Combat positioning in D&D (all editions) and other games

[Irda Ranger]

I don't have my older books with me, but I'm pretty sure you're dead wrong in this statement. Older editions included rules for use of miniatures.

You could be right, but I had whole sections of the AD&D 2E DMG and PHB memorized and I don't recall them, so if there was mini support it must have been pretty thin.

No one I knew was using those when we were teens or younger.

No one I knew either. The guys I knew who painted minis basically just sat them on the table next to their character sheets so we knew what their PC was supposed to look like.

As someone has for a sig, the early Basic rules actually used as advertising copy/selling point the fact that "This game requires no board because the action takes place in your imagination." That was in large part the defining and distinguishing characteristic of an RPG circa 1980, and precisely what set it apart from other games as really unique.

This is exactly what I'm getting at. Why did they think that? Every edition of D&D clearly stated that missile weapons and spells had a certain range, Fireballs were so big, you could charge for so far, etc. The claim that D&D doesn't need a board is a bit like saying that chess doesn't need a board because it's possible to simply visualize mentally where the pieces are. Ok, I guess, but clearly the game assumes a board - it's merely a question of whether it's in your head or on the table.

I hope everyone understands that I understand the strengths of weaknesses of using a board vs. not using one, but I think it's pretty clear that having a battlement is a great way to communicate and record spatial (and other) information between PCs and DMs. It's much less confusing and subject to errors in communication or understanding than a purely verbal communications.

I think you overlooked that in theory, the DM should be describing situations adequately in advance to avoid confusion.

I didn't overlook it. I just assumed that everyone here has been playing D&D long enough to know that in practice it doesn't work like that. To entirely avoid confusion (a) I'd have to describe a room in such detail that it would take at least a minute or two every time the PCs went through a door, and (b) my players would have to never lapse in their attention or misunderstand anything I say.

(a) is time consuming and (b) is asking the impossible.

 

[Fenes]

I didn't overlook it. I just assumed that everyone here has been playing D&D long enough to know that in practice it doesn't work like that. To entirely avoid confusion (a) I'd have to describe a room in such detail that it would take at least a minute or two every time the PCs went through a door, and (b) my players would have to never lapse in their attention or misunderstand anything I say.

(a) is time consuming and (b) is asking the impossible.

If you just rely on battlemaps for descriptions you run the risk of limiting your players' choices to what's on those maps - which is usually far less than what should be there. Chandeliers, ropes, chairs, tables, other furniture, curtains, anything you can use for interesting stunts risks to be forgotten when people focus on squares and grids on a map.

 

[Umbran]

You could be right, but I had whole sections of the AD&D 2E DMG and PHB memorized and I don't recall them, so if there was mini support it must have been pretty thin.

Past editions didn't have terribly complex or nuanced rules for position and move-based effects. It just didn't matter exactly where you were standing each and every moment. So, you could use the minis, but it was easy enough to abstract them away into narrative. For many of us, the amount of pain resulting from imprecise narrative was outweighed the pain caused by having to set up maps and minis, so we often skipped the minis.

4e makes that rather more difficult - many character powers are highly dependent on the details, making it harder to abstract this away into narrative and still remain fair to the players. I expect that generally abstracting would cause more pain than using the minis in the 4e rules.

Your phrasing above is a little ambiguous, so I think I'll add: Minis are a tool, a means to an end. The game does not need to support minis, though perhaps minis can be used to support the game.

 

[Obryn]

You could be right, but I had whole sections of the AD&D 2E DMG and PHB memorized and I don't recall them, so if there was mini support it must have been pretty thin.

It's much more prevalent in 1e than in 2e. I think about the only carryover was that 2e still measured everything in inches.

-O

 

[Corathon]

I have run AD&D 1st edition for 28+ years - and I've used a hex map for almost all of that time. There are rules about positioning in the 1E DMG.

Obviously, I do believe that a hex map improves the game.

 

[Delta]

This is exactly what I'm getting at. Why did they think that? Every edition of D&D clearly stated that missile weapons and spells had a certain range, Fireballs were so big, you could charge for so far, etc. The claim that D&D doesn't need a board is a bit like saying that chess doesn't need a board because it's possible to simply visualize mentally where the pieces are. Ok, I guess, but clearly the game assumes a board - it's merely a question of whether it's in your head or on the table.

No-board has the advantages of being (a) quicker, (b) cheaper, (c) easier to get into.

You should read the examples of play in Basic/1E. It seemed to work okay there. At the time, reusable battlemaps and cheap minis were not on the market, so I suppose you could say that such accoutrements were simply not available yet.

Turn it around and you have "Clearly the game assumes you're imagining things in your head - it's merely a question of whether there's a board on the table to help you out." That's the tradition a lot of us were happy with for 20+ years.

 

[mmadsen]

Battle mats and miniatures have been around for a long time. I know we had primitive battle mats we made ourselves, with plastic tacked over a drafting board -- we wrote on it with grease pencils -- but I think we lost interest when we realized how little any of it mattered. It's not like precise positions mattered much.

Now, what makes the modern game arguably a "board game" isn't so much that there's a board, but that the tactics for winning a battle depend more on artifacts of the game board -- counting squares, etc. -- and less on what's being represented by the map and pieces.

 

[Staffan]

It's much more prevalent in 1e than in 2e. I think about the only carryover was that 2e still measured everything in inches.

No, it didn't. Some things were measured in "tens of yards" (notably missile weapon ranges and movement rates), but the only things that used the term "inches" were those that referred to actual inches.

Notably, spells had their ranges described in yards and areas in feet.

 

[RFisher]

The same year I got my first Basic Set (c. 1981) I also got boxes of official AD&D miniatures by Grenadier.

That said, I never saw minis used in an RPG until I played GURPS c. 1991.

I don’t know why my groups have never had the problems without minis that other groups seem to have. Since it works fine for us without minis, I don’t have much incentive to break at the battle mat. I have to think that a particular combat is really going to benefit somehow from it to bother.

Even when (as DM) I do use a battle mat, I only use it as a visual aid. I run combat fluidly rather than discretely like chess or 3e.

 

[billd91]

I'd say that some kind of battle map is generally helpful. The first time I played with one was way back in the early 1980s at boy scout camp. We'd have people playing D&D in a big tent a long time after dinner and during other free times.
But for a long time, a battle map was an optional part of the game. Any game really. And even when we used chits for relative positions, like the ones that came with V&V supplements and adventures, we'd just put them out on an otherwise featureless table and roughly describe the location.
The way I see it, they can both help and hinder. They help everyone get on the same page as far as visualizing the action, layout, and relative positioning of everybody. Yet they can also limit what you can do. In the absence of a map, unless the DM were particularly rigid, you could often help define the location. In Cyberpunk, where hard cover is always a good thing, you might tell the GM that you're diving behind whatever cover is around and, even if he hadn't described something, chances are he'd include something to allow you to do it. With a battle map, if it's not already on the map, it's pretty much not going to be there. So it can act to constrain what is possible.