Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 6630886" data-attributes="member: 7006">One question I'd ask is whether you guys are playing with a grid and minis or theater-of-the-mind?I personally have found that the times when I have used minis-and-grid for 5E, there *has* been less apparent tactics involved in the combats.  I suspect it's because that when the players are looking at the grid and looking at their minis and seeing positions of their friends and enemies... their focus (logically) is right there-- at the Real World items on the game table.  And their concerns are more about getting little piece of plastic A over to square B, avoiding squares C, D & E, so that little piece of plastic X doesn't move to Y to attack little piece of plastic Z.All of the "atmosphere" of the narrated scenario falls away.  The terrain doesn't matter unless there are Difficult Terrain markers on the grid, the objects found in the area don't matter because the icons for barrels and crates printed on the tiles or grids are seen merely as flavor to the printed tiles to make them "look pretty", and not as actual things to possibly use.BUT... when playing theater-of-the-mind... when everything is inside the player's heads... they find themselves less concerned and focused on fictional positioning, and more about just moving naturally around the imaginary environment-- using or manipulating objects within the imaginary environment because those things have been described.  And on top of that... without knowing *exactly* where things are down to 5 foot spaces, there's a lot more fudging of distances to provide for more interesting possible activities giving more interesting results.Case in point-- in my game last night the players found themselves in a tower with an otyugh hiding in a pit in the floor and a bunch of guard drakes outside the tower just milling around the courtyard (this is Castle Naerytar in HofDQ).  Had I drawn the whole area out on my gridboard... taking into account the large size of the map... the guard drakes would probably have been like 8 to 12 squares away from the tower they were in, and thus the party would have felt compelled to check the ranges on any spells they had, worrying about their positioning in the tower to avoid spooking the otyugh, wondering where the otyugh was and thus how far its tentacles could reach... etc. etc. etc.  As opposed to what actually happened, which was one player asking "Can I use Dancing Lights to try and create a form that the drakes might see and hopefully follow here into the tower so that they otyugh might grab them?"  And I said "Great!" and made them roll a couple checks.  I didn't care where the drakes actually were, and whether Dancing Lights could reach them from where the magic-user was hiding, and how close she was to the otyugh or any of that.  She had a great tactical idea just from what she was visualizing in her head, and I went with it.  And thus several of the drakes were eliminated from the fight by the otyugh, and  the party rushed out of the tower with the otyugh distracted, charging the remaining drakes and taking them out with several swift attacks.The whole encounter was swift and it was visually and tactically interesting because they were imagining the drakes moving into the tower and then getting grabbed by the otyugh, then all of them making a break for it themselves, and then cruising across the courtyard to go after the other ones as fast and as silently as possible to attract no attention.  And this was entirely because they were coming up with a cool tactical plan in their heads, and not concerned with which miniature moves where and which space the spell has to be cast and is that drake too many squares away to be effective and how many spaces can each character move out of the tower and how long will it take for them to reach the far side by moving and Dashing and so on.The bottom line is that 4E's grid combat WAS more tactically interesting and diverse, because they were focused on making the grid combat mechanics (the "board game" if you want to be a little crass) more fun.  But 5E doesn't have nearly as much of that.  The game's more concerned with giving rules that make the combat in your head much more fun.</blockquote>

Verification