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

 

[PeterFitz]

I love miniatures and I've been collecting them for decades, but although my collection is very extensive, it always seems that I don't have quite the mini I want for a specific encounter, or I don't know where it is.

You could say that I could just substitute another mini for it and let everyone know that what they're looking at is not what their characters are seeing. But that has real issues with suspension of disbelief; people are very much influenced by what they're seeing, and seeing a flying pig that's actually representing an ancient neutronium dragon creates a dislocation that hurts immersion.

For that reason, although I love minis and have lots of them, I very seldom use them in play. For tactical layouts, I tend to use chess pieces and the like, and let imaginations fill in the details.

 

[neogod22]

I'm a very strategy oriented player, so I hate TotM for combat. Mainly because with minis I can see what the battlefield looks like and plan my strategy accordingly, aka position myself to be safe, and use the most effective spells I can.

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[was]

I prefer using the minis.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

It’s minis all the way for me for D&D.

I played from about 1994 to 2002 using only theatre of the mind (mainly AD&D, but some other RPGs as well). I found that it made you more reliant on the DM. He was the one that could decide how many Orcs were caught in your fireball spell, or whether the Bugbears were lined up well enough to all get hit by your lightning spell. If the DM wanted the Kobold heading for the alarm to be just out of range of your charging Fighter, theatre of the mind allowed him to easily do so.

When I started running a 3E game there were many feats and combat rules that relied on quite precise positioning. So I switched to using 2d counters (monster artwork printed out to mini scale squares and laminated) on a homemade gridded battle mat.

After a few years of using 2d counters I bought some pre-painted WotC D&D minis. I loved what they added to the game and quickly grew my collection to a couple of thousand minis.

I haven’t bought any new ones for several years, but that’s mainly because I reached the point where for most combats I can represent the monster we’re fighting with an actual mini of that monster. For those cases where I don’t have the exact mini, I can still give a pretty close proxy, rather than having to pretend that the Orc with the axe is a Mind Flayer, and the Goblin with the bow is a Drow Sorcerer. There is just something really cool about mentioning that the PCs spot something flying overhead and then slapping a Huge Red Dragon mini down on the table.

The best reaction I got doing that was during our Shackled City campaign several years ago. The PCs were only 2nd level. They entered a room and I described this strange round creature floating in the air and plopped a Beholder mini down on the table. Eyes immediately went wide around the table! (FYI, it wasn’t an illusion, it was an actual Beholder they were facing!)

That said, for some RPGs I prefer to use theatre of the mind as I think those games work better for their style. For example, Feng Shui and Paranoia both come to mind as games that work better as theatre of the mind, due to the fact that they are more narrative-style games.

Theatre of the mind means that if the player needs the mooks to be next to a window so he can fly kick them out the window and into the garbage bin below, he can do that. If he needs the drinks cart to be near the stairs, instead of in between 2 tables, as it will allow him to jump on it and ride it down the stairs while shooting out the lights, it now is. No need to let stuff like that get in the way of a cool action scene.

 

[Magistus71]

Both. all depends on the encounter.

 

[The Human Target]

When they start making a game where everything isn't measured in precise distances and knowing exactly where your character is located isn't often the difference between life and death, I'll start running games purely TotM.

Actually, that's a lie. We used visual representation (a much more accurate terms than minis) in my Edge of the Empire game.

 

[Sunseeker]

I love minis. They're not perfect but they're too much fun. Grids are nice for relative positioning and such but they get restrictive to creativity.

But some things minis & grids just don't work well for, mass combat, large-scale travel, player creativity.

 

[Shiroiken]

While I prefer TotM, using a VTT encourages the use of minis.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I've had minis since the late '70s and used them extensively and moved wholeheartedly into 2.5e Combat & Tactics , then 3e/3.5e, we never really got going in 4e. I had cardboard passage pieces and so on, so the minis were an integral part of the game, not just pulling them out when there was a battle.

Then I sold thousands of minis and have only a few dozen left. While I love the minis, I don't have the space, time or budget for them anymore. When I do use them I do not use battle mats. I don't care for the counting spaces, and the way the game focuses more on the minutia of one combat than the story as a whole.

But with the last few groups, we've just done strict theater of the mind. All my PCs are specific characters (I would do one specifically for each character), and we don't have the table space for them anyway. I love the way 5e facilitates TotM and the new players jump right in without knowing they are "missing" anything. More importantly, I'm shifting back to an AD&D feel, and while I had the minis back then, and would still enjoy them, they certainly haven't turned out to be essential.

I absolutely love Tom Meier's sculpting, though, and still use his orcs and goblins along with a number of other minis to show people what I consider them to look like in my campaigns.

 

[Jhaelen]

in our group theatre of mind tends to bog down in dicusion/confusion about exact positioning.
So ploping down some minis is usualy faster.

This!
Even if you don't want to bother with exact positioning and counting hexes, sketching a small map and using some tokens (or minis) to indicate relative positions helps tremendously to avoid misunderstandings and thus unnecessary discussions.