific). Neither complexity nor tactics require specific locationing of the type the grid allows.
And, when you claim that "to run D&D mapless you need to eviscerate a lot of the detail in D&D", you are reliant upon the base assumption that
only certain types of detail matter -- specifically those that rely upon the grid.
As an obvious example, weapon speed, the manner in which a given weapon is being used (trying most to hit, trying to land a really solid hit, trying to defend yourself, etc.), attempting combat maneuvers, if you are able to draw an opponent toward you with a bluff, or intimidate an opponent to drive him away from you, etc., etc., are all properties of the RCFG combat system which do not rely upon a specific grid. They are all details that a grid-based system might not allow for, allowing for both complexity and complex tactics, because the focus of the grid-based system is elsewhere. And, in play, they work very, very well.
As another example, in 3.0, I ran an encounter where the PCs were travelling along a cave tunnel angled between 30-40 degrees downward, when a cave fisher attacked a PC from a tunnel that intersected the PC's tunnel at a 45-degree angle, adjoining from the ceiling. The need to use a grid would make such a set-up almost impossible, removing a tense and exciting encounter from the game.
Similarly, I ran an encounter where a grick attacked PCs climbing a rope down a cliff, from a cave that was bored into the cliff, that could not be seen from above. You could use a grid for that encounter, but the encounter was much better for not using a grid.
These kinds of "non-standard" fights are discouraged by a grid system, meaning that, for many games, you need to eviscerate a lot of the potential detail in the campaign milieu.
There is certainly nothing wrong with using a grid when it is appropriate; in a combat where the space is sufficiently complex, and where the fight is essentially a "set piece", it can be cool and fun to break out the minis and even a premade "battlefield" if you have one.....A map, a grid, or a three-dimensional model.
But neither are these things always necessary, or always desireable.
(Oh, and on another subject, it wasn't the presence of the weapon speed rules that sucked. It was that they were almost precisely backwards - the first person to hit should have been the one with the biggest and longest weapon, all else being equal).
I think you have to keep in mind the ability to set a weapon against a charge. A pike is a wonderful weapon when the enemy is coming at you; it is less useful when the enemy is in your face.
A great system for dealing with this is Codex Martiallis (sp?), which is really worth a look.
Bit of a correlation-causation error here. You cannot assume that "the people who buy minis spend more money" implies "making people buy minis will cause them to spend more." There could be a third factor which causes both the purchasing of minis and the spending of more money - namely, the willingness to drop money on D&D in the first place.
Sure, but in that case the guy buying minis is still spending more than the guy who isn't. And, if Scott Rouse is telling us the truth, the correlation was strong enough that it affected WotC's business strategy with respect not only to miniatures sales, but also to how the rulesets were devised.
I, personally, feel that there is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that the sales of miniatures are an extremely important part of WotC's business plan, and that the game rules are affected by the same.
If you are not convinced, that is your perogative. No one else can set the bar of your skepticism for you.
And if you set things up so that you have to drop $10 on minis in order to play the game, that person will simply quit playing (or at least quit buying).
A strategy of "design the game to require minis" is targeting the people who might spend $10 on D&D, but will spend only $1 if that's what they can get away with. The goal is to "turn" enough of those players to make up for the loss of the $1 players who stop buying altogether.
You summed that up nicely. I think that this is exactly what we have seen with 4e.
In any event, I would love to see the marketing data on battlemaps, if any is ever released. Cheaper to produce than minis, and sold at a good price point, they might actually be more profitable than the minis.....although I believe that you would still need the minis in order to sell the maps.
There is nothing "evil" about trying to make a buck. As I said earlier, I think Gygax & Co. dropped the ball on marketing some obvious accessories to earlier editions. Had they not done so, TSR might still exist.
But there is also nothing "evil" in paying attention to that desire to make a buck, and trying to see how it influences the end product, for better or worse.
RC
