Flipping the Table: Did Removing Miniatures Save D&D?

Dungeons & Dragons is doing better than ever, thanks to a wave of nostalgia-fueled shows like Stranger Things and the Old School Renaissance, the rise of actual play video streams, and a broader player base that includes women. The reasons for this vary, but one possibility is that D&D no longer requires miniatures. Did it ever?

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

When Vivian Kane at TheMarySue interviewed lead rules designer for D&D, Jeremy Crawford, about the increased popularity of D&D, here’s what he had to say:

It’s a really simple thing, but in 5th, that decision to not require miniatures was huge. Us doing that suddenly basically unlocked everyone from the dining room table and, in many ways, made it possible for the boom in streaming that we’re seeing now.

In short, Crawford positioned miniatures as something of a barrier of entry to getting into playing D&D. But when exactly did miniatures become a requirement?

D&D Was a Miniatures Game First (or Was It?)​

Co-cocreator of D&D Gary Gygax labeled the original boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons as “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” Gygax was a wargamer himself, which used miniature games to wage tabletop battles. His target audience for D&D were these wargamers, and so use of miniatures – leveraging Chainmail, a supplement he created for miniature wargaming – was assumed. Miniature wargaming was more than a little daunting for a new player to join. Jon Peterson explains in Playing at the World:

Whether fought on a sand table, a floor or a yard outdoors, miniature wargames eschewed boards and the resulting ease of quantifying movements between squares (or hexagons) in favor of irregular scale-model terrain and rulers to measure movement distance. Various sorts of toy soldiers— traditionally made of wood, lead or tin, but by the mid-twentieth century constructed from a variety of alloys and composites— peopled these diminutive landscapes, in various attitudes of assault and movement. While Avalon Hill sold everything you needed to play their board wargames in a handy box, miniature wargamers had the responsibility and the freedom to provide all of the components of a game: maps, game pieces and the system. Consider that even the most complicated boardgame is easily retrieved from a shelf or closet, its board unfolded and lain across a table top, its pieces sorted and arranged in a starting configuration, all within a span of some minutes— in a pinch the game could be stowed away in seconds. Not so for the miniature wargamer. Weeks might be spent in constructing the battleground alone, in which trees, manmade structures, gravel roads and so on are often selected for maximum verisimilitude. Researching a historical battle or period to determine the lay of the land, as well as the positions and equipment of the combatants, is a task which can exhaust any investment of time and energy. Determining how to model the effects of various weapons, or the relative movement rates of different vehicles, requires similar diligent investigations, especially to prevent an imbalanced and unfair game. Wargaming with miniatures consequently is not something undertaken lightly.

D&D offered human-scale combat, something that made the precision required for miniature wargaming much less of a barrier. Indeed, many of the monsters we know today were actually dollar store toys converted for that purpose. It’s clear that accurately representing fantasy on the battlefield was not a primary concern for Gygax. Peterson goes into further detail on that claim:

Despite the proclamation on the cover of Dungeons & Dragons that it is “playable with paper and pencil and miniature figures,” the role of miniature figures in Dungeons & Dragons is downplayed throughout the text. Even in the foreword, Gygax confesses that “in fact you will not even need miniature figures,” albeit he tacks onto this “although their occasional employment is recommended for real spectacle when battles are fought.” These spectacular battles defer entirely to the Chainmail rules, and thus there is no further mention of miniatures in any of the three books of Dungeons & Dragons other than a reiteration of the assertion that their use is not required. The presence of the term “miniature figures” on the cover of the woodgrain box is, consequently, a tad misleading.

James Maliszewski states that this trend continued through Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:

Even so, it's worth noting that, despite the game's subtitle, miniature figures are not listed under D&D's "recommended equipment," while "Imagination" and "1 Patient Referee" are! Elsewhere, it is stated that "miniature figures can be added if the players have them available and so desire, but miniatures are not required, only esthetically pleasing." The rulebook goes on to state that "varied and brightly painted miniature figures" add "eye-appeal." The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though published five years later in 1979, evinces essentially the same attitude, saying "Miniature figures used to represent characters and monsters add color and life to the game. They also make the task of refereeing action, particularly combat, easier too!"

