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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7747918" data-attributes="member: 6873517">I agree. I never played with minis back in the old days. College apartments, not enough money, lack of artistic talent, etc., meant we had few. I did get a bunch of metal painted by a talented guy I knew who did it for a reasonable cost in the 3.5 days and still have some of those. Even so, minis were optional, though they definitely helped a lot. What we did start doing in the mid '90s a lot was the paper tactical map or battlemap done with markers and maybe a few tokens. A piece of paper, a pencil, and some quick sketches went a long way to establishing the nature of the situation and as time went on the call of "can I get a tactical?" became more common. What we didn't have was a lot of formal tactical rules though we had a number of group heuristics to handle the lack of formal maps. For instance, we would give negating saves to a few monsters vs. area effect attacks to represent the fact that they might be on the edge of the effect and thus take no damage. We would often have a caster make an Intelligence check to target a spell. We never really did think of Attacks of Opportunity or good reach rules, though. The tendency was there in 3.X already with the introduction of map-reliant tactical things like Attacks of Opportunity. I don't have any 3.X books anymore but I'm pretty sure that they said "Minis are great, use them." 4E just continued that and made it a key part of the business strategy. It was quite obvious that 4E was explicitly designed with minis in mind and WotC clearly intended to push minis, though that seemed to flop. It was almost a minis game and was designed to compete with the numerous mini games around at the time, along with having a lot of things pulled in from competitors like WoW. As far as today, the online world, lacking the information-rich environment that comes with all being in the same room together really benefits from a map. In general I try to come up with something decent but there can be some real limitations due to lack of good maps (or time/ability to draw them). One thing I have found playing with a map has changed is the kinds of encounters I run. I used to run much more simple things like, oh, 8 orcs, due to the fact that without a map it was often easier to do that. That kind of encounter seems rather troublesome for a map, so I tend to run larger set pieces when I go through the trouble of making a map. On the other hand, I would also run in multiple dimensions or other things that are hard to depict on a map, so there are some definite advantages not using one.</blockquote>

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