Moving towards no minis in 4e combat

[1Mac]

It's been a casualty of how busy I've been (work, boardgaming, ccging and roleplaying), but the humble D&D Miniature is seeing less and less of my game table.

Why? Well, I just haven't had the time to properly search through the 2,000 odd minis I have for those perfect ones... and being completely overbusy in the last few weeks, I've also not had enough time to fine the imperfect ones. So, we've been having a few combats without minis at all.

It sounds like your issue with minis is not because you dislike tactical gaming, but because sorting through minis takes up too much time. If that's so, you can do what I did several years ago when I first started DMing. I managed to buy about a hundred colored plastic "bowling pin" gaming pawns and sorted them by color in a plastic craft tray. I can easily pick a color when I need a type of bad guy; e.g., "the green guys are zombies, and the red guy is their necromancer overseer." Medium and smaller creatures fit in a square or hex, Large creatures fit in the intersection between squares, and the rare Huge or larger creature is an amalgam of pawns. The latter actually worked very well with the hydra I ran, since I could use different colored pawns to track its heads.

If I were to do it again, I might consider using Meeples.

 

[Nymrohd]

I think it really is up to personal preference. I am sure that if the DM is willing and the players are not fussy you can play 4E without minis just fine. Still my players love the tactical combat elements and we cannot seem to be able to simulate them in a way better than the grid (though if it was practical to measure distances I would love to do so; someone has to create an electronic table for wargaming for people with too much cash like me )

 

[MerricB]

I think it really is up to personal preference. I am sure that if the DM is willing and the players are not fussy you can play 4E without minis just fine. Still my players love the tactical combat elements and we cannot seem to be able to simulate them in a way better than the grid (though if it was practical to measure distances I would love to do so; someone has to create an electronic table for wargaming for people with too much cash like me )

If you've got a problem with too much cash, I can solve it for you.

I wander between using minis and not using minis. I think they're a great aid for certain combats where terrain, tactics, powers and everything else just comes together. Then, there are times that they interfere. Sometimes, it's just a slash-and-bash melee, and you don't need to spend extra times with the minis. Or you want to go to something that is truly descriptive in nature. Shimmying down curtains and swinging from chandeliers has always worked better for me as descriptive rather than mini based combat.

Sadly, I had a battlemap (from P1) for a couple of the combats on the weekend, but not the right minis. So I described it all and it seemed to work out fine.

In some ways, it worked better, because I wasn't actually constrained by the "10 feet of gatehouse, so only two of you can see the opponents" grid.

One technique I tend to use when not using minis is to describe and record combat as one-dimensional rather than two-dimensional. So, "you're 10 squares away from the monsters". The exact arc you're on isn't especially important a lot of the time.

Rogues? Well, flanking is pretty easy to adjudicate descriptively.

Cheers!

 

[Nebulous]

That's a table issue that can occur in any RPG. Once the players and the GM learn how to work together, this disappears pretty quickly. We've had no issues with playing a hundred different RPGs without minis to date.

Well, our group has been using minis heavilly since 3rd edition, and even more so in 4e. Our brains are "geared" toward looking at minis so i think it would be harder for us to go without, and more disagreements would arise. I can probably say that i do prefer minis, but i like the option of not having to use them if i don't feel like it.

 

[blargney the second]

I had the same problem (lack of time to hunt for minis) and came up with a different solution: sort them. I've got a bookcase full of boxes of varying sizes with post-it notes to categorize them, and it is MUCH faster to find minis now.
-blarg

 

[VictorC]

For our group it's about 50-50, sometimes we use minis and other times we don't. We never have problems.

sometimes we don't feel like digging around for the rightish minis and other times we're just so into what's going on we don't realize that we hadn't dug out the required minis.

 

[Phaezen]

So, how are you finding it? Have you abandoned minis for your 4e games? Did you never use them? Or do you still find them essential (or you just prefer using them?)

Still use them, but I have been pondering how to run games without minis and my thinking on the matter is as follows:

Step 1:
When describing combat to a player you need to describe how close an opponent is to their character, instead of giving a distance, I would describe a zone

Melee - 1 square
Close - 2 to 5 squares
Medium - 6 to 10 squares
Far - 11 to 20 squares
Extreme - beyond 20 squares.

Step 2:
Look at a characters powers when you are setting up the character sheet and use the appropriate zone name rather than range in squares when writing up the sheet (so for example Magic Missile would have a range of Far)

Step 3:
Shifting will allow a character to move between melee and close
Moving will allow a character to move one zone closer to or further from opponents and/or allies
Forced movement will allow the character to move the target 1 zone (Pull = closer, Push =further, slide=either)

 

[Dimitris]

..
So, how are you finding it? Have you abandoned minis for your 4e games? Did you never use them? Or do you still find them essential (or you just prefer using them?)

Merric, if what you say comes true, we are going to experience the new and fantastic 5e mush earlier.

Dimitris

 

[I'm A Banana]

I don't like the minis, but I also can't get rid of them. As a DM, I don't have a problem trusting myself, really, but I do have a problem with depriving players of the choices and nuance that the game expects. When a huge chunk of the game is movement and position, I can't deny the players that. We might as well go play Pathfinder, or just play a few games of FFZ, or T20, if that's the case. All these games can easily fill that heroic fantasy niche without requiring minis quite as much (combat is tactical in other ways in FFZ, for instance).

Basically, 4e in my mind is tied to the minis grid inextricably. I don't love the system so much that I feel the need to stick with it once I've applied a host of house rules, and to play the game without minis requires so much "winging it" that, for me, it's not really worth it. There are other games out there that do amazing heroic fantasy that don't need the minis grid.

I don't have any fun pushing little plastic mans around a game board, but I can't bring myself to do the huge amount of house ruling required to bring the game out of it. This is one of the grand annoyances of 4e for me.

 

[Hawke]

Teleporting is what gets me. Push, Pull, various powers I can link up better... but how do I make Fey Step work so it's useful and fun while still not using a grid?