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.

 

[darkbard]

Which is exactly the Schrodinger approach that @Saelorn described, it does not make sense narratively in the moment. Only after you have resolved the scenario can you actually describe what happened.

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

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

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Most of this seems to be about how the game handles resource management (which, as far as hp are concerned, had always been a thing for every class). But doesn't seem to me to be particularly evocative of "cool down" rates.

I know that a lot of people complained about the 4e resource recovery framework, because in D&D only spell casters and 3E barbarians have daily recovery abilities. But I don't see how this remotely relates to being an MMO.

4E clearly drew on three types of games that were quite current at the time: MMOs, CCGs, and miniatures skirmish games. It's got a much stronger family resemblance to these types than prior editions had. So there aren't definitive features but I do think a lot of older players were bothered by them, and, of course, there were folks who really loved them. The people I know who really loved 4E were the biggest MtG, minis game, and MMO heads. I don't think this was an accident.

I don't dispute that it reminded you of City of Heroes. It reminded someone else of WOW. It reminded me of HeroWars/Quest (uniform PC build and resolution structures that bind the PC to a cosmological drama about to explode) and Moldvay Basic (simple, crisp effect descriptions which leave most of the adjudication as a table matter rather than being spelled out in needless and constraining detail).

Given the number of people who have tried to "disprove" the resemblance of 4e to Moldvay Basic, I don't think I'm doing too much harm expressing my inability to see any close resemblance to a MMO.

I really don't get the connection of 4E to Moldvay Basic. The 5E playtest clearly drew on that right down to the look and feel of the layout, though they ended up backing away from that in the final version.

4E seemed to try to adjudicate nearly everything whereas Basic was much more of a "here's a really simple set of rules". If 4E, almost everything was a power of some sort and every class (until Essentials) had the same structure of At Will, Encounter, and Daily. In BESM, the only casters were wizards, elves, and clerics. There were no parallels to Encounter powers at all. Anybody but a caster made basic attacks or took relevant actions, most of which were adjudicated by the DM given the lack of any real system for that outside thief skills and a few other ad hoc systems like detecting secret doors or listening at doors.

IMO, the writing aside, I can't think of too many similarities between BESM and 4E.

Classic D&D (oiginal D&D, 1st ed AD&D, B/X, maybe even 2nd ed AD&D?) used the notion of a "turn". That is, one unit of party action! In the fiction, it correlates to 10 minutes.

4e replaces thar with the notion of an "encounter". That is, one unit of party drama. In the fiction, it correlates to 5 minutes.

This is one of those things that made me think of Moldvay Basic. I thought MMOs used real seconds of time, not units of in-fiction time given labels that reflect their significance to the activity of gameplay.

The notion of "turn" is clearly drawn from the game's wargaming roots. I think the big difference is that it's actually a unit of time, whereas an encounter is a much more flexible unit of time that could be 5 minutes but often is much shorter. More on this below.

MMOs certainly do use units of time, which make sense given the fact that they're real time games. Otherwise they have no real ability to synchronize actions across all the players.

I've not played any MMOs (I know myself well enough to know that's a bad idea) but have played video games with cooldown. Often these are set up in a way so that if you're in a fight a long cooldown can only be used once per fight. The CRPG Pillars of Eternity, which has a system very clearly modeled on 4E---I have called it "what 4E would be if it could" because the computer handles all the scut work of condition tracking and so forth---there are quite clear "encounter" and "daily" powers. One of the keys to the system is gaming the fights by only peeling off a relatively small, bite-sized fight so your encounter powers constantly refresh. To manage this, the game taxes some abilities such as summons, by making it impossible or difficult to summon or buff outside of combat. The system, is, in short, pretty much 4E taken to its logical extreme. (Pillars is a game that would appeal to the 4E stalwarts, and the designers had some very interesting ideas, such as the way they handle the bard-esque chanter. And indeed they intend to release a TT version.)

A turn in 1E and BESM is an actual unit of time, though: 1 turn is 10 minutes. In 1E a combat round is a minute, a fact many people found rather ludicrous and either ignored or changed. I think we used 12 seconds. In BESM I don't recall how long a round is, though I thought it was 10 seconds, so roughly similar.

But stuff that tires you out a bit less, and takes only a short rest to recover, is not easy to relate to reality? Yet short rests seem to be widely accepted in 5e. So I don't really follow this.

