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.

 

[Shasarak]

Fair point. I generally use a mix of descriptors in combat because either of those things can happen (overnight resting, magical healing) and then in 5e there is also spending HD to heal or using a medical kit. And this again because HP is a combination of factors.

I would definitely agree that HP represents a combination of factors, I have never seen anyone who honestly claims that pounds of meat are cut from your body on a successful attack.

Honestly it is just the one or two people that tell me that there was never any hit in the first place that just blow my mind. But these are the same type of people that look at their strength score to tell them how damaged their character is so maybe I should just take the hint.

 

[pemerton]

Honestly it is just the one or two people that tell me that there was never any hit in the first place that just blow my mind.

How would that idea possibly have been started?

Maybe by something like this?

[H]it points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as
well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. . . .

Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the lost handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .

For those who wonder why poison does either killing damage (usually) or no harm whatsoever, recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

(From Gygax's DMG, pp 61, 81.)

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Despite the fact that a particular weapon might do slashing or piercing damage I have often narrated that the hit point loss came from the wind being knocked out of the PC as the flat of the blade or the pommel of the sword struck him/her across the chest. <snip> I'm not saying your way is wrong, where every successful attack draws blood, but for me to describe every attack against a PC like that would break immersion for our table.

I agree, this is more or less how I do it. I tend to assume that most hits are grazes or near misses, including spell damage. I adjust for the target, though, so a big inert target like a golem gets different description than a live one like a dwarf, even if the hit points are similar. This also means most healing is kind of an exercise in hand waving, but it's one of those things we've trained ourselves to mostly ignore.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Honestly it is just the one or two people that tell me that there was never any hit in the first place that just blow my mind. But these are the same type of people that look at their strength score to tell them how damaged their character is so maybe I should just take the hint.

This particular interpretation goes all the way back to 1E at least, and was Gygax's. I suspect that like a lot of other things he didn't bother with much of an interpretation at first but was pressed on it and came up with one. It's one that clearly doesn't satisfy a vocal minority.

 

[Kobold Boots]

This particular interpretation goes all the way back to 1E at least, and was Gygax's. I suspect that like a lot of other things he didn't bother with much of an interpretation at first but was pressed on it and came up with one. It's one that clearly doesn't satisfy a vocal minority.

Agreed regarding vocal minority, but it really comes down to common interpretation of terms and managing expectations.

If you are rolling "to hit" the expectation is that there's a hit.
If you are rolling "to damage" the expectation is that there has been damage.

If you don't want to have misunderstandings of the meta and abstraction of things, then the sidebar explaining what HP and AC really are needs to be in the players' handbook.

Otherwise, when you find it in the DMG (which lets be fair, almost no one read all the way through before running their first game) then of course 30 years later you're going to have these kinds of discussions. That said, there are many people who played 1e D&D that don't remember the basic combat and initiative differences or never used them for the same reasons.

Games aimed at folks that obsess over details never survive in that state once they become popular or attain mass appeal. It's not a bad thing, but I think that forums like these cater to people who sweat over details and have time to chat about it.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Agreed regarding vocal minority, but it really comes down to common interpretation of terms and managing expectations.

If you are rolling "to hit" the expectation is that there's a hit.
If you are rolling "to damage" the expectation is that there has been damage.

Sure, which is why I tend to think of them as being grazes or blows that are parried but jar the target. Anyone who's done some sparring and paid attention knows that those start to get to you and will wear you down until you start making real mistakes that leave you open to a bigger, more consequential blow. If you want a good example of how "ablative" combat works IRL, think of things like a group of people hunting large game (elephants, whales, bison, etc.) with primitive weapons like spears or fairly weak bows. Many of the attacks are fairly small, with the purpose of trying to bleed out the beast until it's sufficiently weakened that a killing blow can be struck.

Of course, hand to hand "for real" combat among humans is not actually like that from what I understand. It's much quicker, deadlier, and more confusing and humans are both much more fragile and much more resilient than would be expected, but that's not what mid to higher level D&D simulates (to the extent it simulates anything exactly). The problem is that that often really bugs folks in various ways, particularly ones who have (or think they have) a knowledge of combat, often much too informed by Hollywood, where low caliber handgguns are often portrayed as magic wands of death. D&D doesn't really simulate either RL combat or Hollywood combat.

