Imagine, no Battlemat...

[KenM]

Todays Dork Tower has something to say on battlemats/ using minis.
http://archive.gamespy.com/comics/dorktower/

 

[wedgeski]

They main thing I HATE about a map is square counting. I DESPISE it when the Wizard counts off squares in between his turns and figures out how to perfectly place his AE spell to get the bad guys but amazingly avoid anyone in the party. In a fluid moving battle there is no time for a Wizard to do something like that, and I don't like it when the players do something like that, but it's nearly impossible to avoid.

Why not? That's what a Reflex save represents: unpredictability. The game is already ahead of you.

Everyone else gets their time between turns to plot strategies and come up with tactics, and unlike the fighter who gets to smack things ad-infinitum all day, the wizard only gets a few chances to turn the tide of battle. Who's to say how long wizards train in spatial awareness and battle readiness so that they *do* know where the optimum place to drop their fireball is?

 

[jdrakeh]

Eh, a lot of people don't use battlemats or maps to plot out combat blow by blow. It's hardly big news. Playing D&D 3x without a battlemat is no different than playing AD&D 1e without a ruler, really (note that character movement in AD&D 1e wasn't coincidentally listed in inches). Some people like the added structure that maps and/or measurements provide, while others don't. I've only played in three campaigns that used maps to coordinate combat, myself (and only one of them was a d20 System game). The map only proved truly necessary in one of them (a Fantasy Trip campaign).

 

[Doc_Klueless]

I've been playing with Battlemaps for years and years with multiple game systems.

Heck, even back in 1981 with AD&D we'd draw out the room on graph paper and use Xs and Os in pencils to show where things were. Kind of a poor man's battlemap.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I prefer using graph paper.

The big problems I've found are small map sizes (it's a lot of effort making a map big enough to paste four pages together) and, of course, my terrible sense of scale makes it really hard to do buildings properly.

On the plus side, I can do maps ahead of time (instead of on a battlemat), I can actually hide nasty things around the map (like mines, explosive gas pockets, etc) along with things like cover and rivers.

Yeah, there's square counting, but I find that to be better than the alternative.

 

[Warbringer]

Before I answered this question I reead every post and my opinion changed..Wow

I'd have said in 3.5 it was a risk not to use a battlemat...NOW, I'm going to dump my mat based on comments on this topic and I'M EXCITED about doing so. I think my game will flow much quicker...

 

[woodelf]

So, I tried Iron Heroes a bit last weekend, but we all kind of assumed the guy whose house we played at would have a battlemat, or something with 1" squares on it, but he didn't. We fought some, but the whole thing folded after a while, because everyone said we couldn't do it without some kind of visual representation of what squares our guys were in and what-not.

We're not a heavy miniature collecting/painting group, we use a lot of pennies and dice and the shoe from Monopoly and stuff for markers, but with any d20 game we always have the battlemat for flanking, attacks of opportunity, movement and just general knowledge of what's going on.

But on the drive home, my friend was talking about a year and half long Exalted game we recently finished, a very combat heavy game, and we never once had a battlemat when playing Exalted, or anything like it. GM sketched the basic shape of the battlefield once or twice, but that was it. We never wondered where our guys were, we all visualized it and it worked. Is that a difference in game systems or what? Now that I think about, I was in a Mutants & Masterminds game a year or two back with no maps-- it seemed to work.

So, this is all a roundabout way of speculating about the possibility of d20 without miniatures. Is anyone doing it? Do you just get rid of attacks of opportunity or what? Or can you keep AoO and still do without knowing where the 5 ft. squares end and begin? Or, more generally, do you need a slimmed down, reworked d20 system or just the same game and more imagination?

Can we live without the battlemat?

Yep. I've been running a D20 System D&D game for a year or more now, and we almost never use a battle mat. Basically only when i (1) remember to bring it and (2) have something that's easier to draw than to describe--like a particularly complex room shape. And not specifically because of an aversion to battlemats/miniatures, per se--i used them all the time when i ran AD&D2. Even to the point of buying miniatures for all my players. No, my aversion is to the niggling tactical details of D&D3E and excessive fussiness and rulesiness.

And you're absolutely right: D&D3[.5]E goes out of its way, IMHO, to make it a pain to do fights without a mat of some sort. In fact, part of why i don't use a mat with D20 System games is precisely to counter this influence--to discourage players from focusing on some of the pickier details. But we still use AoOs, and all the other RAW. It's plenty possible. And it's more fun, IMHO, without the battlemat.

 

[DonTadow]

They main thing I HATE about a map is square counting. I DESPISE it when the Wizard counts off squares in between his turns and figures out how to perfectly place his AE spell to get the bad guys but amazingly avoid anyone in the party. In a fluid moving battle there is no time for a Wizard to do something like that, and I don't like it when the players do something like that, but it's nearly impossible to avoid.

I've thought of going to a flat board and just using a tape measure for distance, but that is more work IMO and I still need something to draw my terrain on.

So its up to the DM to determine if the fireball hits depending on how he sees it in his head? That reason alone accounted for a number of arguemets in my nonmat games.

If DM is easy going and pretty much rules lite, matless games roll a lot easier. If the DM still stays a stickler for the rules, you're going to get arguments.

 

[lukelightning]

I don't mind casters positioning their area-of-effect spell precisely. I assume that this is part of the training that wizards et. al. receive; how to aim their spells. I bet that if I could cast fireball in real life I'd quickly learn how to judge its area and range accurately.

Plus on the topic of battlemats: I like 'em. I always like playing with toys. Way back in 1ed we used legos and tape measures. This worked fine but lead to arguements involving area of effect and range, and especially line of sight. Battlemats have the advantage of being "digital" as opposed to "analog." You're either in the square or not.

 

[Gahnomen]

It's pretty interesting, none of the groups I've played with for years now ever used a battlemat, so I figured I'd try it just as an experiment in the game I run. I asked the players what they thought about it during the first session, and they think it was so-so. After the end of the second session though, they suddenly couldn't live without

It certainly makes things easier for the DM, and I think the players can notice the 'fairness' that comes from using a battlemat, rather than the DM's (sometimes) arbitrary decisions about AoO's, wether a player will reach the enemy this round or next, and so forth.

In short, we always use a mat nowadays, and the players nag about using one with the other DM's too.