I think many people accept it, but it's one of my least favorite aspects of the game.

For instance, there are classes that synergize much better due to having a lot of short rest recoveries and others that basically can't be bothered with short rests. Compare a party of a monk, battlemaster fighter, and warlock to, say, a party of a barbarian, paladin, and sorcerer. The former is highly short rest dependent while the latter gets minimal to no benefit from a short rest. This often seems to set up an inherent conflict among players and between players and the DM about something that's fundamentally about rules. Another big difference between the notion of the BESM or AD&D turn and the encounter or short rest is that the turn made no pretense to being in the game world at all. It's just there and by BESM or AD&D it's not even all that relevant in terms of game play as it's just a unit of time like the square on the battlemap is of distance. The encounter or short rest, by contrast, intrude on the fiction in a way that BESM/AD&D "turn" or "square" tend not to. These units impose a certain amount of discretization on continuous space of action, but for the most part we learn to ignore them. Encounter, however, is a much more macro unit of discretization.

 

[Sadras]

Wow, I skip a few pages reading the thread and it turns from an interesting discussion about mini use to yet another edition war wank.

Those are the very best wanks.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Not really. Everyone’s going to have different tolerances for the differing levels of abstraction, even in variations on dealing with hit point loss and recovery. Assuming that just because there’s one level of unrealism going on means that any other level must be accepted is really just a fallacy.

This is a very, very good point. Everyone's also going to have varying tolerances for different kinds of abstractions, too.

Many years ago, Monte Cook defended hit points---something that often bothered me before I read his argument---as one of the prices we pay for having a game that can handle things of drastically different scale without really bogging down. Essentially his point was that hit points were one of the things that let us have dragons and pixies on the same board with each other. I can't find his post on this anymore but it was a good argument.

The "bloodied" condition was something 4E did kind of neatly because it connected being at half hit points to qualitative things. Some monsters or characters got more powerful when bloodied. Some monsters or characters were incentivized to attack bloodied targets. It connected a game status to the rules and the narrative in a fairly elegant way that other aspects, such as "encounter" power or "daily" power never did, especially "daily" for characters like rogues or fighters. It wasn't perfect, but it was generally decent and is an example of something I wish the designers had kept in 5E. (Yes, I could house rule it....)

There's a lot of things that 4E did I liked, despite being overall negative towards it. My biggest objection to it was how slow it was at the medium to high levels and how egregiously long character sheets got.

 

[Jay Verkuilen]

Maybe the reason that Ruin Quest is doing so well is that you can get your leg broken and your hand chopped off when fighting a bunch of mooks. :shrug:

Yeah, that's a game that's much too far down the "realism" track for me, although the old fumble tables were pretty ludicrous and you could end up dying from weapon fumbles....

 

[pemerton]

it is simply not true that having 1 hp left in ADnD means that you are "just fine and dandy". It would mean that any injury is going to be the one that potentially kills you.

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

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

it does not make sense narratively in the moment. Only after you have resolved the scenario can you actually describe what happened.

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

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

 

[billd91]

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

???
That sentence makes no sense to me. I strongly doubt JRRT had mixed feelings about Frodo’s fate when the orc chieftain speared him.

 

[pemerton]

4E clearly drew on three types of games that were quite current at the time: MMOs, CCGs, and miniatures skirmish games. It's got a much stronger family resemblance to these types than prior editions had.

AD&D has a closer resemblance to miniatures wargaming than 4e, right down to advice in the DMG about mini scales, rules for building castles and then laying seige to them, etc. 4e (as Rob Heinsoo explained in an interview in 2008) has a closer resemblance to contemporary "indie" RPGs.

As far as miniature skirmishing is concerned, all that 4e seems to add to 3.5E (which had creatures spaces defined in terms of symmetrical mini bases, and had rules for 5' steps (= 1 sq shift), etc) is a larger variety of powers that make indvidual positioning during melee more important; and to change the action economy so as to encourage mobility.

So there aren't definitive features but I do think a lot of older players were bothered by them

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

The people I know who really loved 4E were the biggest MtG, minis game, and MMO heads.

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

What distinguished the people I know who loved 4e was that they (i) enjoyed games, and (ii) were not interested in a game that involves following the GM's plot crumbs. I don't think this was an accident.

I really don't get the connection of 4E to Moldvay Basic. The 5E playtest clearly drew on that right down to the look and feel of the layout, though they ended up backing away from that in the final version.