Gygax himself confirmed that miniatures weren’t required in a Q&A session on ENWorld:

I don't usually employ miniatures in my RPG play. We ceased that when we moved from CHAINMAIL Fantasy to D&D. I have nothing against the use of miniatures, but they are generally impractical for long and free-wheeling campaign play where the scene and opponents can vary wildly in the course of but an hour. The GW folks use them a lot, but they are fighting set-piece battles as is usual with miniatures gaming. I don't believe that fantasy miniatures are good or bad for FRPGs in general. If the GM sets up gaming sessions based on their use, the resulting play is great from my standpoint. It is mainly a matter of having the painted figures and a big tabletop to play on.

So if the game didn’t actually require miniatures and Gygax didn’t use them, where did the idea of miniatures as a requirement happen? For that, we have to look to later editions.

Pleading the Fifth​

Jennifer Grouling Cover explains the complicated relationship gamers had with miniatures &D in The Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games:

The lack of a visual element may make spatial immersion more difficult to achieve in D&D than in more visually oriented games; however, this type of immersion is still important to the game. Without the visual component to TRPGs, players may have difficulty picturing the exact setting that the DM lays out. Wizards of the Coast's market survey shows that in 2000, 56 percent of gaming groups used miniatures to solve this dilemma…Because D& D combat rules often offer suggestions as to what you can or cannot do at certain distances, these battle maps help players visualize the scene and decide on their actions…Even though some gamers may get more interested in the visual representation of space by painting and designing scenery such as miniature castles, these tools exist more for showing spatial relationships than for immersing players visually.

In essence, Third Edition rules that involved distances seemed to encourage grid-based combat and miniature use. But the rise of Fourth Edition formalized grid-based combat, which in turn required some sort of miniature representation. Joshua Aslan Smith summed it up on StackRPGExchange:

The whole of 4th edition ruleset by and large is devoted to the balance and intricacies of tactical, grid-based combat. There are exceptions, such as rules for skill challenges and other Role Play aspects of the game (vs. roll play). To both maximize the benefits of 4th edition and actually run it correctly you need to run combats on a grid of 1" squares. Every single player attack and ability is based around this precept.

This meant players were looking at the table instead of each other, as per Crawford’s comment:

Part of that is possible because you can now play D&D and look at people’s faces. It’s people looking at each other, laughing together, storytelling together, and that’s really what we were striving for.

It wasn’t until Fifth Edition that “theater of the mind” play was reintroduced, where grids, miniatures, and terrain are unnecessary. This style of play never truly went away, but had the least emphasis and support in Fourth Edition.

Did the removal of miniatures as a requirement truly allow D&D to flourish online? Charlie Hall on Polygon explains that the ingredients for D&D to be fun to watch as well as to play have always been there:

Turns out, the latest edition of Dungeons & Dragons was designed to be extremely light and easy to play. Several Polygon staff have spent time with the system, and in our experience it's been a breeze to teach, even to newbies. That's because D&D's 5th edition is all about giving control back to the Dungeon Master. If you want to play a game of D&D that doesn't require a map, that is all theater of the mind, you can do that with Skype. Or with Curse. Or with Google Hangout. Or with Facetime. Basically, if you can hear the voice of another human being you can play D&D. You don't even need dice. That's because Dungeons & Dragons, and other role-playing games that came after it, are all about storytelling. The rules are a fun way to arbitrate disputes, the maps and miniatures are awful pretty and the books are filled with amazing art and delicious lore. But Wizards of the Coast just wants you to play, that's why the latest version of the starter rules is available for free.

D&D’s always been about telling a good story. The difference is that now that our attention – and the camera or microphone – can be focused on each other instead of the table.

