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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7991694" data-attributes="member: 18"><p>Yeah this is an interesting point.</p><p></p><p>It's true, but we practically did an accidental study on the differences in 2E/3E/4E, because sometimes we used minis/battlemaps/etc. and so on, and sometimes not. In my experience, which is purely anecdotal of course, the difference between Theatre of the Mind and a tabletop battlemap the DM draws on (i.e. a blank gridded Chessex battlemap or whatever), together with simple tokens, was very small. People still had to imagine virtually everything, and we still got really full role-playing and people not moving their counters constantly out of combat and stuff. Everything above that, the RP and imagination-engagement tended to drop off. Not steeply, but it did clearly drop off. Minis made people forget that the character (especially a monster or NPC) didn't actually look like that from the description. Descriptions of places at odds with what a detailed, colourful map showed, clearly lost out to the map, in that people would forget stuff not actually shown on the map.</p><p></p><p>I don't think that you need anything but a clear outline map and clearly marked tokens for a strong tactical game, though. In 4E we managed to combine a strong tactical game with strong RP, not because of the rules, particularly, but because we used a battlemap we drew on. TtoM tends to degrade the tactical game and only slightly increases RP engagement - it does however, in my experience, people try a bit more wild-and-wooly stuff in combat, which can be exciting, because everyone cares less about OAs and exact position and so on.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 7991694, member: 18"] Yeah this is an interesting point. It's true, but we practically did an accidental study on the differences in 2E/3E/4E, because sometimes we used minis/battlemaps/etc. and so on, and sometimes not. In my experience, which is purely anecdotal of course, the difference between Theatre of the Mind and a tabletop battlemap the DM draws on (i.e. a blank gridded Chessex battlemap or whatever), together with simple tokens, was very small. People still had to imagine virtually everything, and we still got really full role-playing and people not moving their counters constantly out of combat and stuff. Everything above that, the RP and imagination-engagement tended to drop off. Not steeply, but it did clearly drop off. Minis made people forget that the character (especially a monster or NPC) didn't actually look like that from the description. Descriptions of places at odds with what a detailed, colourful map showed, clearly lost out to the map, in that people would forget stuff not actually shown on the map. I don't think that you need anything but a clear outline map and clearly marked tokens for a strong tactical game, though. In 4E we managed to combine a strong tactical game with strong RP, not because of the rules, particularly, but because we used a battlemap we drew on. TtoM tends to degrade the tactical game and only slightly increases RP engagement - it does however, in my experience, people try a bit more wild-and-wooly stuff in combat, which can be exciting, because everyone cares less about OAs and exact position and so on. [/QUOTE]
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