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]

HP are a measure of what can kill you in combat.
Therefore HP are abstracted such that they represent your experience in combat. You can take more damage as you level because you're better at avoiding mortal damage. <snip>

That can work for combat, but it can be problematic for situations like falling damage or, say, spell damage.

 

[Kobold Boots]

That can work for combat, but it can be problematic for situations like falling damage or, say, spell damage.

Give me an example of spell damage you'd like modeled and I can give you the way to do it to stay consistent with the system as presented.

As to falling it's pretty simple really.

Choose a height beyond which it's pretty certain you're going to be immobilized or incapacitated due to impact.
- In my estimation this is 15 feet unless you've got some sort of acrobatics/tumbing skill, 25 feet if so.
Fall of appropriate height drops you to some percentage of or 0 HP automatically and may provide an appropriate effect at the discretion of the DM.
- Tumbling mitigates some damage or avoids effect depending on how the DM works it out at his table.

Spell Damage types usually break down to the following.
- Direct damage - best suited for HP use as normal - This is combat, thus abstraction works. Auto hit doesn't mean armor doesn't soak.
- AOE damage - best suited for HP use as normal - This is combat. Don't stand in fire.
- Damage over Time - again, abstraction works, this is combat. DoT doesn't mean that armor doesn't soak or you have good endurance or some other explanation. Heck, part of being mortal in a fantasy world where magic exists could be that the more you're exposed to magic the more resistance you build up to it until you really decide to go off the deep end and play with things you really shouldn't.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Give me an example of spell damage you'd like modeled and I can give you the way to do it to stay consistent with the system as presented.

As to falling it's pretty simple really.

Choose a height beyond which it's pretty certain you're going to be immobilized or incapacitated due to impact.
- In my estimation this is 15 feet unless you've got some sort of acrobatics/tumbing skill, 25 feet if so.
Fall of appropriate height drops you to some percentage of or 0 HP automatically and may provide an appropriate effect at the discretion of the DM.
- Tumbling mitigates some damage or avoids effect depending on how the DM works it out at his table.

By that logic a dextrous fellow like a rogue should be pretty much OK. Often he's not whereas the fighter just says "meh."

Heck, part of being mortal in a fantasy world where magic exists could be that the more you're exposed to magic the more resistance you build up to it until you really decide to go off the deep end and play with things you really shouldn't.

Why are wizards so much more fragile then, even to magic damage?

I'm not saying you can't handle things this way or that it's a bad idea, but you'll need to do a good bit of work and alteration I'd think.

Now 5E has some useful things, such as resistances (and the drastically underused vulnerability) and the ability to have high hit points and very low AC or vice versa. That can represent some useful diversity among creatures.

As I said elsewhere, Monte Cook's point about hit points is that they allow things of pretty drastically different scale and underlying logic to exist on the same board. They're a little messy in the corners and when you move the fridge there are some roaches, but by and large they work fairly well.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I think 3E had the concept of arcane vs divine magic, and also of non-magical extraordinary abilities.

3e explicitly called out some class (and monster abilities) as 'extraordinary' (EX) and others as supernatural (SU). But, the division among Martial, Divine, and Arcane goes all the way back to Men & Magic, when the only classes were Fighter, Cleric, & Magic-user, respectively. Likewise, the 4 Roles were just a formalization of the party-contributions of the Fighter, Cleric, Magic-user - and, eventually, in 3e, when SA replaced backstab, Rogue.

In RQ spells don't have "levels". In RM, the level of a spell corresponds (roughly) to the character level at which it can be used (a bit like 4e). To me, this seems similar to being weirded out by 3E compared to (say) Hero because in Hero different abilities have variable points costs whereas in 3E all feats have the same cost ("1 slot").

It's a fair thing to be weirded out by, in either case, really.

If "not D&D" = "doesn't use some version of the classic spells by level table", then D&D is being defined in a very prescriptive and (I would say) rather surface-level way.

Yes, it is.

(And these things are strange. 5e radically revises the spells-per-level table, and the damage expressions for spells eg fireball is not 1d6 per level, nor 5d6 or 6d6 - which was its generic amount (eg from wand or scroll) in AD&D, but no one seem to find that weird but me.)

Oh, I've seen lots of long-time & returning players find the damage-by-slot level, sparse high-level spells, and, particularly, the prep & cast spontaneously of neo-Vancian a little hard to wrap their expectations around.
But, though it's a bit different, it's still a (slightly) different spells/level/day chart for each class, and traditional class imbalances are more or less intact.

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

You don't randomly draw 'power cards.' There's no 'deck.' A mid-level magic-user memorizing spells is closer to 'deck building' than anything in 4e chargen, and its still not very close...

