Theater of the Mind

[Ahnehnois]

95% with D&D really sounds like an exaggeration to me, especially if you follow the rules closely, which is an assumption I made when I made my post. If hte rules are followed loosely, then it is easier, of course.

Well, I did (spoiler alert) make that number up. But I'm very precise about ranges and speeds, and I almost never spend any real time resolving issues related to those.

If, for example, a spell is medium range and at 5th level is 150 ft., it is quite rare that a character will ever be exactly 150 ft or 155 ft away from the target. Most of the time, they'll either be closer or much farther, and the usability of said spell will be clear. Same thing for movement. You're in melee, you're in move range, in charge range, or you're X number of rounds running away. Rarely do the exact speed numbers come in to play.

Attacks of opportunity are easily adjudicated; it simply matters who's threatening who, and modeling one 9-square area in one's head is not a big challenge.

Where grids come in handy is when someone is trying to snipe an enemy from a particular range and both of them are moving (unusual and borderline metagame-y) or when there are more combatants than people can remember, which based on how human short-term memory works I generally assume to be around ten. Again, rare.

 

[Mallus]

FWIW I never saw the need for a battlemap in 3e. Particularly if you're willing to be fuzzy on ranges and speeds

The groups I've played with/run for definitely showed a preferrence for using a battlemat with 3e. I've run combats without them just fine, particularly ones set outside/at longer ranges. But for room & corridor fights, they liked the mat & minis, so I went along with it.

Maybe there are regional differences? In 29 nine years of playing D&D we've been using minis (or tokens) to represent battles all of the time except for the first few couple of sessions.

Could be -- but I suspect the difference are more local gaming culture, without actually being regional. Where are you, BTW? I've done all my gaming in New Jersey & Philadelphia, with a few trips to the con in Baltimore back in college.

I recall my introduction to D&D during high school was pure Theater of the Mind. The next big campaign --run by my friend's father who was also my math & history teacher-- used metal minis and dungeon tiles every session. After that, use of exact positioning tools fell off. My long 2e campaign was primarily TotM, and when we did use tokens and maps we grabbed anything at hand --various boardgame pieces were popular, and crude sketches on graph paper-- just to get rough visual representation of the layout. It was effectively TotM.

The problem is: 'Theatre of the Mind' fails if only one of the players (or the DM) isn't completely on board with it all the time. In the groups I participated in, there were always debates about exact positioning...

Heh... in the groups I've been in, there were always debates about something. It's not like 3e or 4e or the use of more exact positioning solved this more general problem . Sure, there will some debate & disagreement, but a healthy and functional group can navigate that without too much trouble.

TotM only fails if the people playing can't reach an agreement, or at least shut up long enough for the game to move on, ie the real problem is, as usual, with the players, not the mechanics/abstraction methodology/game aides.

The only thing that changed with 3e/4e was the sophistication of the game aids we used: Instead of scrap paper, tokens and the occasional lead miniature we started using pre-painted plastic minis, dungeon tiles and poster maps.

I used nice metal miniatures (some painted), cardboard dungeon tiles, and big-ass poster maps back in the mid-1980s (my friend's dad had a great stash of gaming supplies). What we *didn't* have were laptops, smartphones, tablets, and Internet access. Some folks would consider that plus!

 

[Janx]

The groups I've played with/run for definitely showed a preferrence for using a battlemat with 3e. I've run combats without them just fine, particularly ones set outside/at longer ranges. But for room & corridor fights, they liked the mat & minis, so I went along with it.

Our use of battlemat or even just dice or coins as tokens on the open table was more for representational purposes.

We all know my PC can move 6 squares per turn, and how far he can hit. So with a battlemat, I could resolve a ton of simple mechanics without DM assistance for "Can I move across the room and still hit the villain?" questions.

I don't think we had quibbly questions about being in or out of fireball blast range because as somebody up thread said, folks either tend to be in the thick of it or quite a ways out of it to avoid such blasts.

But the battlemat made it quite obvious that such was true by quick glance.


Without a mat, information was usually relayed in distances. The enemy is down the hall, 50 feet away. I can move 30 feet/round, so I know he'll be 20' away at the end of the round.

The only conflicts come in when being in two places in a fight scene at once is beneficial (like being on the rear of the dragon, it dies, and wanting to be at the front where a player is secretly removing the Ring of Regeneration it had on its toe).

It basically amplified 2 other play problems (players who swipe loot instead of pooling it) and players who HAVE to be in everything, so they munge the imaginary map that things are closer than they were to justify it.

 

[Jhaelen]

Could be -- but I suspect the difference are more local gaming culture, without actually being regional. Where are you, BTW? I've done all my gaming in New Jersey & Philadelphia, with a few trips to the con in Baltimore back in college.

I'm in Germany. But you are right. It could have been a local thing. Back in the days it seemed that everyone playing RPGs (and especially D&D) knew each other even in cities quite a distance away. It was in 1984 that roleplaying games were first noticed by the mainstream, mainly because of the release of 'Das Schwarze Auge' by a then popular board-game publisher. Anyway, several of the (older) RPG players were also engaged in playing table-top war games, maybe it was their influence that lead to the preponderance of utilizing battlemaps of some kind.