“What 5th edition has done the best,” according to game designer Kate Welch, “is that idea of it being the theatre of the mind and the imagination, and to put the emphasis on the story and the world that is being created by the players.” That’s the kind of “drama people want to see,” both in their own adventures and on their screens.

If the numbers are any indication, that makes D&D a lot more fun to watch.

 

[pemerton]

Yes true, but the actual PHB (not some D&D gimmick accessories) presented the powers in card blocks. Presentation matters a lot.

The 1st ed AD&D had spells presented with "data sections" then descriptions. Adding a bit of colour to that doesn't, to me, seem to make it a card block.

refresh rates weren't standardized the same across all classes for all powers, previously they weren't necessary for all classes to play the game without constantly referencing the book

The AEDU was hard coded into the system for EVERY class.

Most of this seems to be about how the game handles resource management (which, as far as hp are concerned, had always been a thing for every class). But doesn't seem to me to be particularly evocative of "cool down" rates.

(And in AD&D you had to reference the book for every class if you wanted to look up spells, thief ability chances, or - for fighters in particular - weapon vs armour charts. To the extent that people copied all this down onto their PCs sheets, likewise for 4e PCs.)

The cards were previously for spells and magic items... not class abilities

Spells are class abilities!

they weren't part of an official character builder

The official character builder wasn't part of the PHB, was it? (I thought that was 3E at launch.) But in any event I'm not sure how that is relevant. Do cards become more MMO-ish if they're in an official character builder rather than an official supplement?

Each of these factors along with others I haven't mentioned made them both more prevalent in use and gave the mechanics a more artificial/mechanical feel in play for many.

And this connects to the game being a card game/MMO/CRPG how?

I know that a lot of people complained about the 4e resource recovery framework, because in D&D only spell casters and 3E barbarians have daily recovery abilities. But I don't see how this remotely relates to being an MMO.

Daily refresh rates also benefit from being very easy to conceptualize and grasp - those activities apparently tire the wielder out, sleep refreshes. Very easy to see how the abstraction relates to a concept of reality.

But stuff that tires you out a bit less, and takes only a short rest to recover, is not easy to relate to reality? Yet short rests seem to be widely accepted in 5e. So I don't really follow this.

I like some resource management, I like particularly types of resource management, I didn't like 4e's structure for powers and found it overbore any fun I got out of the game.

Which is, again, a complaint about a resource management structure.

But AEDU refresh rates, of course, weren't the only aspects of the 4e structure that invoked MMORGs to some of us. The way powers were structured and picked up, the way PC roles were reflected by mechanics, they all reminded me of City of Heroes in particular (not WoW which I have almost no experience with).

You and other 4e fans didn't see the connection - fine. I don't really care that you didn't - but I did. What always galled me (and still does in this thread) was attempts by 4e fans to 'disprove' the connections and connotations I was seeing.

I don't dispute that it reminded you of City of Heroes. It reminded someone else of WOW. It reminded me of HeroWars/Quest (uniform PC build and resolution structures that bind the PC to a cosmological drama about to explode) and Moldvay Basic (simple, crisp effect descriptions which leave most of the adjudication as a table matter rather than being spelled out in needless and constraining detail).

Given the number of people who have tried to "disprove" the resemblance of 4e to Moldvay Basic, I don't think I'm doing too much harm expressing my inability to see any close resemblance to a MMO.

the explicit shift to more narrative-oriented time

Classic D&D (oiginal D&D, 1st ed AD&D, B/X, maybe even 2nd ed AD&D?) used the notion of a "turn". That is, one unit of party action! In the fiction, it correlates to 10 minutes.

4e replaces thar with the notion of an "encounter". That is, one unit of party drama. In the fiction, it correlates to 5 minutes.

This is one of those things that made me think of Moldvay Basic. I thought MMOs used real seconds of time, not units of in-fiction time given labels that reflect their significance to the activity of gameplay.

