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.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

There is always a tendency to want to increase the complexity of rules to make them more realistic. I've been guilty of that myself and have always backed off to a simple model because as stated above, the aim is fun.

The real trick is finding a sweet spot so that the secondary reality of the game isn't jarring to the participants. What different people will find jarring is, of course, up for debate. For example, people I play with seem to generally have a hard time with frequent character resurrection and raising of the dead. We want something like that to be very rare/special, not a matter for a fairly trivial spell. Thus we tend to have a gentleman's agreement that such things are either highly unusual or simply don't exist in our games. That's just an example, of course. There are other things that will bother different groups. Game designers make tradeoffs among these aspects and will often not judge well for anyone's particular table.

IMO this is something that 5E has, mostly, gotten right. You can run it without lots of magic items, for instance. Healing is a bit more of a challenge, though it's more open that it was before 4E. (Another of those 4E things I wish they'd kept more of is healing surge. That would have been a great way to differentiate the bard or the not-as-yet warlord from the cleric! The bard helps you activate what's in you already, while the cleric could provide outside help.)

 

[billd91]

IMO this is something that 5E has, mostly, gotten right. You can run it without lots of magic items, for instance. Healing is a bit more of a challenge, though it's more open that it was before 4E. (Another of those 4E things I wish they'd kept more of is healing surge. That would have been a great way to differentiate the bard or the not-as-yet warlord from the cleric! The bard helps you activate what's in you already, while the cleric could provide outside help.)

Honestly, I think the bard still fulfills that role pretty well - Song of Rest offers bonus healing other characters are already spending some of their hit dice to heal.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Wow, I skip a few pages reading the thread and it turns from an interesting discussion about mini use to yet another edition war .
Don't you folks get tired of it?

ASCII characters 34 & 65 in conjunction have suddenly been coming up disproportionately in this thread. 'Grid Dependence' has been a fakeversy since AD&D fans started attacking 3e for it, quite early in the current millennium, so I suppose it was inevitable.

That 5e's support for TotM consists prettymuch entirely of just using the term in a positive way as it professes to 'default' to it, makes it more than a little ironic, too.

.I daresay such Schrodinger deaths are a veritable staple of the action/fantasy genre!

Very much so, sure. And there's often ways back from death in genre, too. Usually more involved than pushing a Vancian spell button, but a staple.

The people I know who really loved 4E were the biggest MtG, minis game, and MMO heads. I don't think this was an accident.

I suspect it wasn't an accident. It may have been selection bias or confirmation bias, for instance. Myself, I loved 4e (like I have 1e & 3.5 - a bit less than 1e, if we're feeding sibling rivalries), despised M:tG ("Tragic: the Addiction"), only played tactical games like Battletech or Carwars when there was nothing else to do, and won't touch a video game (the last one I played was Asteroids), CRPG, or MMO.

The "bloodied" condition was something 4E did kind of neatly because it connected being at half hit points to qualitative things. Some monsters or characters got more powerful when bloodied. Some monsters or characters were incentivized to attack bloodied targets. It connected a game status to the rules and the narrative in a fairly elegant way. It wasn't perfect, but it was generally decent and is an example of something I wish the designers had kept in 5E. (Yes, I could house rule it....)

5e kept it in a side-bar, they just didn't dare attach a jargon term to it. You could add a monster ability that kicked in 'when reduced to 1/2 hps' or worked vs targets that 'had taken at least half their hps in damage' quite easily. It's just a little wordy, because no jargon.

. My biggest objection to it was how slow it was at the medium to high levels and how egregiously long character sheets got.

Nod. The first time we hit Paragon, it was like running full tilt into a gelatinous cube. A few levels later it'd sped back up again. FWIW. Character sheets in the on-line builder were weirdly inflated /and/ left out critical information, it was some egregiously bad formatting. Prior to that all that made sheets long was printing out the full texts of powers & items available to the character - if you printed out the full texts of spells available to casters in any other ed, it'd've been far longer...

In LotR, JRRT is ambivalent about Frodo's fate after being stabbed with a troll spear. It turns out that Frodo is OK.
That made complete narrative sense. "Narrative sense" does not depend upon certainty.

'Ambivalent' is an odd way to put "presented the event with a level of uncertainty."

But (as an author) did present "contradictory ideas". Ie generates a sense that Frodo is dead, while also generating a sense that, as the protagonist, Frodo will survive. The contradiction (or ambivalence) is subsequently resolved in favour of the latter.

