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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4060481" data-attributes="member: 4937">You are going to be really disappointed then.Of the existing editions, I agree.  I've long made various minor complaints against the trend toward requiring minatures to be a part of the game.  One of the things about the 4E commercial looking at the history of the game that rings so untrue, is that the players of the first edition of the game are using makeshift minatures to precisely track where thier characters were with respect to the monster.  I can't imagine many groups thought it necessary.  While I did know groups with minatures for props, it was mostly because the DM really enjoyed painting minatures.  I didn't use a minature in play until 3e. But from everything I can tell about 4e, the requirement to use minatures is going to be even stronger in 4e than 3e.  We don't have to speculate deeply about why that is to be.  WotC is now in the business of making minatures, so publishing a game the depreciates the value of minatures is not in the corporate interest.Err... no.  That doesn't follow.  I'm not sure that 'essential' means what you think it means.  There are quite a few elements of essential DDM still missing.   I'm not sure that 'epitomy' means what you think it does.  I would think that DDM is the epitomy of adversarial tactical skirmish play, and I would imagine that 4E is going to be more compatible with DDM than 3E was.  For example, one very good reason for streamlining a monster in the RPG rules is to make its stat block more closely match its DDM stat block.  One of the explicit and implicit goals of 4E design is to use the same rules set for PnP, minatures, and electronic play.UPDATE: It's also worth noting that as 3E evolved, it became more and more of a tactical skirmish game over time rather than less.  In particular, by late 3.X, the layout of encounters in official WotC modules was increasingly looking like the layout of encounters in a tactical skirmish game.  If you look at the encounter format of something like 'Expedition to Castle Ravenloft', it looks very much like scenarios from a minatures book.  What we are being told about 4E, is that these sorts of innovations in late 3.X are previews of 4E.  So what we have in 4E is a game more explicitly a tactical skirmish game with possibly some story tacked on than ever before.UPDATE 2: One of the things that everyone agrees about 4E is that it encourages less 'static' and more 'dynamic' combat.  From the 4E playtest reports, one of the things that we can gather that they mean by that is that alot of the 4E abilities include pushing back or moving the target of the attack in some way.  In many cases it seems to be the primary purpose of the attack.  On one level, that's kinda exciting.  But if your style of play involves not using minatures, you don't want to hear too many examples of this because one of the reasons that very few D&D abilities over its history have involved moving around the target of the attack is that such abilities don't really facillitate tracking the location of combatants abstractly.  If you want to make pushing someone 5' in some direction really relevant, you really need to precisely track everyone's location and that means at some point using minatures.</blockquote>

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