Combat in your game

[MerricB]

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I used to describe almost all my combats verbally, not using miniatures at all.

Then the D&D Miniatures came, and because they were cheap*, durable and portable, I started using them... now almost all of my combats use miniatures.

If I have a combat where it is the party vs. 1 NPC, then I am likely to not use miniatures - especially if I want the NPC to be someone that PCs can interact with verbally. (Witty repartee and all that). However, the majority of combats don't work that way. Especially because of the fireball-happy status of the sorceress in the group...

So, how do the combats run in your game?

(*: cheap compared to most metals, especially considering I can find most of the line usable... and I don't have to paint them!)

Cheers!

 

[Chris Durham]

I mainly use D&D and Chainmail minis in my games. I've found that having a physical representation clears up miscommunication and misunderstanding of my scene description. I'm not sure if this has plagued me in the past due to my poor descriptive skills or my players' poor visualization skills, but that really doesn't matter. Minis help clear everything up.

The real problem I have is battlemats. Drawing an accurate representation of a scene in the duration of the players' attention span can be difficult, especially when the area needs intricate detail. For this reason I'm considering just drawing the rooms out on paper as part of my game prep; at least until I can afford those cool Dwarven Forge 3d walls.

 

[GlassJaw]

Mostly I use minis from board games like Heroquest. I also have a good amount of metal minis and just started getting some D&D minis.

 

[Dogbrain]

Legos are good, Rita, yah.

 

[MerricB]

The real problem I have is battlemats. Drawing an accurate representation of a scene in the duration of the players' attention span can be difficult, especially when the area needs intricate detail. For this reason I'm considering just drawing the rooms out on paper as part of my game prep; at least until I can afford those cool Dwarven Forge 3d walls.

Hehe. I use the D&D Miniatures battlemap, and a few strategically placed pens and/or glass beads in most cases. One of these days I'll get around to getting a better battlemap... probably.

Cheers!

 

[Commonblade]

The mini's really help new players.

We use a battle map that can take wet erase markers and draw everything out. (Looks really cool if you have the black light or glow in the dark kind, especially for dark encounters.) Since a lot of the players in my game are going or just out of school, we have a lot of turnover and constantly try recruiting new players. When new to the game, the battle map makes learning combat all the better.

 

[JonnyReb]

I use mostly paper figures such as SJG Heroes and others.

I *would * use WoTC plastics, if the chowderheads in WoTC's marketing/product division would make the figures available and affordable for RPGers like they said they would at the lines inception, instead of making some chessy WizKids knockoff with random packs (quick! how many wolves do you have compared to how many you *need*...... yeah, me too) and making iconic creatures rares (umber hulks.. have you priced umber hulks in the after market?).

At least Wizkids makes most of their figures in various scaled levels so that the common variety of creatures is generally easy to find and cheap to buy in the after market.

I sold a 27 year metal collection in anticipation of the WoTC line, and have regretted that desicion every day since.

Not that I'm bitter.........

 

[Wombat]

The group finds that combat slows way down with the minis. Of course we have also stripped down the combat rules to make them run faster. We prefer the chaos of combat (for good and for ill) to running a tactical miniatures game.

So, nope, no minis, counters, or battleboards.

 

[Sir Elton]

Miniatures are the bane of imaginative gaming.

I wouldn't mind them if I were playing a pure, unadulterated Diablo II rpg, but I'm not. I'm playing in the Savage Lands.

 

[Herpes Cineplex]

Everything's verbal in our group, with an occasional Cheesy GM Map(TM) scrawled on a piece of paper or on a whiteboard.

There are a lot of reasons for this. No one wants to buy a battlemat or miniatures, for one thing. No one wants to have to draw an area to scale on a battlemat. Most of us don't want to sit at a table, which you almost have to do if you want everyone to be able to see and use miniatures easily. Most of us don't care enough about combat to want to focus that heavily on the tiny tactical details. Most of us are okay with the occasional garbled impression in combat, and we already have ways of minimizing that kind of confusion and straightening things out again. We don't use a map and minis for any other game, so it feels weird to do it for D&D. Most of us aren't interested in playing movement and the like as a boardgame (counting squares of distance and so on). And lots of other little reasons, but you get the idea.


I remember the guys I played with in high school using miniatures for fights, though, and it was kind of a "meh" experience. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't exactly an enormous and striking improvement on the way my current group handles it. Really, going back to minis just doesn't seem worth my time.

Hell, if someone offered me a mat and a full set of miniatures for free, I'd probably still say "no thanks," because I can't really see myself ever having a use for them.

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