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Message: <blockquote data-quote="halfling rogue" data-source="post: 6383629" data-attributes="member: 6779182">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".I wrote about our full experience <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?362432-5e-Game-Report-Takeaways-and-Exceeded-Expectations" target="_blank">here</a>, 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!</blockquote>

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