...now the last edition of Gamma World, it had deck-building, which, very surprisingly, didn't suck much at all. ;P

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

Yeah, unfamiliar. Though, to be accurate, the PH1 did not have a giant list of spells, each class had a rather modest list of powers (only the Wizard's & Warlock's were "spells"), organized by the level at which you gained them, so when you were picking a power you only had to read through 2-6 selections. It was a lot simpler than reading through /all/ the spells of a given class/level in 1e, and vastly simpler than sorting through the actually giant, giant list of spells in the 3e and 5e PHs, which are just every spell in the game, thrown into a giant alphabetical list. The 5e version doesn't even do you the favor of listing the class(es) with the spell.
And, it was far more intuitive for the level of the power to be the level at which your character could choose it, rather than approximately half the level at which you could acquire it, rounded up, except when it wasn't.

It's really a perfect example of how 4e was more accessible to new players, while freaking out older ones.

There were magic items in the PHB, many of which seemed to bear little or no resemblance to classic items.

Yep. 3e moved stuff from the DMG to the PH, including like all the combat rules, and, via make/buy made magic items into a player build resource - but left items in the DMG. 4e items in the PH was a straight-line trend from 3e.

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, this whole new kinda sketched out but never realized world, dumped alignment system, magic items that have highly limited power usage

Actually, all of those have precedents and/or roots in prior eds. Magic items with limited usage n/day, 1/day, 1/week or month, even, and any other sort of arbitrary proviso, were common in past eds. The alignment system wasn't dumped, merely consolidated, the aligments new player found confusing/contradictory were folded into the more intuitive ones, 5 alignments instead of 9, but D&D had as few as 3 in the past, Blackmoor was a kinda sketched out but never realized world, skill challenges were a new mechanism but a solution to an old problem that the game had tried to tackle before, and the game had always /needed/ incentives to keep the party adventuring a 'whole day' rather than a 5MWD!

every character being alike in terms of being a Vancian spellcaster, ....

Yeah, that's "factually incorrect" (as we say around here, because lying is not against the CoC, but calling someone a liar is). In 4e, only the Wizard was in any way Vancian (and, like the 3e & 5e wizards, 'prepared' rather than 'memorized' his spells, just only his daily spells & utilities). And only arcane classes were casting spells.

What you're really getting at is the common advancement structure - all classes had the same exp chart, as in 3e (so that was entirely precedented ) and 5e, but also the same advancement schedule in terms of bonuses, across the board (which 5e also kept, as proficiency, for some reason) and in terms of short- and long-rest-recharge resources, which was certainly rooted in the many limited-use abilities in the game's history, and had some precedent in the way 2e & 3e moved full casters to 9-level casting (formerly Clerics, Druids & Illusionist had only 7 spell levels).

What was unprecedented was what all that helped enable: the classes were much better-balanced (to be fair, less imbalanced) than ever before, or since.

D&D really doesn't have a good way to represent "he's stunned and out of the fight". Your crit example works well: He got knocked down to 0 hit points but wasn't killed because the crit didn't confirm. Of course, the way hit points work has some "Murphy's Rules" aspects. This is but one.
IMO this is a good interpretation. The mithril coat is a magic item. In D&D this usually is run as "has a higher AC" which has a uniform and evident effect. However, the way it's described in LotR, it also has other properties, such as "protecting from what would have been a death blow."

Yeah, 3e did get a few things that started to model armor protecting rather than just deflecting - Fortification, I mentioned, above, and the mithril coat could certainly have been a +X Mithral Chain Shirt of (sadly, IIRC, only 'Light') Fortification, but, sure, also crits w/confirm rolls (spears are x3, so yeah, ouch). 1e didn't, and 3e & 1e both have characters dropped below 0 on an inevitable death countdown. 5e doesn't confirm crits, but it at least has the chance of a dropped character recovering on his own... after d4 hrs... so not actually 'fatally wounded,' as it turns out.

Those're all still pretty weak, though, compared to a mechanism like FATE 'consequences' which, of course, very consciously model the kind of dramatic treatment of injuries you see constantly in examples like the above, across many 'action' genres, not just fantasy, or armor that absorbs damage and separate unconsciousness & death tracking of damage, like Fantasy Hero (resistant defenses, STUN, BOD), so you can be unconscious but in no danger of death or conscious & fighting though mortally wounded (both things that don't happen in D&D without 'special abilities', but happen in fiction, and, heck, reality).

LotR also tracks encumbrance... only Gimli wears armor or carries a shield due to the burdens of the road. D&D style systems aren't great at that.

I seem to remember carefully toting up encumbrance in 10th-of-a-pound 'gp' detail, back in the day.

 

[Kobold Boots]

By that logic a dextrous fellow like a rogue should be pretty much OK. Often he's not whereas the fighter just says "meh."

Within the context of how the system is presented the fractional damage rule puts the rogue and fighter on the same par initially where the rogue may indeed have the tumbling skill and fare better in shorter falls. The warrior in heavier armor would be screwed if they got pushed off a 15 foot landing.

Why are wizards so much more fragile then, even to magic damage?

In this system because they are not combat trained. They are magic trained Take a level of fighter, less of an issue. As far as magic damage goes, it's still damage, where it comes from is less of an issue it's how you compensate for it which would be factored in to classes that spend more time focused on combat. The magic user should focus on damage mitigation through wards and other magical defenses.