 

[aramis erak]

So in RM, a roll to hit is literally that - a roll to see if weapon contacts body. There is a chart that reflects different sorts of armour, which encoude the principle (true in the fiction, and at least purportedly grounded ina real-life principle) that heavier armour makes it harder to dodge blows, but will reduce the damage they inflict.

In RQ a roll to hit is slightly different - it is a roll to see if an attack forces the opponent to parry or dodge to avoid being struck. If the parry or dodge check then fails, the blow does strike. There is then a further mechanical process to determine if armour absorbs/deflects the blow.

Rolemaster uses 10 second combat rounds... and does NOT define a result doing damage as a single hit, either. The term given for damage is "concussion hits" - which implies multiple hits. The combination of time, the ability to shuffle OB into DB, and the term hits being used for damage, all imply it's not one attack=1swing.

Now, GURPS, a roll to hit is in fact a single swing during a 1 second combat round, and the target gets a chance to parry

 

[Imaro]

Spells are class abilities!

Yes but until 4e not all classes cast spells... and yes since you are being purposefully obtuse I'm being just as obtuse in labeling all powers spells in 4e...

The official character builder wasn't part of the PHB, was it? (I thought that was 3E at launch.) But in any event I'm not sure how that is relevant. Do cards become more MMO-ish if they're in an official character builder rather than an official supplement?

Why does whether it was part of the PHB matter or not? When someone created a character sheet with WotC official tool for doing such... it created cards for powers.

And this connects to the game being a card game/MMO/CRPG how?

Because cooldowns mimic the daily/encounter/at-will nature of powers and card games abilities are very precise mechanical bits with a spattering of fiction on them ... just like the powers in 4e. This was all stated and explained numerous times earlier in the thread. You may not agree but asking it over and over again won't change the answer.

 

[Imaro]

Most of this seems to be about how the game handles resource management (which, as far as hp are concerned, had always been a thing for every class). But doesn't seem to me to be particularly evocative of "cool down" rates.

How is a tiered standardized time frame to regain powers for every class not evocative of a cool down rate in say WoW?


From WOWpedia

The term cooldown is defined as a period of wait time before a spell, ability, or item power can be used after a prior spell, ability, or item power. Often referred to by the pseudo-acronym "CD".

'Cooldown' may refer to:

-The period of time after using a spell, ability or item before it can be used again. Many powerful spells and abilities have lengthy cooldowns, encouraging players to exercise forethought in choosing the best moment to use them. Some abilities have no cooldown and can therefore be used as often as desired (provided any other requirements are met).

-The period of time after using almost any spell or ability in which it is not possible to use any other spell or ability. This is known as the global cooldown, and prevents players from using several abilities at once, instead requiring them to be used one at a time (often as part of a 'rotation'). Most abilities cause and are affected by the global cooldown, but some are not - see the list below.

-An ability with a lengthy cooldown; for example, Save your cooldowns for boss fights.


Again it's not that 4e was the only edition who used mechanics reminiscent of cooldowns it was how standardized/rigid and prevalent they now were in every class.

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

But AEDU refresh rates, of course, weren't the only aspects of the 4e structure that invoked MMORGs to some of us. The way powers were structured and picked up, the way PC roles were reflected by mechanics, they all reminded me of City of Heroes in particular (not WoW which I have almost no experience with).

You and other 4e fans didn't see the connection - fine. I don't really care that you didn't - but I did. What always galled me (and still does in this thread) was attempts by 4e fans to 'disprove' the connections and connotations I was seeing.

Thank you! City of Heroes/Villains, which is what I was playing back when, was exactly what I thought of when I read 4e and talk of strikers, controllers, tanks, etc. It was using the exact same terminology as I was getting in that game. Then reading the powers and such the main thing in my head was this is a MMO on the tabletop. And it turned me off right away right or wrong.

 

[billd91]

Thank you! City of Heroes/Villains, which is what I was playing back when, was exactly what I thought of when I read 4e and talk of strikers, controllers, tanks, etc. It was using the exact same terminology as I was getting in that game. Then reading the powers and such the main thing in my head was this is a MMO on the tabletop. And it turned me off right away right or wrong.

