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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 6353946" data-attributes="member: 58197">Theater of the mind certainly does not work for everybody, and in D&D it often requires some effort to clarify who is where doing what to whom. At my table, what happens is a player declares an action; I warn of a consequence to that action; the player decides whether to carry on or do something else. This would be typical:Player: "I move up and attack the lich."Me: "If you do, you'll provoke opportunity attacks from two of the skeleton warriors."Player: "Crap. Those guys hit way too hard."Other Player: "We really need to take down that lich, dude. I can't take another of those fireballs."Me: "The lich looks pretty beat-up. Half his ribs are gone and there's a big hole in his skull."Player: "Is there any way I can circle around the skeleton warriors?"Me: "Sure, but you'll have to spend your action moving. You can get next to the lich, but you won't be able to attack this turn."Player: "I'll do that, and then I'll Action Surge and attack."Me: "Sounds good. Go for it."This approach only works if a) the players are willing to trust the DM rather than argue over positioning details, b) the DM is willing to be reasonable, and c) the DM is careful to always warn players when they're doing something with possible unforeseen consequences. If the DM tries to play "gotcha" games--just having the skeleton warriors take OAs instead of warning the player--then it's going to go badly. But "gotcha" games tend to go badly anyhow.It's worth noting that 5E does contain some significant changes from 3E in order to aid TotM. The two big ones are a) you only trigger OAs when moving out of somebody's reach, instead of any time you change squares, and b) flanking is no longer a thing. The effect of these is that you no longer need to know exactly which square somebody's on; you only need to know who's in melee range (except where reach is involved).A review that delved into these issues would be very interesting. Sadly, this was not that review.</blockquote>

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