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]

I avoided kit bashing 4e because the system looked well-balanced and I didn't want to screw around with that. Reason is not because I dislike kit bashing. It was because by the time I moved to 4E, 3.5 was a brutal hodge-podge of nonsense advanced by the deep D20 3rd party system and the lack of a PHB+1 rule. I was ecstatic to not have to kit bash to achieve balance.

The problem I had with 4E was that it was so intricately set up that it was hard to depart from the vision of the designers. While I agree that near the end of 3.X there really was a hodgepodge of too many options (thanks to the OGL and resulting glut of D20 products) I did feel it was possible to make use of 3.X to achieve something like what I wanted to achieve---my 3.5 campaign was pretty heavily Unearthed Arcana-ed.

With 4E I felt very constrained to play things the way the designers wanted me to. The fact that 4E also seemed to encourage rules-lawyering meant it really ended up taking a lot of what I liked as a DM away from me. Of course, by "DM proofing" they were trying to help newer DMs, and I get that, but man I really felt like I was stuck doing things the way the guys in Seattle wanted me to do it. I still feel some of that in 5E but it's much more modular and easier to mess with. I haven't gone through and fixed a lot of the numbers I think they messed up (such as in saves and skills), were I to start a campaign myself in earnest, i would first.

 

[Tony Vargas]

How is 3E not "kitbash-friendly"?
And I don't buy that 4e is not "kitbash-friendly" either. This idea of knock-on effects is overrated. (What examples do you have in mind?)

It wasn't just that the sheer volume of material made tweaking any one thing a fraught exercise, both in terms of blowing up the game with an unforeseen broken combo, and in terms of blowing up a player's precious 'build,' but that the 3.x community had a RAW uber alles zeitgeist going that was utterly intolerant of variants or house rules, of any kind - it would just tolerate the banhammer, a sub-set of 3.5 - core-only or E6 - was acceptable, if looked down upon.

Similarly, 4e had a lot of material out so a lot of wires to choose from when deciding which one to cut without blowing it up, and while it was less prone to broken combos, it was pretty neatly balanced as it was so it can't have seemed like there was a lot to be gained in tinkering. Plus, re-designing a game is essentially what we're talking about, and 4e was a game (well, a D&D) designed to a comparatively high standard, it was intimidating to attempt amateur design work at that same level.

Oh, and 3e & 4e were both open to re-skinning, so if you did have a player who really wanted some off-the-wall bit of gear in 3e or off-the-wall power concept in 4e, he could probably just take something off the shelf and describe it differently, when, back in the day, you'd've likely had to've created a new rule for whatever it was.

It's spawned everything from PF to Mutants and Masterminds to d20 Cthulhu to 13th Age, etc.

That's d20, not 3e.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

It wasn't just that the sheer volume of material made tweaking any one thing a fraught exercise, both in terms of blowing up the game with an unforeseen broken combo, and in terms of blowing up a player's precious 'build,' but that the 3.x community had a RAW uber alles zeitgeist going that was utterly intolerant of variants or house rules, of any kind - it would just tolerate the banhammer, a sub-set of 3.5 - core-only or E6 - was acceptable, if looked down upon.

I never really encountered that particular attitude in 3.X myself, although that might have been more just who I knew, but boy was that the norm in 4E.

Similarly, 4e had a lot of material out so a lot of wires to choose from when deciding which one to cut without blowing it up, and while it was less prone to broken combos, it was pretty neatly balanced as it was so it can't have seemed like there was a lot to be gained in tinkering. Plus, re-designing a game is essentially what we're talking about, and 4e was a game (well, a D&D) designed to a comparatively high standard, it was intimidating to attempt amateur design work at that same level.

My reason for tinkering is rarely for balance reasons, although there's some of that of course. Often it's because the RAW do one thing and I want to do something else. With 4E, it was really set up to emphasize a certain synergy type play with a group of 5 PCs that covered the assigned roles and a general assumption that the players were really engaged and very system-knowledgeable. If you had 7 PCs, it often super laggy just due to the burden and various off-turn actions. God help you if there was a bard or either an avenger or barbarian in the party, with lots of ability to either act off-turn or to turn minor actions into attacks.