A friend of mine was dallying with making a tabletop version of City of Heroes back in about 2006 - before 4e published - and I had to do a double-take when 4e came out because of some of the similarities of the powers and roles. If's even funnier looking at the fly power in CoH and flying spells of 4e. Both the 4e wizard and the CoH flyer get what is essentially a Hover power at 6th level (levitate in 4e). True flight doesn't come until 14th level in CoH, 16th in 4e. Group or mass flight comes at level 20 for CoH, 22 for 4e.

So, yeah, 4e gave of a very strong CoH vibe for me.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I haven't played much 5E yet, but I will say the over-emphasis on grids and miniatures were definitely a contributor to me seeking alternatives for D&D style play. I have never been much of a miniature person. But they felt increasingly important and central to the game over from 3E to 4E. So it wouldn't surprise me if this helped draw some people back, and bring some new people in.

 

[Tony Vargas]

"Purist for system" simulationism. That's not the only mode of simulationism that Ron Edwards discusses.

That begs the question, does Mr. Edwards even know what a 'definition' /is/, because he seems wholly unable to construct one, or at least work himself up to the point he's willing to spit one out...

OK, waitaminit:

Simulationist: Purists for System: ...FUDGE...BRP...GURPS...the Hero System...d20

So, basically, core & universal systems, regardless of design philosophy, balance, functionality, or level of complexity?

...oh, here's a real gem...

we need to distinguish between Simulationist elements vs. coherent design - the former have certainly been widespread, but mainly in incoherent games, with AD&D and Vampire as the chief examples.

So, isn't Incoherence like hypocrisy is for a post-modern critic: the only sin left that can be decried?
Is it a coincidence that the chief examples of incoherence were representatives of the two most-dominant RPGs of 90s? D&D and it's challenger at the time, Storyteller?

While, technically, I do have to agree that AD&D and Vampire were both incoherent, I do so only in the natural-language sense.
In the same sense, so is Mr. Edwards.

But 3E adapting some of the tropes of those games, and emulating some aspects of their mechanics in some outposts of resolution (eg grappling, disarming, tripping), has resulted in a conception of D&D play as simulationist play. (Maybe in your experience this predates 3E? I can't rule that out, but I don't think I personally encountered it.)

Yes, I've seen the sort of 'reverse simulation' I'm talking about, going, prettymuch, all the way back (to 1980, I suppose). Seeing it so vigorously put forth as the one true way had to wait for the edition war, though.

The weird thing about this, for me, is that spell cards, magic item cards, etc, existed for AD&D. And AD&D also had abilities with precise "refresh rates": hit points, spell recovery, lay on hands, etc..

And in AD&D you had to reference the book for every class if you wanted to look up spells, thief ability chances, or - for fighters in particular - weapon vs armour charts. To the extent that people copied all this down onto their PCs sheets, likewise for 4e PCs.

Spells are class abilities!

The official character builder wasn't part of the PHB, was it? (I thought that was 3E at launch.) But in any event I'm not sure how that is relevant. Do cards become more MMO-ish if they're in an official character builder rather than an official supplement?

I know that a lot of people complained about the 4e resource recovery framework, because in D&D only spell casters and 3E barbarians have daily recovery abilities.

But stuff that tires you out a bit less, and takes only a short rest to recover, is not easy to relate to reality? Yet short rests seem to be widely accepted in 5e. So I don't really follow this...

Classic D&D (oiginal D&D, 1st ed AD&D, B/X, maybe even 2nd ed AD&D?) used the notion of a "turn". That is, one unit of party action! In the fiction, it correlates to 10 minutes.
4e replaces thar with the notion of an "encounter". That is, one unit of party drama. In the fiction, it correlates to 5 minutes.

Yes, there are many parallels to be found, in other editions, to specific things people actually complained about in 4e.

