D&D 5E Battlemats?

[SkidAce]

Related question: is anyone switching away from battlemats to theater of the mind for their 5e games? Or from something else to theater of the mind?

IRL, I know someone who's moving to theater of the mind for 5e.

We played TOM for our intro into 5E.

And it was fun and fine. We have some imaginative and creative folks. Loved it, felt very 1E. (granted we used minis for positioning in 1E).

But after a vote, they like the relative positioning, visual cues, and occasional diorama I create. And their minis!

So we use a battle mat, but we are still TOM, as some gray areas or technical details get glossed over (rough estimates, not much square counting)

 

[ThirdWizard]

Related question: is anyone switching away from battlemats to theater of the mind for their 5e games? Or from something else to theater of the mind?

IRL, I know someone who's moving to theater of the mind for 5e.

I use ToTM for pretty much every RPG I play except D&D for what its worth. Sometimes I sketch out a general idea of what the area looks like, but usually I don't even need to do that.

 

[mcbobbo]

I use them. I have also been know to print entire maps out to scale and paste them down one room at a time. A sheet of .220 26 x 33 acrylic helps. (Got him for just $28 bucks at the sign shop.) I use Paizo pawns as minis but have made my own pogs in the past.

 

[jgsugden]

All of the above.

I use whatever best suites the battle at hand. For some battles I stick to Dwarven Forge. For some I use DDM maps (or other maps I have laminated). For others tiles.

And for some, we just talk it out without using figures. I see no need to pull the figures out in a battle where terrain and positioning are not going to make much of a difference, and having a few battles where people are not looking at the table constantly is a refreshing break.

 

[Mark CMG]

I've used minis since starting to play D&D when it first came out in 74, though in early days it was more loose. We'd use the minis to keep track of marching order and roughly to suggest where we were during combats and what a campsite arrangement might be. Sometimes, in more complex situations, we draw out locations on paper and even put some objects down to represent elevations.

Once mats you could draw upon became available we took right to them (most of us being minis wargamers before D&D was first published. Battlemats, flip-mats, and the like have all seen use during my games and many in which I played.

When running something published, I often make my own from the maps in the adventures, scaling them up in graphics programs and printing them out for tabletop use. I've been doing this for the 5E Starter Set Adventure and detailing much of that in the series of blog posts I have been writing starting here -

http://www.creativemountaingames.com/2014/07/the-friday-grab-bag-my-d-5e-starter-set.html

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?356735-My-D-amp-D-5E-Starter-Set-Quest-and-Campaign

 

[Weezknight]

Coming out of 4th Edition with nothing but battlemats & grids, I'm loving the freedom that 5th Edition is going to offer. That being said I may still scribble some crude notations of cover, etc. just for the players' reference and relative positioning, but no grids.

 

[halfling rogue]

I voted "Yes" when I saw this thread last week. After playing 5e for the first time over the weekend, I almost hate to say it but if I could I would now change my vote to "No".

Related question: is anyone switching away from battlemats to theater of the mind for their 5e games? Or from something else to theater of the mind?

IRL, I know someone who's moving to theater of the mind for 5e.

I wrote about our full experience here, but explicitly concerning the battlemat I wrote this (amended for context):

As a group we have always used a battlemat. ALWAYS. For us, D&D = Battlemat. We all enjoy it as a visual aspect of the game. All of us own minis and one of us owns a giant table sized chessex mat we use for all our adventuring needs. When I was prepping for our first game, I prepped with a battlemat in mind. There was no question we were going to use it. Even when I arrived to DM, the battlemat, though not on the table, was ready to go. But a funny and completely unintentional thing happened. When the party came upon a certain non-combat situation, the players wanted to have a better visual representation of what they were seeing and their surroundings. An old school player in our group told us they used to use simple graph paper just to draw out a rough visual so that’s what we did. I drew a rough sketch on paper and described everything else. Then an ambush came and we just used the graph paper for reference. Not as a battlemat, but simply visual reference and described everything else. Again, I did not intend for this to happen. I love the battlemat. We are a group that loves the battlemat. It just happened. Our old school player gave me some tips on what they used to do to visually represent the battle on the graph paper using lines and Xs and Os like a football playbook. Literally like 10 seconds worth of explaining, here’s what we used to do, and then without thinking we just did it like they used to do.

I even told them that we’ll definitely need the battlemat for the next encounter because it was more complex than the road. But when we got to the location just before combat the same thing happened again! To show them what a certain location looked like I just flipped the graph paper over to give them a quick visual and this visual led to a visual of the next encounter, and then the next, and then the next. Without meaning to, we never used the battlemat the entire time and it was really, really, really, really, really fun. In the past we would meticulously draw to scale the dungeon via the map in the adventure and place our minis exactly where we wanted them to be. For this session I didn’t draw anything to scale with the map. I just drew something similar and quick, but once it was on the graph paper that’s what we played to. I drew a stalagmite a little too close to the wall once and it became a good hiding spot. We didn’t fuss with distances, (something I thought we needed the battlemat for to squash any possibility for dispute), and in fact it caused everyone to be more creative. Instead of saying, “I go here” the players literally were describing to me what they were doing or going to do and how they were doing it. I mean, the new kid was hanging underneath the wagon in our first encounter! That wouldn’t have happened in the past two editions for our group. It didn’t feel forced either. I didn’t ask them to describe it for me. They just did. I didn’t prepare them to play Theatre of the Mind because I was planning on the battlemat! What shocked me was that it felt natural not to have a battlemat. You asked last Wed if I preferred using a battlemap, and I said yes, but after only playing the new ruleset once, it has completely convinced me otherwise!

 

[Bayonet]

I brought along a few battlemats and a Ziploc full of those 4E tokens for my first 5E session, simply because I had them on hand. (Went out and bought a bunch of stuff after playing my first few sessions of D&D earlier this summer. Been dying to use them)

The DM made use of them a few times, and others preferred to go ToTM. They seemed to work well at the time.

If I ever DM (for newbs more newbish than me), I'll likely use them. They seem to make it easier to step into the game, and they make combat a lot simpler.

 

[fanboy2000]

Wow [MENTION=25017]Halfling_rogue[/MENTION] that's pretty awesome. I think the biggest advantage a battlemat has is that it can clearly convey a great deal of information. If that information is clearly conveyed verbally or through a smaller diagram, then the battlemat is easily done away with in 5e.

In 4e, it's trivial to reach a point where tactical positioning is so important that a battlement becomes essential for many groups. Certainly, I don't have the ability to keep all of that straight in my head. But in 5th, they've reduced the need for tactical positioning. It's a lot easier for DMs like myself to keep all of that in our head. The elimination of flanking and the reengineering of Attacks of Opportunity go a long way to eliminating the need.

 

[Li Shenron]

I used battlemats in previous editions, as well as TotM. Each has its own pros and cons.

I am going to use a middle ground in tabletop 5e D&D, i.e. I will use minis on a map, but without a grid -> keep track of distances but free positions and directions.