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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="karolusb" data-source="post: 5330840" data-attributes="member: 83359">In AD&D, at low levels, most enemies lasted a hit or two.  While people missed a pretty good amount, rounds with a missed attack were generally nearly instantaneous.   Minis make every round a chore.  Swing and miss 5 second rounds become tactical move, minor action, planning summary, missed attack 3 minute rounds.  Yeah you could get through alot more combats back in the day.   I like 4E, I also like the fact that you can get people to play it (didn't like 3.5, you know how hard it is to get people to play HERO, it was a drought in my gaming life).  I have played many games over the years, and don't that my ambivalence to miniatures bars me from playing d&d.   That said last game I ran I rarely used battlemats.  I asked players to avoid very fiddly power choices (the monk dropped his every enemy adjacent to you at any point during your shift power etc).  Five of the players worked with it just fine.  One was really flustered and confounded by it (another in truth was flustered and confounded by miniatures).  Most 4E powers are pretty easy to handle in a narrative fashion, but some are nearly impossible.  The monk who was heavy in positioning powers worked fine, teleporting enemies next to the fighter etc.   I didn't go for extreme abstraction.  Guy is 60 feet away, you move 25 feet in a move action.  If you move and make a ranged attack you are at 35 feet away.  The kind of thing that can be sketched on graph paper with little x's and passed around the table when people need clarification.   It didn't speed us up massively.  But it did some.  A game session that might involve 2 combats only become one that involved 2 combats and some roleplay.  The gains weren't as much as I would have liked, but they were there, and we did occasionally use battlemats, though I never felt they added much to regular combat encounters.</blockquote>

Verification