OK.

I'm an "older" player. So are most of the other 4e players who post on these boards, as best I can tell. This notion that "older" players were especially bothered by 4e has no factual basis that I'm aware of.

I am, too, but, IMX, the longer a player being introduced to 4e had played earlier editions, and the earlier the editions they played, the more disequilibrium they experienced in learning 4e. It was just too unfamiliar, and the experience of 'not getting' something you identify as having 'mastered' can be disconcerting.

And the people I know who really loved 4e included someone whose other gaming passions were Rolemaster (his first RPG), Civilisaiton and Diplomacy; a boardgamer who's been playing RPGs since Moldvay Basic; a wargamer who's been plauying just as long; and a couple of old Moldvay players who (as far as I know) are WOW amateurs at best.

I was in club at the time that was heavily weighted towards Storyteller and deeply prejudiced against D&D - they took to 4e easily.

It was very much the "not-D&D D&D" in good ways as well as bad.

Moldvay Basic isn't a font or layout; it's about a game that presents itself with clear rules and doesn't encourage the GM to manipulate the rules with a nod and a wink.

And it wasn't burned on YouTube? Er, I mean, video tape? Weird.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

But (as an author) did present "contradictory ideas". Ie generates a sense that Frodo is dead, while also generating a sense that, as the protagonist, Frodo will survive. The contradiction (or ambivalence) is subsequently resolved in favour of the latter.

I get the use of the term "ambivalent" as being more general than feelings, but it's definitely secondary usage. "Ambiguous" is probably more likely to be understood by most readers.

 

[Shasarak]

But there is, of course, ample genre precedent for such situations. How many times have you watched an action film wherein the hero is shot and fallen to the ground, seemingly dead, only to have a later scene reveal the bullet was stopped by a lead game token in his breast pocket or somesuch? I daresay such Schrodinger deaths are a veritable staple of the action/fantasy genre!

Narration is easily manipulated without stretching belief beyond what is already suspended for the genre.

Of course there are movies where the hero appears to get shot but does not just as there are movies where the hero does not look like they were shot but turns out that they were. That is the whole point of Schrodinger, two events are possible and you dont know which one actually happened until afterwards.

I guess the bit that is particularly stupid to me is if the person in your example narrates that, rather then the bullet being stopped by the lead game token, he was not actually shot at all.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

But there is, of course, ample genre precedent for such situations. How many times have you watched an action film wherein the hero is shot and fallen to the ground, seemingly dead, only to have a later scene reveal the bullet was stopped by a lead game token in his breast pocket or somesuch? I daresay such Schrodinger deaths are a veritable staple of the action/fantasy genre!

Narration is easily manipulated without stretching belief beyond what is already suspended for the genre.

There's a substantial difference between such false-deaths being a thing that could happen, and being a thing that must happen in every instance. Only the former is well-founded in both fiction and reality.

More to the point, the idea that reality could be inherently unfixed until the time of observation, is one which is completely inconceivable. There is no possible reality which could correspond to such a thing. Whether the cat is dead or not is a fact which is already true, regardless of whether we observe it. Whether or not that hit was substantially physical is already set in stone at the moment of impact, if that game world has any semblance of similarity to any believable world.

 

[Shasarak]

That's true of me when I'm fine and dandy - any blow from a sword might kil me.

There are plenty of characters in the world of AD&D who have only 1 hp.

Yes that is true. There certainly are plenty of characters in ADnD who only have 1 hp and who rightly fear being killed by any blow of a sword.

Comparetively there are the other characters with more hps who can not be killed by any one blow with a sword. Even a blow from an Ogre will not be enough to take them down with a single strike. And when one of those characters only have 1hp remaining your narration that they are "fine and dandy" is ludicrous.

In LotR, JRRT is ambivalent about Frodo's fate after being stabbed with a troll spear. It turns out that Frodo is OK.

That made complete narrative sense. "Narrative sense" does not depend upon certainty. (In other words, what [MENTION=1282]darkbard[/MENTION] said.)

JRRT knew that Frodo was wearing Mithril armour so, like Thanos said, the Troll should have gone for the head.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I suspect it wasn't an accident. It may have been selection bias or confirmation bias, for instance. Myself, I loved 4e (like I have 1e & 3.5 - a bit less than 1e, if we're feeding sibling rivalries), despised M:tG ("Tragic: the Addiction"), only played tactical games like Battletech or Carwars when there was nothing else to do, and won't touch a video game (the last one I played was Asteroids), CRPG, or MMO.

