Keldryn
Adventurer
I am decidedly in favor of having gridless combat be the default in DDN, with grid-based tactical combat being an optional module. I find grid-based combat to be very limiting as a DM and also very time-consuming, both in terms of prep-time before the game and while running the game.
That being said, I admit that I currently have trouble running D&D without miniatures. I've been playing with minis on a grid for years with systems that heavily encouraged their use. Probably even more of a factor is that I've spent much more time playing computer and console RPGs than pencil & paper RPGs, so I'm used to having concrete visual representations of everything. My imagination has become weak from lack of use. I need to get used to running gridless combats again before it will feel natural.
I suspect that the current D&D audience's experiences with computer and video game RPGs is probably the primary reason why many players have trouble visualizing gridless combat. The Final Fantasy analogy is an apt one. The early games had very abstract combat; your character would play an attack animation and a monster would take damage. The rest of the battle was left to your imagination. These early games were much more abstract in general; your party didn't magically collapse into one individual when outside of combat, and your character wasn't the same size as a mountain or a town when walking around the wilderness. Modern games are so visually detailed as to leave very little need for the player to imagine.
I cut my teeth on BECMI D&D (starting in early 1987), and I have fond memories of playing in the car, around the campfire, or sitting outside during lunch hour at school. Minis wouldn't really have been a viable option in those situations, and we never found those games lacking. I did start buying and using minis fairly early on in my games at home, but their use was pretty abstract; we used them for indicating marching order and tracking relative positioning in combat. I mostly bought them because I had fun painting them.
My experience was the opposite. When running 4e, it takes all of my attention and faculties just to keep track of monsters' attack powers, auras, triggered actions, and positions on the grid. I found it next to impossible to breathe any kind of flavor or life into the encounters, or to even remember to determine if some monsters should flee instead of fighting to the death. That's more about monster design than gridded combat, however. I prefer "terribly bland" monsters, at least for the majority of combatants, as the fewer stats I need to be aware of, the more attention I can pay to description and fictional context.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the grid itself; it's a valuable tool for running some combat encounters. It becomes a problem when that tool becomes a virtual necessity for running the game. I am aware that it's possible to run 4e without a grid, and some on this board have done that. However, you're working against the system in doing so. For all intents and purposes, I think it's fair to say that 4e assumes and requires the use of a grid.
So what's so bad about the grid?
Keep in mind that none of these are absolutes, just general tendencies or habits that are easy to fall into.
The use of the grid itself naturally draws attention to the visual representation of the battle and away from the DM's narrative of the combat.
The use of the grid can make for a jarring transition between "modes" of gameplay. Free-form, narrative exploration comes to an abrupt halt while the DM sets up the battle grid, and players go from primarily narrative description to moving figures around on a board. Then the grid gets cleaned up and we transition back to a more narrative mode of play.
The grid can take a long time to set up. If you're using Dungeon Tiles, Dwarven Forge pieces, or similar aids, it can take a significant amount of time to locate the desired pieces and put them together. It's best to do this before the game when possible, which can dramatically increase prep time. If you don't do it before the game, it significantly increases the amount of time to run an encounter, and now the players are sitting and waiting. Drawing the map on a wet-erase mat is often a lot faster, but it still takes time, especially if you try to make it look good. I used to try and draw all of my maps in Campaign Cartographer so that I could print them out at 1" = 5' scale, but I ended up spending so many hours of prep time making maps and trying to get them to print properly that I didn't have time to make the adventure interesting.
The grid can make combat take longer to play out. Counting squares takes time, especially when players need to pause on each square to check whether or not they'll provoke an AoO. It's not uncommon for players to know where they want to move to and have to count squares through a few different routes to see if they can get there without getting attacked. Even though it's often fairly obvious just from looking at the grid where an area of effect will hit the most creatures, the precise nature of the grid leads many players to count out the squares anyway, in case their intuition is wrong.
The grid still doesn't eliminate player questions for clarification. Players don't need to ask how far away a creature is or where a creature is standing, but players are still asking a lot of questions about the map. Is that square in the middle of the room a table? What does this squiggle represent again? Those crates extend halfway into this square, can I fit through there? You didn't mention them when you described the room, but are those bottles on the table (on a Dungeon Tile) actually there? Wait, did you say that this table against the wall here was another bookshelf or that it was bench? Tell me again, is the orc figure with the sword the hobgoblin, or is it the orc figure with the spear? Sometimes there end up being more questions than if we'd just run the whole thing without a map.
Reliance on the grid can impose limits on your adventure locations. Adventures in Dungeon magazine are a prime example of what happens to your adventure locations when you try to design your adventures around being able to use Dungeon Tiles to build your battle maps. It's tempting to re-use those pre-printed poster maps instead of drawing or building your own, to save time. When you're designing an adventure and you know that you're going to need to either draw an encounter location on a wet-erase map or build it with Dungeon Tiles, how likely are you to create a location that will be very difficult to create a battle grid for? Consider the dungeon designs in the original Dragonlance Modules, or Castle Ravenloft in module I6. You wouldn't likely see designs like those in a 4e adventure. If I imagine a location that won't be easy to represent on a battle grid, I'm unlikely to actually use it in play.
The grid limits the scale of your encounter areas and makes range categories mostly a non-issue. Unless you have one massive gaming table,
you're going to be lucky to have even a 3' wide battle map, which is 36 squares or 180' in the game world. That can work for dungeons composed of passages and rooms, but not nearly so well for wilderness areas, large caverns, cities, dungeons built by giants, etc. I can't fit a battle map that wide on my table, unless the players keep their character sheets, dice, and snacks on their laps.
Not at all. Clear rules are important, and having visual aids can make the game run a lot more smoothly. There is a point at which having too much structure becomes stifling, and that's different for each individual. For me, 4e's clearly-defined powers and assumed use of battle grids was well over that line. But I don't function well under a rigid structure in any situation. Give me just enough structure to give me something to get started with, and I'll improvise from there.
Wish I could give you XP for this.
