Minis or Theatre of the Mind? (Survey)

For combat with more than 5 I will pull out minis. Exploration going into towns 99% theater of the mind

 

[Sketchpad]

In combat, I like to use minis when I can for all games I run.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Which do you prefer?

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.

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.

The single biggest determinant, though, is the play space available. If you're running where there's enough table space to lay out maps & minis, like as not, it makes sense to do sofor any but the most trivial encounter. If you're running with no play surface (which I did a lot back in the 90s - all the local gaming shops that hosted games had closed, and we were running games crowded around studio apartment), then TotM isn't just the best choice, it's the only choice.

 

[Vexorg]

I love minis and use them every game, BUT...

I've found that as DM if I use a drawn grid or poster map I tend to point to the map rather than describe things, so Ive started to use minis on bare tabletop just as relative distance markers.

 

[flametitan]

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.

I've not seen where 5e is in practice so much worse at TotM than 13th Age. Area of Effects can be a little difficult to track if you're trying to track it accurately, but that's why DMG 249 exists (which should have been in the PH, but that's too late now.) After that you get a 13th Age esque means of saying you fall back to X feet away from the melee, just with feet instead of bands.

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

 

[flametitan]

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.

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. It even calls out burning hands as an example of how to handle Area of Effect in ToTM (according to the table it can target two enemy creatures) while noting that you should abstract the combat a little so that you aren't in a headache over who can target what. Once you start using that chart, the only real difference between the two is that one uses dice and the other math for the AoEs while the range bands are broader in 13th Age.

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.

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.

 

[MarkB]

I switched from minis to theatre of the mind for my latest 5e campaign, and I'm strongly considering switching back. We've gone through plenty of combats that have worked well enough, but in most cases I end up having to at least draw out a map anyway, and even then, I don't feel like I'm always conveying to my players the lay of the land properly, let alone where everyone is positioned relative to each other, and I feel like I'm making more assumptions regarding their positioning and movement than I really have a right to.

I run games at a club and our current session is just wrapping up. Next time I come back around to DMing I think I'll break out the minis again.

 

[Ezequielramone]

I love to collect minis and look at how awesome those are for me. And I love to see my player's face when I show up an awesome monster on the table or when they choose their minis. Also the tactical edge of the game is something I enjoy. Still from time to time I use totm

 

[Tony Vargas]

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.

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.

13A defaults to TotM, and everything is presented that way. So, yeah, it handles it better, even before comparing the quality of the rules in question (which is generally a fruitless exercise, anyway).

Can the DM run 5e TotM anyway? Sure, he's probably going to at least try, because it's the 'default.' But then a DM could run 4e TotM, too - and probably just as well if using wrecan's SARN-FU, for instance.


....JMHO, but TotM was a buzzword during the edition war, and 5e paid it some lip service, while understanding what it really needed to do was get back to the classic game in the up-front presentation, and doing so. 3e/4e style tactical combat and actual TotM support were token efforts for DMs who'd gotten invested in the controversy. The main thrust of 5e is to evoke the classic game, and, in the classic game, we didn't debate TotM (no one'd even coined it) vs minis, we just played it however was expedient at the time...

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.

 

[Lidgar]

Combat = minis/grid for us. We used to be (i.e. 1e/2e days) much more TotM, but then we all got into minis with 3e.

Everything else: TotM. Often with some props, such as portraits for NPC's or pics of important places/scenes.