If you don't want to have misunderstandings of the meta and abstraction of things, then the sidebar explaining what HP and AC really are needs to be in the players' handbook. <snip> Games aimed at folks that obsess over details never survive in that state once they become popular or attain mass appeal. It's not a bad thing, but I think that forums like these cater to people who sweat over details and have time to chat about it.

Sure, this forum is for a bunch of obsessed freaks but lots of more casual players get bothered too. They may not spend time articulating it on the internet or even know how to articulate it clearly, but they do get bugged.

Description of what damage means can also be used to help reinforce a character concept. For example, in a game I play in my Dex build paladin and the high Con/Toughness feat abjurer have roughly the same hit points and if the abjurer is using Shield has roughly the same ACs. However, they're very different characters with very different concepts. The paladin avoids damage primarily by skill, speed, and divine favor, parrying blows with sword and shield, for instance. The abjurer is using magic and, in that character's case, sheer toughness and resilience. The exact same damage can and should be described differently to reinforce the theme of the characters.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I'm not saying your way is wrong, where every successful attack draws blood, but for me to describe every attack against a PC like that would break immersion for our table.

It's only 'wrong' when you make a successful attack against a stone or turnip. (And I know D&D has stone golems and galeb-dur, and I'd be surprised if no one had ever created a turnip-monster for it, too.) ... or, y'know, anything else about the attack, the character, or the situation precludes drawing blood, or if you'd find the mechanics of resolving the injury inconsistent with it drawing blood.

So, certainly not wrong, but also not necessarily always right?

Or, put it another way, I insist that your troll bite causes strawberries to explode from my nose. Prove me wrong using the mechanics.

I think the real point is you (as ahem, 'injured party,' can narrate the injury in accord with your established narrative - if you're playing Mr. Spock, you narrate a wound as bleeding green blood; as the DM you can narrate what makes narrative sense in your world, like the old 'lasers cauterize the wound, so you're not bleeding,' thing (yeah, I know); you pick the narrative, so you can associate it as much (or as little, to really tick off that guy at the table who's bothered by it, or to prove the game mechanic is dissociated) as you want, to your standards of narrative-to-mechanic correspondence.

It's just another iteration of what D&D does throughout: if there's a problem with your game, it's your fault, not the system's, every time. You knew the DMing job was Empowered when you took it, Fred. If you think that sounds logically fallacious or unfair or don't like references to 50+ yo cartoons or something, well, /that's your fault too/.

Because discussion of RPG rulesets is all about assigning blame when the game sucks, not about making them better, right?

How would that idea possibly have been started?

Maybe by something like this?

[H]it points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as
well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them. . . .

Damage scored to characters or certain monsters is actually not substantially physical - a mere nick or scratch until the lost handful of hit points are considered - it is a matter of wearing away the endurance, the luck, the magical protections. . . .

For those who wonder why poison does either killing damage (usually) or no harm whatsoever, recall the justification for character hit points. That is, damage is not actually sustained - at least in proportion to the number of hit points marked off in most cases. The so called damage is the expenditure of favor from deities, luck, skill, and perhaps a scratch, and thus the saving throw. If that mere scratch managed to be venomous, then DEATH. If no such wound was delivered, then NO DAMAGE FROM THE POISON.​

(From Gygax's DMG, pp 61, 81.)

That's not how the idea got started, though, that was (should have been) the end of if. It got started because people complained long and loud, back in the day (way back, even before my day in the day), how unrealistic it was that characters gained HD as they leveled. Because, well, if you think of hit points as representing nothing buy physical damage, going from having 5 to have 66 without becoming much larger or much sturdier doesn't make much sense, and, 'realistically,' (yeah, I know) most human-like fantasy races don't get that much larger (at least, not through the repeated experience of killing things and taking their stuff) or that much sturdier (when they do get that much sturdier it usually involved a medusa or cockatrice or something, and is quite sudden).

So EGG, being who he was, wrote a long involved rationalization of the game mechanic.