If you had fewer PCs or wanted to, say, run a rogues-only game, it was much more difficult to do. In my 3.5 game, I had some races being all gestalt characters (essentially two classes at once) with others having Eberron style action points. It worked surprisingly well though on paper it would have been totally broken. It turned out the action economy and MAD kept things in check. 4E was just such an intricate set of dependencies and synergies that I never felt confident enough to do that. Truth be told, I didn't really love it enough to want to either, especially given how rules-lawyer-y it seemed to make players. I was initially skeptical of 5E but was converted very quickly.

You're right, thought, 4E was pretty well designed and I do think the designers had some very good ideas. I wish some of those had been more directly carried forward into 5E. For example, having healing activate hit dice is a good thing. I also wish they'd have kept fewer saving throws or defenses rather than having as many as they did.

Oh, for anyone who really likes 4E, evidently they're working on a tabletop version of Pillars of Eternity, which is very clearly built on the 4E lineage.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I never really encountered that particular attitude in 3.X myself, although that might have been more just who I knew, but boy was that the norm in 4E.

Yep, prettymuch the opposite experience, here. 3.x the attitude was dissect every rule to find & then argue for the interpretation that was most favorable as being "The RAW," 4e, the rules were just clearer and the benefit from pushing an interpretation where there was ambiguity often less profound (and likely to be 'updated' away at any moment, anyway), so less rule-lawyering, but at least as much of a tendency to stick with the rules rather than tweak them, yourself.

But I was talking more about the broader on-line community, which was very RAW-insistent in the 3.x era, and just more sort of RAW-acceptant in 4e. There was more sound & fury in RAW debates in 3.x, more edition warring in 4e RAW debates.
Neither were conducive to tinkering.

My reason for tinkering is rarely for balance reasons

The thing about 4e, though, was that it was surprisingly (for D&D) balanced, so you not only might not tinker with it to fix balance problems, but you might be hesitant to do so for fear of wrecking said balance...

although there's some of that of course. Often it's because the RAW do one thing and I want to do something else.

With Skill Challenges as an alternative to combat, 4e struck me as being pretty open to doing quite different things... at least compared to classic D&D which just blithely assumed dungeon-crawling...

With 4E, it was really set up to emphasize a certain synergy type play with a group of 5 PCs that covered the assigned roles and a general assumption that the players were really engaged and very system-knowledgeable.

Ironically, that was no different than D&D had always been, just spelled out formally (in the olden days, you /needed/ the cleric for healing/undead-turning, the thief for traps/locks, the fighters to take hits & grind damage, and the wizard for magic - or you were likely going to TPK or at least fail the adventure's presumed goals, hard - it just wasn't as up-front about it, and the classes didn't come through too consistently at their assigned roles*). Players certainly needed to be engaged, yes (and a more balanced game is actually more conducive to that, since you're not left wondering why you even try), but 'system-knowledgeable,' not so much. 4e was very easy to play 'cold' (just walk in, pick up a character you know nothing about, and start playing - prettymuch the assumption of the Encounters program) compared to other editions, but rather disconcerting to step into from a place of extensive experience with earlier editions.

If you had fewer PCs or wanted to, say, run a rogues-only game, it was much more difficult to do.

A pure rogues-only game (I ran one in AD&D, briefly) was prettymuch off the table in any edition, rogues being barely-viable even supported by a party (same with an all-fighter or all-low-level-wizard game, for instance). What was more-nearly viable was a party of PCs who were MC'd Thief/something-else, to bring in the necessary healing, combat power, and, of course, magic-use; doing that in 1e meant a mostly non-/demi-human party, and doing it in 3e just meant plenty of levels in not-rogue, quite possibly adding up to a 'normal'-ish party.
Using that work-around for an 'all rogue' game in 4e would've been problematic - early 4e lacked the hyprid rules, and Rogues (and 5e sorta kept this, but for Expertise) didn't have the lock on theifly skills they did in prior eds. But even just playing several different rogues would've been viable enough, especially if your campaign was mostly heists & the like, where combat was to be avoid when possible, and ended swiftly when not - you'd have an all-striker party, afterall, and those were viable in a brittle way, that'd work for 'days' of fewer combats and more skill challenges. Alternately, depending on what defines a 'rogue' in your mind, you could have several different classes that happened to be participating in the stereotypical rogue lifestyle - the criminal underworld, or the sneaking about, opportunistic approach to adventuring - because class wasn't quite the straightjacket it's generally been (if your concept didn't include magic, any martial class might work for it, for instance).

