D&D 5E Battlemats?

[aramis erak]

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.

Switching to? No. Already using. Gave up on minis years ago. When I have to, I use the pogs that came with my T&T 7.0 box.

 

[fanboy2000]

When I have to, I use the pogs that came with my T&T 7.0 box.

So are the boss monsters slammers?



I'm very, very, sorry.

 

[aramis erak]

So are the boss monsters slammers?

If they can get their hands on you....

I'm very, very, sorry.

Don't be... a good play on words is its own reward. Keep trying...

I'll say that the character pogs by Fiery Dragon are actually kinda nifty. And they made them first for D&D 3E... I only got them because I bought T&T 7 and they were included; I used them because they're useful.

And they are sold out except for the current set.

They also have them available electronically... but that's kind of missing the point...

 

[dd.stevenson]

That would be a good poll, I think. Honestly, I don't know enough about the different visual aids out there to make a poll like that. That said, I've used battlemats, various tiles made by WotC, and many, many poster maps from the miniatures game.

The options I'm aware of are:

• Gridded, mini-ready battle mat
• Ungridded, scale map suitable for measuring distances with a string or ruler
• Rough sketch or minis on the bare table top, showing relative positioning but not really suited for measuring exact distances
• Player drawn maps, which may or may not reflect what the DM actually described

Obviously there are variations, and I expect that in reality a lot of groups mix and match.

 

[JWO]

Anything more than about 3 or 4 enemies and I start to lose track of what's going on so I pretty much always have to use a gridded map. I like the idea of playing without but I don't think it's feasible really.

I know a lot of people say that you lose immersion playing with minis but I find it's worse without when I have to ask the players to remind me which enemy they were fighting and whether they were already wounded or not!

 

[msDarkSage]

I only use them for bigger battles, like 5+ enemies. Or when I want to draw how terrain looks like and how can players move around.

 

[Queer Venger]

I dont use mini's for every encounter, but when I do, I use a Battlemat.

I also use it in combo with Dungeon Tiles.

 

[Doc_Klueless]

And then I got my Geek Chic table.

Aaaand there was much jealousy and covetousness...

I want to get one. I can afford financially to get one. But it takes soooo long to get it!

(Which one did you get, if you don't mind me asking?)

 

[Thaumaturge]

Aaaand there was much jealousy and covetousness...

I want to get one. I can afford financially to get one. But it takes soooo long to get it!

(Which one did you get, if you don't mind me asking?)

I love to talk about my table, thanks for asking.

It takes a while, yeah. It took us almost exactly a year (placed our order at Gen Con 2013, got it the week after Gen Con 2014) to get ours, and that was with us getting bumped up in the queue by 3 months (I don't know the reason). Much patience is required, padawan.

We got an emissary with many of the bells and whistles. But it seems very worth it (cognitive dissonance being what it is, of course it seems worth it). It's a wonderful table. Even my non-gaming friends are pretty enthusiastic about it as a dining room table. And then I can take off the leaves and pull out the drawers and we have a kick tail gaming setup.

I've got a couple of small children. They have their own drawer where they keep their Hero Kids characters and minis, too, which is nice. It's also good to have dice and everything all easily put up at the end of each session.

But, man, you have to be emotionally prepared for the wait. And the hardest part is the last week or two.

To loop back around to the topic, I'd been heavily into minis play (so heavily that I coveted a geek chic table for years). Then with the playtest, I really enjoyed gridless/mini-less combat. With the table here, and the full rules out, though, I am certainly going to find excuses to take the leaves out and set up a combat.

The real problem I'm running into is that 5e combat is so fast setting up a nice looking encounter with Dwarven Forge tiles and everything often takes much longer than the combat itself. I figure I'll use theater of the mind for the simple stuff, wet erase markers for the more interesting combats, and Dwarven Forge for the epic conclusions. But we'll see.

Thaumaturge.

 

[DMZ2112]

I had an unusual experience last night while running Lost Mine of Phandelver. Two young guys came up toward the end of the session and started asking questions about what we were playing. It was clear from their comments that they had some experience with D&D4, and at one point one of them asked, "So you don't use miniatures and a mat? How do you keep track of everything?"

I pointed to my head, and to the heads of a few of my players, and he let out a long sigh. I steeled myself to defend Theater of the Mind, and he just said, "Oh, man, that is so much better."

"Yeah," his friend said, "that is a much better way to do it."