And it was fine until 40 years later, some nerds decided it was 'dissociated' because hit points /had always been all about physical damage/, when, in fact, on the grounds of (defense against) realism, hit points had 'always' (as of 1979) been about non-physical factors, as well or even instead.

If you are rolling "to hit" the expectation is that there's a hit.
If you are rolling "to damage" the expectation is that there has been damage.

Yep, and D&D has been disappointing you from the beginning. ;P You make /a/ roll to hit, but you're not swinging only once, for instance. No matter how much 'damage' you roll, you won't be removing body parts ... unless, of course, the monster's entry says certain bits are cut off after taking X damage, in which case you can chop bits off it with a mace or fireball or psionic blast.

If you don't want to have misunderstandings of the meta and abstraction of things, then the sidebar explaining what HP and AC really are needs to be in the players' handbook.

Isn't it? I think it has been for a while now (I may be thinking of the more-than-one-swing-in-an-single attack roll bit). It's a whole lot shorter than EGG's way of putting it, but then, so's everything.

Sure, this forum is for a bunch of obsessed freaks but lots of more casual players get bothered too. They may not spend time articulating it on the internet or even know how to articulate it clearly, but they do get bugged.

I've rarely seen casual players bothered by the minutia of hit point rationalizations - though, to be fair, I had never seen too many repeat 'casual' players until 2010, when I started participating in Encounters.

D&D does seem to say you're being 'hit' a lot more than seems to happen with a character in genre, in the sense of struck and visibly wounded. Particularly in pop-culture fantasy TV/movies, characters tend to swing swords a lot, but land more kicks, punches, trips, and the like - when the target is a main cast member or important villain, anyway, the mooks just get skewered. D&D has generally sorta delivered, once you think through the hit <> hit and damage <> physical wound routine. Because losing hps indirectly, but fairly simply models the way those characters in genre will run from a fight or appear desperate, even though they haven't been touched because "there's too many of them!" or "he's really good, we can't take him" or whatever (they're running low on hps, see?). Except, of course, that you need Cure ____ Wounds & healing potions or weeks of rests to 'heal' your not-damage from when you weren't hit.

But, if you /don't/ bother to think through all that, it still delivers about the cadence of the pop-culture-fantasy-genre battle: Hero goes into battle, villain comes on strong, here is pressed to even defend himself, but, on the verge of losing (dangling over a cliff, struck a serious blow, dropped to his knees, reeling or even unconscious for a moment as the villain gloats), he rallies and wins.

(Y'know, more or less depending on edition, variants, DM, PC being the 'hero,' monster being the 'villain,' the rest of the party, etc...)


Besides, nowadays, if a newb asks you "what are these hit points all about anyway?" you can just tell him "meh, it's like your health bar in a fighting game," and he'll totally get it. Because fighting games ripped off hit points from D&D, thankyouverymuch.

 

[Kobold Boots]

This is wrong, This is right.

- I posit that drawing blood on every successful hit is wrong within the historical intention of HP abstraction and wrong as far as RAW is concerned even now.
- I also posit that it is impossible for anyone to tell any DM what is wrong at his or her own table because of Rule 0.

Anything beyond this is likely fodder for the discussion thread, but know that you're beating whatever drum you prefer to beat and not having a RAW discussion.

Be well
KB

 

[Lanefan]

In 1st ed AD&D it could cause level loss - so you can get worse at fighting because you're tired from walking/running, ...

Where was this?

I know there's probably still a few corners of the DMG and PH I haven't competely dug through over the years, but I sure don't recall ever seeing this anywhere.

If it's in UA or DSG or WSG then I likely did miss it, as I cherry-picked from UA at best and never really gave the other two books much thought at all.

Lanefan

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

In 1st ed AD&D it could cause level loss - so you can get worse at fighting because you're tired from walking/running,

I totally don't remember this. It might be somewhere in the glorious sprawling mess that is the DMG1E, though I'm nowhere near my copy at the moment. Level loss was usually the province of certain undead, though you could start losing XP or being unable to gain it due to things like alignment conflict.

There were many rules in 1E that rarely got used, though: Did anyone actually use initiative RAW? If so, could they actually explain it?