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

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

Picture courtesy of Pixabay​

Wait, What?​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pleading the Fifth​

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[pemerton]

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.

The fact that githyanki are not licensed content has no bearing on whether or not 3E can be kit-bashed.

 

[Tony Vargas]

The fact that githyanki are not licensed content has no bearing on whether or not 3E can be kit-bashed.

3.5 is a lot more than the d20 core rules. You can build a conceptually unrelated game from the ground up using d20, but you're not kit-bashing D&D 3e. And, seriously, you cannot discount the community attitude towards RAW at the time.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

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!

Yeah, that's my point about 4E encouraging a very rules lawyer type of play. That happened in my games, even to people who I tended not to think would play that way. Anyone with rules lawyer tendencies was very much drawn in that direction.

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.

I suppose, but there's a lot of players who just want to swing their swords and not have to think, "wait, is it time for me to use my Daily...?" The old fighter class was very much for that kind of player---or at least it allowed for that kind of play---and I'm pretty sure we all know that type. Sometimes they're really good players in other ways, say good RPers, but they just don't like screwing around with game mechanics. Unfortunately in the original 4E you had no choice but to be a "spellcaster".

That's why the Champion archetype is a good thing in 5E. I wish there were a few other types of characters like that.

 

[Tallifer]

I ran 4th edition for four years (until WotC stopped supporting the on-line resources to handle the flood of options) without any grid or miniatures. Theatre of the mind works fine in any edition.

I will say on a tangent that 5th Edition did save my campaign from a dwindling core of three or four players to a waiting list of eager players: I can attract a much broader spectrum of players, both old school and noobies.

 

[pemerton]

there's a lot of players who just want to swing their swords and not have to think, "wait, is it time for me to use my Daily...?" The old fighter class was very much for that kind of player

A related discussion came up in the "worldbulding" thread.

I agree that a mechanically intricate game like 4e is hard for a "casual" player to get into and do well at. In the world of card games, I would compare bridge to five hundred in this respect. It's a virtue of 500 that it is possible for even a casual player to do passably well without following all the play and counting all the cards (the trump suit is longer; they can be led by a stronger partner; etc; and watch those casual players crumble when the bid is No Trumps!). But that isn't an argument that bridge is a bad game!

EDIT: the champion analogue in 4e is the archer ranger, who does nothing but Twin Strike or the occasional Twin Strike variant as an encouner or daily power. I think it's probably a weakness, though, for this character to have been ranged rather than melee. Melee is, on the whole, more exciting. The flip side being that 4e melee can be pretty lethal if you're not a technically competent player. Which I guess just reinforces the point that 4e is not particularly friendly for the "casual" player.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I agree that a mechanically intricate game like 4e is hard for a "casual" player to get into and do well at. In the world of card games, I would compare bridge to five hundred in this respect. It's a virtue of 500 that it is possible for even a casual player to do passably well without following all the play and counting all the cards (the trump suit is longer; they can be led by a stronger partner; etc; and watch those casual players crumble when the bid is No Trumps!). But that isn't an argument that bridge is a bad game!

I didn't say it was a bad game---in fact several times I've said that the were some good ideas in 4E---but that was a substantial limitation of it. 4E was, particularly at the medium to higher levels, more like bridge than like a simpler game like, oh, spades or euchre. For it to run well, you had to have a pretty solid knowledge of the system, and that could get very frustrating when a player didn't but was playing a character type that demanded it. I wouldn't necessarily call that kind of player "casual" either. Many of them were much more interested in the RP aspects, but got bogged down in the rules. Players of highly mixed abilities could also be frustrating, too. The fact that there were character types like the original bard that were very much built on operating off turn was often a real source of frustration, too. "Whose turn is it?" was not remotely uncommon to hear in the 4E days; I rarely hear that now.

It was way, way too like MtG in that respect. The folks I knew who were real MtG heads were the ones that liked 4E the best.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

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.

Yes, absolutely. We used magnetic chips under the base of the minis for that. Under 4E we still use them but not nearly as much as there are fewer conditions. Sometimes the chip stack would be markedly higher than the mini!

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

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.

I wasn't active online during 3.X. I'd dropped off in the early '00s.

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... 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...

I'd played or run so many other skill based games I'd long since used things like SCs.

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*).

Yeah, D&D has always been niche-protected, and certainly it is the case that 4E was just up front about it.

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.

I'm not sure I agree with the fact that you didn't need to know the system. IMO you needed to know it pretty well, certainly once you got over about 10th level. As I said elsewhere in this thread (in a conversation with pemerton), 4E had some things that mitigated against player engagement, most notably excessive turn length.

I think we'd long since allowed multiclass rogues, so my memory of a rogues-only type game was a bit skewed. If you were talking about the 2E thief with just humans RAW definitely. Regardless, 4E really assumed that party roles were filled and it was quite challenging not to have them filled IME. In that sense, the party roles were definitely influenced by MMO roles and builds: tank, healer, DPS, etc.

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

As to healing surges, IMO that was one of the good idea of 4E. I really wish they'd differentiated the bard from the cleric healing by having the bard do things like activate hit dice (bad WotC! foolish name for that). Basically the bard is able to make use of what you have in you already but the cleric brings something from the outside. But I'm not at all a fan of the bard as a full caster.

 

[pemerton]

4E was, particularly at the medium to higher levels, more like bridge than like a simpler game like, oh, spades or euchre.

I agree with this.

For it to run well, you had to have a pretty solid knowledge of the system

And this.

that could get very frustrating when a player didn't but was playing a character type that demanded it.

And this.

The folks I knew who were real MtG heads were the ones that liked 4E the best.

My group is a mix of long time RPGers (the least experienced RPGer started with Rolemaster nearly 20 years ago now, so had about 10 years RM experience when we started playing 4e), wargamers, boardgamers, etc. (Though for most the M:tG years are well behind them now; one is getting back into it as his kids pick it up.)

I posted this quite a few years ago now, and still think it is true:

I can only assume that WotC thought that there were many players like my group, who want a crunchier/more tactical play experience than a game like HeroQuest is going to deliver (half of us are ex-Rolemaster, after all) but who also were looking for a much less simulationist approach to world design, scenario design, scene framing, and action resolution.

So it's not just that they agreed with Ron Edwards, but also that they thought that the players who would flock to a narrativist-leaning game would be drawn from the ranks of those who love Runequest, Rolemaster and collectable card games.

And OK, when I put it that way, it looks like a pretty implausible hypothesis from the start!

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

I posted this quite a few years ago now, and still think it is true:<snip>

Yes I very much agree. I'm kinda sorta simulationsist, though not a hard core one. This is especially true when it comes to world design, which I always felt was the weakest part of 4E. It didn't have an economy I could follow, for instance. It was super gamist---witness how little detail was presented in the original Monster Manual as an example, just stats---and then the adventure designs were a mix of gamist and narrativist, with essentially no simulation or world-building at all. They didn't even bother to lay out their world, though they constantly mentioned Nerath and its backstory!

In many respects, I think your quote really clarifies for me what I really just didn't like about about 4E. It didn't check one of my own key boxes and tended to get bogged down in aspects I didn't much care for. A good group could get past that, of course. I played some 4E that was a lot of fun, absolutely. I really never liked much liked running it.