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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Majoru Oakheart" data-source="post: 4127671" data-attributes="member: 5143">And the people at WOTC know this as well.  A lot of people buy D&D despite their problems with it and just fix them by themselves and go on about how great the rules are when they aren't even using them.  WOTC wouldn't want to leave this portion of the D&D community behind by making a statement like "You now need a battlemat".Let's be realistic about the situation.  In order to follow the rules of D&D, you've needed a battlemat since 3e.  When the rules say "in order to figure out if you are flanking you draw a line from the middle of your square to the middle of your allies square and if it passes through opposite sides of the enemies square you are flanking" then there is no way to use the rules without a battlemat(or at least grid paper).Sure, you can easily distill the rules down to their basic components and easily make up some house rules that allow you to play without a battlemat.  You can see that the concept behind flanking is that 2 allies are on opposite sides of an enemy and simply rule when this happens based on the positioning of the enemies and PCs in your mind.  You can see that when the rules say you need to be in an adjacent square to be in melee that they mean "be within 5 feet".  It is fairly easy to translate all of the rules into non battlemat terms and houserule that whether you are 1 foot away or 5 feet away you are still "adjacent" for rules purpose".However, you still have to make changes to the rules in order to play that way.  And even with those changes there are simply parts of the rules that you'll never accurately recreate.  No one can tell me that they actually keep track of 6 PCs, 11 enemies, 15 squares with difficult terrain in them, a river that gets wider near the north end, a small pool, 4 sloping passages and an irregular shaped room and the EXACT relative locations of all of them in their heads and are 100% accurate.I know when I used to play without a battlemat, rooms became awfully square and featureless in order to give my brain a rest in keeping track of the locations of everything.  I hated purchased adventures because they'd give me some complicated looking room with terrain and the like and I'd have to pretend it wasn't there so as to avoid getting a headache.And I'm not arguing the merits of using a battlemat vs not using a battlemat.  I believe there are advantages to both.  However, I wish the debate would stop coming up about whether or not one was required to play D&D.  One IS required to play D&D.  It is just a bit of work to adapt the rules to allow them to be played without one.</blockquote>

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