Well yeah, there's always selection bias or confirmation and your anecdote cancels mine out....

The things that those players highlighted were specifically the "deck building" aspect of 4E chargen and other similar things.

5e kept it in a side-bar, they just didn't dare attach a jargon term to it. You could add a monster ability that kicked in 'when reduced to 1/2 hps' or worked vs targets that 'had taken at least half their hps in damage' quite easily. It's just a little wordy, because no jargon.

You can certainly add it back in, but it's not really built into the game in a systematic fashion the way it was in 4E. There are no notable abilities or monsters that I can think of, at least off the top of my head.

Nod. The first time we hit Paragon, it was like running full tilt into a gelatinous cube. A few levels later it'd sped back up again. FWIW. Character sheets in the on-line builder were weirdly inflated /and/ left out critical information, it was some egregiously bad formatting. Prior to that all that made sheets long was printing out the full texts of powers & items available to the character - if you printed out the full texts of spells available to casters in any other ed, it'd've been far longer...

Yeah, definitely. The CB was a necessary evil, but evil it was.

I am, too, but, IMX, the longer a player being introduced to 4e had played earlier editions, and the earlier the editions they played, the more disequilibrium they experienced in learning 4e. It was just too unfamiliar, and the experience of 'not getting' something you identify as having 'mastered' can be disconcerting.

Yes, definitely. I found it pretty disconcerting at first, in a kind of "uncanny valley" kind of way, particularly the early books. The later ones made more sense but the PHB had this giant list of "spells" with levels that didn't line up to what we'd been used to seeing for literally ever (and now again). There were magic items in the PHB, many of which seemed to bear little or no resemblance to classic items. There were tons of new concepts, most of which had no precedent or clear root in the prior game: Milestones (aka a game incentive to keep adventuring), skill challenges (decent-ish idea poorly implemented), this whole new kinda sketched out but never realized world, dumped alignment system, magic items that have highly limited power usage, every character being alike in terms of being a Vancian spellcaster, power sources, ....

It was like Ozzy releasing rerecorded and heavily reimagined versions of Mr. Crowley and Crazy Train.

It was very much the "not-D&D D&D" in good ways as well as bad.

That's a pretty good summary.

And a whole lot of older players did leave---witness the fact that another game that's built on the 3.X chassis Found a pretty lucrative Path to the market....

 

[Tony Vargas]

And a whole lot of older players did leave---witness the fact that another game that's built on the 3.X chassis Found a pretty lucrative Path to the market....

And that was only the newer older players running to PF, the older older players got OSRIC, too.

 

[Hussar]

oh, what the hell.

To me, virtually all the criticisms of 4e are pretty much self-indulgent twaddle. For evidence, I simply point to 5e and 5e's popularity.

There are almost no criticisms of 4e that you can make that don't equally apply to 5e. Yet, 5e is heralded as the second coming of D&D and 4e gets pilloried. FOR EXACTLY THE SAME STUFF.

HP's? Guess what, there's no difference, really between 4e and 5e. Sure, you don't have as much in combat healing in 5e as 4e, but, that's about the only difference. Any "Schroedinger's HP" garbage equally applies because I can fail two death saves, be 1 HP of damage away from instantly being killed and 8 hours later, I'm not only better, but I'm completely undamaged.

Arguments about the "level of abstraction" are just self serving. Pick a point where "the abstraction is too much" and then ignore any counter argument. It's intellectually bankrupt. It's two smurfs arguing over who is more blue. But, man, is it really, really important to make sure that your favorite edition just happens to fall within that "level of abstraction" and that other edition doesn't.

MMO comparisons? Yeah, guess what? 5e HAS encounter powers. 5e HAS abstract powers. The argument was always, "Why can't my fighter do X any time he wants?" Well, gee, I'm looking at the Battlemaster right now and every single issue you had with 4e exists right there in 5e.

Look, I get not liking 4e. That's groovy. But, ffs, just admit that you don't like the edition and move on and quit trying to "prove" that there is anything of any actual substance to your dislike. Revel in it. You don't like it. Great. That is perfectly fine. But, don't pretend that your dislike is somehow grounded in facts and if everyone would just "see" what you see, we'd all agree with you. Because, otherwise, it's so hypocritical to sing hosannas to 5e while criticizing 4e.