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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5473756" data-attributes="member: 58197">I was thinking much the same. Not quite the same, because Mike Mearls has always been up front about his enjoyment of old-school play; if his public announcements were driven by WotC's design and marketing priorities, he certainly would have kept his mouth shut about running a monthly AD&amp;D game! So I don't think he's suddenly had some kind of gag order taken off.I do, however, agree that this may indicate the start of a move away from miniatures-dependence. That dependence was a feature as long as DDM was a big money-maker for WotC. Now that DDM has been canceled, the feature has become a bug, adding another barrier to entry to a game that has too many already. I think that unless that poll shows a very strong preference for minis, we will see a trend away from the battlemat in official D&amp;D products over the next few years. Eliminating minis-dependence from 4E is a pretty tall order, but they'll do what they can to reduce it, and when the time comes for 5E they will eliminate it.It's funny. I have a ridiculous miniatures collection--close to 2,000 at last count. (It got to the point where I made a spreadsheet just to keep track of them all.) I've dabbled in metal miniature painting and modding, and had a lot of fun with it. I love my minis. And yet, I'd be happy to see them become optional, even deprecated. In my experience, when the battlemat comes out, the game slows to a crawl and immersion is replaced with number-crunching and square-counting.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5473756, member: 58197"] I was thinking much the same. Not [i]quite[/i] the same, because Mike Mearls has always been up front about his enjoyment of old-school play; if his public announcements were driven by WotC's design and marketing priorities, he certainly would have kept his mouth shut about running a monthly AD&D game! So I don't think he's suddenly had some kind of gag order taken off. I do, however, agree that this may indicate the start of a move away from miniatures-dependence. That dependence was a feature as long as DDM was a big money-maker for WotC. Now that DDM has been canceled, the feature has become a bug, adding another barrier to entry to a game that has too many already. I think that unless that poll shows a [i]very[/i] strong preference for minis, we will see a trend away from the battlemat in official D&D products over the next few years. Eliminating minis-dependence from 4E is a pretty tall order, but they'll do what they can to reduce it, and when the time comes for 5E they [i]will[/i] eliminate it. It's funny. I have a ridiculous miniatures collection--close to 2,000 at last count. (It got to the point where I made a spreadsheet just to keep track of them all.) I've dabbled in metal miniature painting and modding, and had a lot of fun with it. I love my minis. And yet, I'd be happy to see them become optional, even deprecated. In my experience, when the battlemat comes out, the game slows to a crawl and immersion is replaced with number-crunching and square-counting. [/QUOTE]

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