minis and battlemats or not?

[Dykstrav]

I started using minis and battle mats in the mid-2E days. Most of my players loved the idea, but in the days of pewter, only about four or five players actually bought and painted minis.

A 1E DM that I played under in the same time frame hated minis and mats. He claimed it interfered with immersion, but after trying it twice, the players all pretty much realized that it took away his ability to fudge positioning when he wanted. We respected his decision to abstract positioning and left the mats and minis for my 2E game.

In 2002, I tried going back to 2E and had a blast with everything except combat. The DM was good at the storytelling and narrative angle but felt restricted by the rules, and the combat rules were heavily house-ruled (i.e., he often ignored the rules as written in favor of what he wanted to happen, sometimes in our favor and sometimes in the monster's favor). This guy was heavily abstract, he even told us that he kept hit points secret because he felt like player's tracking hit points was metagaming (which, I fould out later, he fudged as he liked as well).

In the early 3E days, many of the DMs I saw didn't like mats and miniatures because they didn't like attacks of opportunity or the way flanking and the rogue's sneak attack worked. They decided to play without mats and minis as a method to maintain more control over combat. Typically, this had the net effect of reducing sneak attacks and attacks of opportunity to either encounter powers or relegating them to DM fiat.

Personally, I prefer miniatures and some sort of battle mat. Currently, I'm using maps from the fantastic locations products and dungeon tiles, but I've spent many a year on the vinyl. I feel that it makes the game more into a board game, but you also gain the benefit of consistently applied rules. Players aren't asking about positioning every turn when their iniative comes up, so it speeds up play. The world (and when characters can use their cool powers, like sneak attack) doesn't feel so random when everyone can clearly see where their character is on a board.

 

[Dykstrav]

Double post.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

I've always played with minis and battlemaps here from 1e to 4e. I prefer it that way, not just for the "I was over there not here" problem, but also because it puts the answer "how many of those orcs can I get with a fireball" in the player's hands and removes the answer to "can I get a flank without provoking an attack of opportunity? How about without exposing myself to more than one full attack?" from the realm of DM fiat.

 

[fba827]

I never really used them before my current group.

But now that I have used them, it makes a complicated combat encounter much easier. If for no other reason than to ensure that what everyone is envisioning is the same.

Though, as a downside, there does tend to be less description of "flavor" in a room because if you start describing a bed in the bedroom, you have to start accounting for it on the grid, etc. So those details might get glossed over.

for rp, noncombat encounters, or non-complicated combat encounters then I have no problem without them.

 

[Holy Bovine]

No minis, no battlemat. It breaks the immersion and it's a distraction to the RP.

I disagree. Its not like the battlemat is being used during the meeting with the king.

The groups I have played with for the last 20+ years must be an oddity because I have never seen any of them do a lot of role play during combat with or without a mat & minis. We still describe what we are trying to accomplish but that's about it.

 

[loki8481]

personally, I've always found it easier and quicker to just use a graph-lined white board and dry erase markers. less need to run around carrying bags of minis of various sizes to represent any possible monster that the players might run into.

 

[wedgeski]

I love the mini's, and we heavily embraced the "combat as tactical sub-game" element of both 3E and 4E D&D, so it makes for much fun at the table.

We don't find it affects RP at all, simple as that. Our best roleplaying happens outside of combat, usually, with in-combat roleplaying usually little more than the sum of name-calling, victimisation, taunting, and general trash-talk. Push back from the battle-mat, and the RP is as rich as it ever was.

 

[avin]

For D&D games we use battlemats and miniatures. 3.5 and 4E truly are easier with minis and solves, as somebody said, the "I wasn't there" problem.

For all other systems I don't use miniatures or maps.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Yes. Or, when we don't, it's down to other visual representation (e.g., markers on a flipmat, map, or even whiteboard; whatever's appropriate at the time).

And, really. . . Miniatures, mats and so on are an impediment to imagination, a distraction from roleplaying, or a breaker of immersion, in the same way that the use of RPG rules is any or all of those things.

 

[ggroy]

A 1E DM that I played under in the same time frame hated minis and mats. He claimed it interfered with immersion, but after trying it twice, the players all pretty much realized that it took away his ability to fudge positioning when he wanted.

The DM was good at the storytelling and narrative angle but felt restricted by the rules, and the combat rules were heavily house-ruled (i.e., he often ignored the rules as written in favor of what he wanted to happen, sometimes in our favor and sometimes in the monster's favor). This guy was heavily abstract, he even told us that he kept hit points secret because he felt like player's tracking hit points was metagaming (which, I fould out later, he fudged as he liked as well).

I knew several DMs who liked the deliberate "vagueness" of playing without minis and mats. Some would even roll dice to randomly determine which enemy was nearest to a particular player, whenever a player asked.

At several games, we the players proposed the idea of playing with minis and mats, even if it was using chess pieces or tokens from a monopoly game, on the table without much of a grid. We were essentially getting sick and tired of the repeated constant arguing over "I was over there, not here" problem. Sometimes these arguments would last as long as 2 minutes, with the other players tuning out or even sometimes falling asleep. The DM at first absolutely protested at even the notion of playing with minis and mats. Then with most of the players threatening to walk out on the game for good, the DM relented and we decided to try using minis. It was only then that we the players came to the realization that some of these DMs didn't even know how to adjudicate combat properly. A few DMs literally did not know what the proper combat rules were. Essentially we caught these DMs in a lie, and called them out on it.