For combat with more than 5 I will pull out minis. Exploration going into towns 99% theater of the mind
I don't have a strong preference based on edition. I've run 4e (and even Champions! which is far more (hex)grid-dependent than 3e or 4e could ever claim to have been) TotM, when it makes sense, for instance, when the combat is just trivial or the environment simple. And, I've taken out some sort of visual aid, even if just sketching positioning on scratch paper or laying out pencils and dice, in 5e (and even in Storyteller which is downright hostile to anything so ROLL-playish) when the reverse was the case and some help keeping positioning and the like straight was called for.Which do you prefer?
Nothing about 5e's system makes it more TotM-friendly than 3.x/PF, 4e or many other games, and 13th Age easily has it beat on that count, with a built-for-TotM system reminiscent of wrecan's "SARN-FU." Rather, it's the way 5e's tuned for fast combat, which makes tactical maneuvering moot, so while you can't do it very well, you don't miss it so much, and the encounter guidelines err on the side of many simple/trivial encounters that add up to an attrition/resource challenge over the course of a day, not an existential or even tactical challenge in each combat.
Well, 5e gives movement, range, and area in feet, and spells use geometric AEs. So if you want to know who gets caught in a burning hands or whatever, you need to know where everyone is in relation to the caster, where the effect is places, and line up the AE with those positions. Easy (enough) to do if the AE is simplified for use on a grid with a template (3e) or abstraction of all shapes to squares (4e), or if you adapt a shorcut like that to 5e, but potentially problematic if you're running TotM. 13A neatly solves the issue by /not/ tracking movement in feet, positioning precisely, nor areas in geometric shapes, making it work very smoothly for TotM. Movement, OAs, and the like are also designed to work with TotM in 13A, mechanically.I've not seen where 5e is in practice so much worse at TotM than 13th Age.
Well, 5e gives movement, range, and area in feet, and spells use geometric AEs. So if you want to know who gets caught in a burning hands or whatever, you need to know where everyone is in relation to the caster, where the effect is places, and line up the AE with those positions. Easy (enough) to do if the AE is simplified for use on a grid with a template (3e) or abstraction of all shapes to squares (4e), or if you adapt a shorcut like that to 5e, but potentially problematic if you're running TotM. 13A neatly solves the issue by /not/ tracking movement in feet, positioning precisely, nor areas in geometric shapes, making it work very smoothly for TotM. Movement, OAs, and the like are also designed to work with TotM in 13A, mechanically.
5e nominally 'defaults' to TotM, but it's numbers are presented as if it were meant to be used with minis, just of an unknown scale at the time of writing.![]()
Which is fine, really, if you were used to running TSR-era D&D TotM, since it was, having recently emerged from wargaming, presented in a similar way (though it as far as assuming a scale - two in the case of 1e AD&D, at least). And 5e did make a big priority out of evoking the classic game, witch 13A-style adaptations for TotM would have been at odds with.
Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that optional DMG rules are on par with 13A's standard rules, that's a pretty big failing when you think about it: the game is supposed to default to TotM, yet the mechanical presentation of the PH isn't conducive to that. Support for TotM - along with the 'tactical' module - is relegated to the DMG.Again, 5e provides the needed tools to do the abstraction 13th Age does. They're in the wrong book, but they're in the core books.
The funny part of that is that while Gygax used a wargaming scale, his home games apparently never used actual minis. Arneson did, though, so the two styles have play have always co-existed.