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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Grainger" data-source="post: 6598610" data-attributes="member: 6779234">I don't really like minis because I feel the game comes out of the imagination, and people start thinking the participants look like the minis when they're usually only an approximation. No-one ever finds a mini that actually looks like their character, and they start off by saying "well... he doesn't have the armour, and his hair is shorter..." but very quickly this gets forgotten, and it becomes what the character looks like.Also, more generally, the minis then start to dictate the look-and-feel of your campaign. There are many ways to envisage a medieval or pseudo-medieval world, and I rarely find that any given fantasy art matches my interpretation.Using a battlemat has its place (e.g. for more complex combats), but then I prefer to use very approximate pieces to represent everyone (different coloured dice) or very approximate stand-ins (e.g. very cheap plastic dinosaur toys) that clearly don't really represent what everyone/everything looks like. Likewise, a plain grid with hand-drawn lines is better than a printed dungeon layout for the same reason; I want to choose what my dungeons look like, and I convey that to my players by saying words.That said, I use it sparingly, because everyone is looking down on the action, rather than imagining it  in "first person" perspective. Case in point: in our last game, two  Manticores attacked the party. I described how -after firing their tail  spikes - they flew in at top speed, hungry for flesh, jaws open, coming  right at the characters they targeted, biting and rending at them. If we  had been using a map, this would have been lessened, I think, because  it would have become abstracted. So three thumbs up (I grew an extra one for the purposes of this post, because I feel so strongly about it) for Theatre of the Mind!</blockquote>

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