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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Cynicide" data-source="post: 9699217" data-attributes="member: 7031555">I thought I'd weigh in on the subject of battlemats and VTT's. In 2020 my group lost their in-person play space, we moved online and I have been running games in Foundry ever since. I've used battlemats almost exclusively but I'm thinking that I'll ditch them for theater of the mind after the current adventure is completed.This came as a bit of a bolt of lightning inspiration to me, I was playing game of Call of Cthulhu at ChaosiumCon run by Brian Holland and he kept us on the edge of our seats, no maps, not tokens, no pictures. Just his descriptions and interactions with the NPCs. After the game I wondered if the tech was getting was getting in the way of my home game. What follows are my thoughts about it. <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Battlemaps and tokens add a whole lot of prep time. If it's a map of a specific place then I'm either looking for a public map, subscribing to a patreon or drawing it myself. Even If I find the perfect map I have to go through and mark the walls, windows, secrets and doors. If I choose not to do this I'm doing manual fog removal at the table. This doesn't even cover token creation or spell effects if you want to go that far. Is that time better spent fleshing out the descriptive details of the dungeon, or working on my rules mastery, or adding interesting details and NPC's to the plot.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Players and the GM fixating on the details. How do I position this spell so I can get the most people? Is there true line of sight between these two tokens? Can I close the distance in one turn? There aren't hard questions but in my in-person table top days we'd hand wave this and move onto the fun stuff.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Subconscious reduction in imaginative details while the map does the heavy lifting. I've noticed my descriptions aren't as good as they could be if I just subconsciously rely on the map to do the heavy lifting. I also don't want to deny the players the experience of imaging a place instead of picturing what they see on the map.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Bugs. Ooops! Someone saw something they shouldn't because they clipped through a wall.</li> </ul>So once my current campaign is done I'm going to going map free for a spell to see if it makes a difference.</blockquote>

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