When someone expresses dissatisfaction with a new version of an old product, and cites things that haven't /really/ changed as 'differences' to justify that dissatisfaction, and insists on changing things back across the board, rather than amending the specific items being complained about, chances are, there's something else that /has/ changed that is at the root of the problem. But, for whatever reason, they don't feel comfortable bringing it up. Instead, to get back what is actually desired, we must go through this charade of implausible complaints, nostalgia, factual misstatements back-peddled to meaningless subjective claims, recriminations, accusations, name-calling, etc... all to get the clock rolled back and restore the actual changes, actually at issue, but which are, for whatever reason, unspeakable.

That charade is over, D&D has been restored.

You can probably work out for yourself what changed, and changed back, and thus what it was really all about, for yourself, without poking anyone on the internet anymore. You've obviously got 4e down, you just need to parse 5e's natural language (good luck with that) for the things it changed /back/.

 

[Lanefan]

(And in AD&D you had to reference the book for every class if you wanted to look up spells, thief ability chances, or - for fighters in particular - weapon vs armour charts. To the extent that people copied all this down onto their PCs sheets, likewise for 4e PCs.)

Ditto for feats etc. in 3e / 5e.

In all versions of the game you were kind of expected, as part of being a useful player, to note your character's abilities on its character sheet...with one exception: a typical spellcaster would soon enough have enough spells, some with quite lengthy write-ups, to force you to have handy the book(s) containing those write-ups.

More recently, it's now possible to put the spells online so everyone at the table can look 'em up all at once without having to argue over who gets the book next: a vast improvement!

As for fighters, remember in 1e you'd only be proficient with 4 or 5 individual weapons, gaining another every so many levels; so writing out the space-speed-etc. details for each proficient weapon wasn't as big a headache as you might think.

Spells are class abilities!

Er...no. Spellcasting is a class ability: the ability to cast (arcane or divine, by class) spells.

I know that a lot of people complained about the 4e resource recovery framework, because in D&D only spell casters and 3E barbarians have daily recovery abilities. But I don't see how this remotely relates to being an MMO.

For my part, the argument I had wasn't the dailies but the "encounter" reset; mostly because trying to define exactly what constituted an encounter would in many instances be like trying to nail a cloud to a tree. If they wanted a short duration for stuff then they should have given it an actual duration, measured in actual game-based units of time like rounds or minutes...

Classic D&D (oiginal D&D, 1st ed AD&D, B/X, maybe even 2nd ed AD&D?) used the notion of a "turn". That is, one unit of party action! In the fiction, it correlates to 10 minutes.

...or turns... (which I've always thought are a needless complication just for the sake of complication - if something takes ten minutes I'm quite capable of saying it takes ten minutes)

4e replaces thar with the notion of an "encounter". That is, one unit of party drama. In the fiction, it correlates to 5 minutes.

...or drama units, of which it seems there's two to a turn.

"Sorry, your drama quota has been exceeded: you must wait 143 seconds before attempting further drama."

But stuff that tires you out a bit less, and takes only a short rest to recover, is not easy to relate to reality? Yet short rests seem to be widely accepted in 5e.

Given the number of complaints I see about 'em on these boards, I'll not be quite so quick to leap to this conclusion...

Lan-"now wondering if there's a way to implement 'drama units' as a measure of time in my game"-efan

 

[Shasarak]

And what is the occurrence?

There are no serious injuries (we can tell that from how it heals and how it doesn't impede; plus the magic rules tell us that if anything got chopped off we'd need regenerate, nor cure X wounds, to heal it).

What damage resistance amounts to is more like When fire is being used, tieflings are able to take it better than ordinary people or If you're wearing adamantine armour, then mundane weaponry is less of a threat to you.

I guess you are right that the game has changed with the new Video Gamer mentality so that you no longer have any serious injuries. In ADnD however that was not the case and if you were knocked into negative hps you required weeks to recover.

So yes if 5e is your basis of looking at HPs, AC etc I can see how you may get the impression that they correspond to nothing in particular.