Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Magil" data-source="post: 6817070" data-attributes="member: 6672353">Conversely, I see a lot of people singing the praises of using "imagination" for combat, as if implying that putting combat in a grid is somehow limiting. I'd make two points in reference to this. The first is that I've been taught all my life that simply describing something with words is a lot less likely to get people to accurately absorb information than proper use of a visual context (whether it's props, graphs, or grids), and this is especially true when trying to comprehend spatial concerns. To use a quick example, showing someone a picture of a character is much more effective at conveying the character's appearance than trying to describe the character verbally. Multiply this by several levels of complexity when you enter in the precise distances of measurement that the DnD rule set uses.The second is that many find some degree of limitations comforting rather than restrictive. After all, the rules do more than tell you what you can do, they tell you what you cannot do, or what requirement you need to meet in order to do it. That is why rules are used. Grids help more than they hurt by "limiting" your understanding of the situation to the most correct interpretation and making sure each individual has the same understanding. I cringe whenever two or three people have a very different understanding of a tactical situation simply because it's not represented visually, when such a thing would not have actually occurred within the game world because the characters should be able to comprehend their situation accurately. It breaks verisimilitude and takes you out of the world. As a small aside, I'd also like to point out that people's imaginations tend to be much more limited than they first realize <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />As to your question of "What would you have as gridless rules?", the example of 13th Age given a few posts earlier works well. There are games out there that have rules for gridless play, but again I will stress that Dungeons and Dragons is not one of them.With that said, everyone does what works for their table. My experience with Theater of the Mind is almost exclusively negative and I'm by nature a tactical thinker, so naturally I have a strong bias against it. I don't doubt that the game can be run without a grid (though I have yet to see it done effectively--the most successful examples I see of it tend to be where the game ignores the written rules to an extent which I am uncomfortable with), but even though the grid is presented as an "optional rule" in 5E, I don't buy it. The rules were very clearly written with the grid in mind. The fact that they use five-foot measurements rather than "squares" is simply a cloak to try and disguise the fact, but it's not fooling me.</blockquote>

Verification