I'm not saying you can't handle things this way or that it's a bad idea, but you'll need to do a good bit of work and alteration I'd think.

Possibly, but not as much as you may think. Mages would focus on being harder to hit and that is where the AC abstraction comes in. Classes with higher HP focus on HP abstraction. Insofar as the system progresses the AC vs. HP discussion is where the system tradeoff mechanic would need to be put in and that's where the work would need to be. (High AC plus High HP needs to be hard to get to without some serious trade offs)

Now 5E has some useful things, such as resistances (and the drastically underused vulnerability) and the ability to have high hit points and very low AC or vice versa. That can represent some useful diversity among creatures.

As I said elsewhere, Monte Cook's point about hit points is that they allow things of pretty drastically different scale and underlying logic to exist on the same board. They're a little messy in the corners and when you move the fridge there are some roaches, but by and large they work fairly well.

Agreed overall.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Yeah, 3e did get a few things that started to model armor protecting rather than just deflecting - Fortification, I mentioned, above, and the mithril coat could certainly have been a +X Mithral Chain Shirt of (sadly, IIRC, only 'Light') Fortification, but, sure, also crits w/confirm rolls (spears are x3, so yeah, ouch). 1e didn't, and 3e & 1e both have characters dropped below 0 on an inevitable death countdown. 5e doesn't confirm crits, but it at least has the chance of a dropped character recovering on his own... after d4 hrs... so not actually 'fatally wounded,' as it turns out.

1E/2E had the widely used -10 rule.

Those're all still pretty weak, though, compared to a mechanism like FATE 'consequences' which, of course, very consciously model the kind of dramatic treatment of injuries you see constantly in examples like the above, across many 'action' genres, not just fantasy, or armor that absorbs damage and separate unconsciousness & death tracking of damage, like Fantasy Hero (resistant defenses, STUN, BOD), so you can be unconscious but in no danger of death or conscious & fighting though mortally wounded (both things that don't happen in D&D without 'special abilities', but happen in fiction,

Yes, many other games have them in various forms. The closest the D&D family has gotten is the Vitality/Wounds system in Star Wars D20. I used that in my 3.X campaign, though it wasn't super well integrated into the system and could be a bit annoying at times. Still, it reflected the rather pulpy feel I was going for.

But with the general exception of 4E, D&D has stuck to its war-game roots and stayed away from effects of injuries or statuses. I liked the idea of many of the 4E status effects but felt that the sheer number was one of the big reasons for slowdown.

and, heck, reality).

Oh Ye Gods are the consequences of injury IRL something else and they end up being the gift that keeps on giving, too.

I seem to remember carefully toting up encumbrance in 10th-of-a-pound 'gp' detail, back in the day.

Oh yeah, and I occasionally enforce them but I don't tend to count up every last point.

 

[Tony Vargas]

1E/2E had the widely used -10 rule.

Which doesn't work for modeling a character dropped, but who is saved from a mortal wound by his nifty elf armor. Once you're in negatives, you've been mortally wounded, and must be saved, or die with a minute (2e) or 10 (1e).

But with the general exception of 4E, D&D has stuck to its war-game roots and stayed away from effects of injuries or statuses. I liked the idea of many of the 4E status effects but felt that the sheer number was one of the big reasons for slowdown.

3e had like 40 named conditions. 4e had 18. 5e trimmed that down all the way down to 15.

Oh Ye Gods are the consequences of injury IRL something else and they end up being the gift that keeps on giving, too.

'Realism Kills' used to be my tagline on an old RPG BBS.

 

[Lanefan]

LotR also tracks encumbrance... only Gimli wears armor or carries a shield

And Boromir, for as long as he lasts...

due to the burdens of the road. D&D style systems aren't great at that.

D&D systems can be just fine at that but it needs players and DMs willing to rather harshly enforce it and live with the results.

 

[Kobold Boots]

And Boromir, for as long as he lasts... D&D systems can be just fine at that but it needs players and DMs willing to rather harshly enforce it and live with the results.

Agreed. Encumbrance rules exist to paper napkin this sort of thing.

 

[Shasarak]

Says who? That's a question of system design. In 4e the player knows that death saves have to be rolled, but doesn't know - anymore than the rest of the table - whether the mithril stopped the blow or rather skewered the PC to death.

Well yes obviously that is exactly the point. No one at the table knows until someone opens the box to observe how mad the Schrodinger's cat is.

They move at full speed. They can still beat that ogre in an arm wrestle. Etc. Nothing in the fiction of the game suggests that they are injured, or even tired. The contrast in this respect with a system like RQ, or RM, or even a non-simulationist system like Cortex+ Heroic (where your opponent gets to put your physical stress die into their die pool), is pretty marked.

RQ and RM are not, afterall, very realistic. It turns out that DnD models real life much better then those other games because the human body does keep operating at close to 100% until it cant. Exactly like HPs would suggest.