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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 6178070" data-attributes="member: 3887">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. 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.  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 <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />. 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. 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!</blockquote>

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