I was initially skeptical of 5E but was converted very quickly.

5e does quite a good job of meeting classic-D&D expectations, and at least doesn't seem alien if your formative experience with D&D was 3.x/PF, as well.

You're right, thought, 4E was pretty well designed and I do think the designers had some very good ideas. I wish some of those had been more directly carried forward into 5E. For example, having healing activate hit dice is a good thing. I also wish they'd have kept fewer saving throws or defenses rather than having as many as they did.

The latter was a mechanical simplification that would have worked very nicely with the rest of 5e's design philosophy, but for (critically) how it would have felt to long-time/returning players, which was the deal-breaker. The former was solid design from a resource-balancing/management perspective, which, ironically, considering what you had to say above, made the game /less/ sensitive to party make-up, but, again, was too much of a deviation from the Band-Aid-cleric, spell-resource-management-centric traditions of the game. 5e gets by with just giving a /lot/ of classes some access to healing, so you're likely to get enough to get by in spite of the relatively low amount and lack of in-combat - as long as your players don't all decide to be single-class rogues. ;P

 

[Lanefan]

When the system uses concrete numbers for range, separation, movement rates, etc, and when the actual rules decisions that take these as inputs are made by the GM based on his/her conception of the ingame situation (which is what TotM tends to mean in 5e), then the GM is exercising a degree of influence of outcomes.

In AD&D the movement rates relative to the distances, together with the engagement rules, tend to reduce the impact of this - where is does manifest more is in relation to the duration of magical effects once the action is not taking place in a dungeon adjudicated via tight timekeeping rules.

Maybe, though timekeeping outside of a dungeon-crawl environment can easily be made just as tight, and has to be when tracking the durations of some risky spells (Fly, I'm looking straight at you!).

That said, tracking spell durations - particularly when not in combat - would seem to have little or no relation to the use/non-use of minis.

Who has what effects on them at any given time is, however, much easier to track and remember with minis than without: by putting coins or poker chips or torn shreds of paper underneath the minis, colour-coded for each effect, it's immediately easy to see who has what going for/against them.

Lanefan

 

[Lanefan]

3.X had Unearthed Arcana published as a set of potential house rules along with the tons of third party content and games based on the D20 ruleset, so I'm not sure I'd agree with the assertion about 3.X. 4E to me felt much less easily alterable, with many more pretty clear dependencies among its parts. There seemed to be much less other people publishing with 4E, although that may be more to the way WotC handled the license.

My 3e experience was all from the player side, watching the DM try to tweak the game to suit what he/we were after - a more-or-less 1e style using the 3e chassis - and seeing/playing through the results. We didn't use many if any add-on books, just 3e core and maybe some setting-specific stuff...and whatever monster books the DM could find.

Six years in he switched the campaign to 3.5 on the fly in something of a gesture of surrender, and abandoned many of the changes and tweaks he'd done in favour of a more RAW-based approach.

Most of the problems he'd found involved unforeseen knock-on effects both short and long term - one example was that he'd drastically slowed down the advancement rate from what 3e RAW would have in order to make the campaign remain viable for a longer time, which looked fine on paper but eventually knocked-on into throwing wealth-by-level completely out the window. We ended up far too rich* for our character levels, and this in turn knocked-on into making encounter design a bit of a crapshoot. And so it went...

I left that game not long after the 3-to-3.5 jump, in order to free up the time to start my own then-new campaign.