4E seemed to try to adjudicate nearly everything whereas Basic was much more of a "here's a really simple set of rules".

Where does 4e try to adjudicate nearly everything? How hard is it to freeze a puddle using Icy Terrain? To close a portal to the Abyss? To make a NPC fall in love with you?

4e has a clear action economy; so does Moldvay Basic. Both have crisp, simple presentation of character abilities. 4e's combat rules are far more intricate, but not because they try to "adjudicate nearly everything" but simply because they encompass a far greater number of parameters than Moldvay Basic does. 4e's non-combat rules are both simpler and more general than Moldvay's, because 4e draws on 20 intervening years of RPG design (and especially techniques of "closed scene" resolution developed in indie RPGs).

Moldvay Basic isn't a font or layout; it's about a game that presents itself with clear rules and doesn't encourage the GM to manipulate the rules with a nod and a wink. 4e is the first version of D&D since to return to that approach. (Of course it's actual gameplay is different from Moldvay - it's not about Gygaxian dungeon crawling, but about the sort of heroic epic that Moldvay Basic alludes to in its Foreword but doesn't actually support.)

If 4E, almost everything was a power of some sort and every class (until Essentials) had the same structure of At Will, Encounter, and Daily. In BESM, the only casters were wizards, elves, and clerics. There were no parallels to Encounter powers at all. Anybody but a caster made basic attacks or took relevant actions, most of which were adjudicated by the DM given the lack of any real system for that outside thief skills and a few other ad hoc systems like detecting secret doors or listening at doors.

Moldvay has a fundamental action economy: the turn, which limits player declared actions and correlates them to the various other economies of the game (wandering monsters; light - torches, lanterns or spells; searching; fighting; etc).

4e has a series of action economies: the round in combat; the encounter; the "go" in a skill challenge - and these correlate to the other economies of the game (recovery of expended powers; making checks so as to change the fiction; accruing treasure parcels; etc).

It's the tightness of design, and its clear orientation to purpose, that connects the two games. Also the empahsis on adjudication over karaoke.

The notion of "turn" is clearly drawn from the game's wargaming roots. I think the big difference is that it's actually a unit of time, whereas an encounter is a much more flexible unit of time that could be 5 minutes but often is much shorter.

The relevant passages were already cited upthread. The duration "until the end of the encounter" means 5 minutes. Encounter powers are recovered with a rest of 5 minutes or so. The idea that "the encounter" as a mechanical unit in 4e is plagued by uncertainty is not borne out by the rules of the game.

The encounter or short rest, by contrast, intrude on the fiction in a way that BESM/AD&D "turn" or "square" tend not to. These units impose a certain amount of discretization on continuous space of action, but for the most part we learn to ignore them. Encounter, however, is a much more macro unit of discretization.

In Moldvay Basic and AD&D, all combat takes a turn (including binding "wounds", etc); all searching takes a turn; all movement is in blocks of turns; etc.

If you ignore those, then you are ignoring the action economy of those games. Presumably you could llikewise ignore the action eocnomy of 4e. (The 4e DMG2 even had a discussion of various ways to do this.)

there are classes that synergize much better due to having a lot of short rest recoveries and others that basically can't be bothered with short rests.

But this isn't an argument that short rest abilities are "unrealistic" or "break immersion" or "rupture suspension of disbelief". It's a complaint about assymetric resource suites across classes. That complaint is as old as wilderness adventuring in which the MUs dominate because, outside the dungeon, they can safely nova their spell load-out and thereby dominate encounters.

Of course 4e solved this problem.

 

[pemerton]

???
That sentence makes no sense to me. I strongly doubt JRRT had mixed feelings about Frodo’s fate when the orc chieftain speared him.

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

 

[Kobold Boots]

???
That sentence makes no sense to me. I strongly doubt JRRT had mixed feelings about Frodo’s fate when the orc chieftain speared him.

Depends on how you define ambivalent and whether or not you break the fourth wall.

As an author, I know whether or not I'm actually killing a character when I write the piece. I can stabby stabby all I want if I know the character is going to be alive on the other side of it a few chapters later.

Similarly, I know my intentions as a DM when I'm running a campaign. I let my players turn the dials prior to campaign start on the "high magic, low magic", "high fatality, low fatality" scales and it pretty much works for the table. For the record the dials at my table usually skew towards high fatality and mid to low magic.

KB