Lyxen
Great Old One
Your players must not care as much about accurate positioning etc. as mine do, then.
In my view, playing on a grid is anything but accurate, if you want accuracy, play gridless on a vtt, at least it will avoid totally inaccurate computations for angles and for areas of effect.
Were I to ever try running a combat in ToTM I'd be amazed if we got through one round in an entire evening; we're so used to using the visual cues of minis and a board to see how things spatially relate to each other (and even then there's arguments, but nowhere near as often as would be the case with ToTM).
To each his own, I agree that TotM is not precise, but it's much better for imagining things in one's head, and it's blindingly fast. That being said, I think it's a question of preferences, of course, but also what you were trained to do. I was running TotM 43 years ago when we had nothing to track actual positions, most of our players are completely familiar and comfortable with it, and able to train newcomers very easily in it.
Absolutely - the whole "fog of war" idea where combat is often pure chaos.
There's tweaks to the rules you can make to edge closer to this in-system, but they also add to how long it takes to run a combat.
Which tweaks are you speaking about here, I have no idea what you might be referring to ?
In our groups, the one tweak that enhances fog of war is the total inability for anyone whose turn it's not to speak during that turn, which means that they can't get clarifications or interfere, but I'm not sure it's the same thing. Anyway, that strict application of speaking turn speeds the game by a considerable factor.
One thing for @Chaosmancer to keep in mind is that those sort of mistakes can and do go both ways - I-as-DM might forget to apply ongoing damage to a PC, for example. In the long run I suspect they largely cancel out.
Eaxctly, as long as there is no intent to bias results whether from the DM and the players, this makes the mistakes even less significant overall.