* - there's really no such thing as a PC who is too rich - it's outright impossible. The term is here used only in reference to game design.

In some ways, that integrated design was a benefit because many game mechanics worked together better, a hindrance in others because the tolerance of play styles and some other factors narrowed. For example, it was relatively easy to have mixed level game groups in 1e, much harder in 3e and 4e because tolerance for mixed level parties had narrowed as damage output and ACs of monsters were more closely related to the expected level of the party members.

That, and the power curve was much steeper between levels than in 0-1-2-5e. In 1e a 3rd-level character can find ways to survive and to usefully contribute in a 5th-ish level party. In 3e that same 3rd-level character would either spend all its time fleeing or be dead very quickly.

Another way of looking at it: I've found that 1e will comfortably allow for about a +/-2 level range around the party average, e.g. if the party average is 6th you can easily have a 4th-8th range within the group. The power curve is flat enough to support this; though anything beyond it can get problematic. But 3e (and from what I can tell, 4e) had trouble with as little variance as +/-1 level within the party (a 3-level range) and wasn't even happy with a 2-level range e.g. some are 4th, some are 5th.

This power curve issue also covered monsters. In 1e a 2nd level party, if careful and maybe a bit lucky and willing to accept a casualty or two, could reasonably expect to take down a hill giant. In 3e a hill giant wouldn't even work up a sweat in annihilating said 2nd level party, no matter how lucky they got. To me this is a design flaw rather than a feature.

Lan-"it seems to be my day to ramble"-efan

 

[The Crimson Binome]

4E was relentless about requiring synergies among the players.

Was that something which came about later in the product cycle? From what I played in the first year, it seemed like any character was pretty interchangeable with any other character within the same role, and you were fine as long as you covered all the bases.

 

[pemerton]

That's d20, not 3e.

You're pointing to a difference of brand. I was talking about the actual mechnical system.

 

[Tony Vargas]

You're pointing to a difference of brand. I was talking about the actual mechnical system.

There's a difference in the system, too, those 3pp games share only core mechanics - D&D is those core mechanics, plus tons of open content, plus proprietary content.

 

[pemerton]

What I think tended to happen in my experience was that Skill Challenges ended up becoming an exercise in dicing. I don't think that's what the designers' intent was. I'm fairly certain that it was supposed to be an introduction of the kind of modern structured interaction to D&D. I doubt they intended the way a lot of tables ended up using SCs. There were some aspects that made it turn into that, at least where I was. One was the requirement that everybody participate. This often meant that the SC as written would have some weird skills attached just to allow the barbarian's player something to do in a social situation. Our joke for that was "he does pushups to impress the king".

I think that the 4e desginers didn't have the courage of their convictions, and in their presentation of skill challenges tried to speak out of both sides of their mouths. It's clear in the DMG, and even moreso the DMG2, that skill challenges are envisaged as a system comparable to the sort of complex scene resolution one sees in many, many other contemporary RPGs.

But they also presented skill challenges - and the modules doubled down on this - as fiction-free "dice rolling exercises". Presumably this was meant to appeal to people who like rolling dice and aren't interested in the fiction of the RPG. But many people seemed to approach SCs this way even while complaining about it!

Anyway, I find the whole thing very strange. In combat, no one thinks you need an arbitrary rule to get the wizard involved - the wizard fights because s/he is under attack. In a social scene, the way you get the fighter's player to make a check is to frame the situation so that the player will miss out on something s/he wants unless s/he succeeds at a check. In my experience it's not that hard.

IMO the big problem with 4E's design wasn't that they used that idea, it's that they made every class use it, especially in the early days of 4E. The fighter and rogue both became "spellcasters" of a sort. A lot of players I recall were really undone by that change. They wanted to swing swords, not figure out when to use which power.

This is another thing that I find pretty strange. The idea that choosing what move to make, or what tactic to use, equals choosing what spell to cast, seems like the tail wagging the dog: it's taking an artefact of one particular RPG design (classsic D&D) and projecting it back onto the fiction as if that's just how things are in the world of the fantasy RPG.