D&D 5E Theatre of the Mind or Miniatures?

[I'm A Banana]

Quick question - which I expect to become a lengthy thread - Are you playing D&D 5E mainly with miniatures or without?

Cheers!

It's a bit of a mix for me. With Fantasy Grounds, "minis" are cheap and easy and add a bit to the visual presentation, so I prefer to use tokens there. But in person, it's always preferred to do Theater of the Mind.

I recently had a convo with my in-person group, who are a bunch of newbies who started with 4e and using minis, and they all vastly prefer off-the-grid play. They noted that it creates more in-character moments, more roleplaying, more interesting choices. They also expressed relief at not having a bunch of powers to juggle. I think - especially for newbies - a grid might turn it quickly into strategic, "gamey" kind of play, and the detailed powers are a little meaningless. Broad action like "I hit it!" is conveyed much more directly and obviously.

 

[Agamon]

My D&D players like using minis, and while I don't quite have Curt's collection, I do have hundreds of minis, so I might as well use them.

My Savage Worlds game, on the other hand, has no minis or grid. And it works fine.

 

[Jefe Bergenstein]

I would say mostly theatre of the mind, but I have a small map to keep track of basic positioning. Cribbing from FATE, I normally have a set piece encounter have 4-9 square "zones" that are about 25 feet on a side (so movement between them basically eats your movement". Inside zones you are either engaged with an enemy and subject to attacks of opportunity, or unengaged and can move freely. I normally place 2-3 features similar to aspects which can grant advantage on a roll if invoked, and get the players to help coming up with them.

I guess it's not true theatre of the mind as there is some minor visual representation, but frankly I (and my players) cant keep track of threee PC's, 2-3 henchman/familiars and all the enemy combatants entirely in our heads.

Fights are just over too quickly in 5E to bother with miniatures for the most part. Even with double the exp budget, my party has stomped over everything.

 

[jgsugden]

My preference is to do a mix.

Minis are not used when either: 1.) There is no real benefit because the battle is so simple, 2.) When I'm more worried about the story of the battle than determining who won (battles where villains reveal their plan, battles where something dramatic is occurring around the battle, etc...), and 3.) When the miniatures will have trouble capturing the environment well (swimming, floating in the Astral Plane, etc...)

However, I like having the 'strategy mini games' there for most of the combats, so I use minis about 2/3 of the time.

 

[Grainger]

I find that with minis, people look at the minis, and don't visualise it enough. Maybe if we played with minis all the time, this would wear off, but I don't want to go through the gauntlet of non-immersiveness to get out the other side.

To put it another way: the minis (or stand-ups), and attendant maps, dictate what your game-world looks like, instead of the DM's descriptions doing the same job (the players are staring at the minis for the whole encounter, long after the DM has set the scene). I suppose I could get round this by just using plain counters - a different colour for each character - strangely, though, advocates of minis rarely want to do this, even though they stress the utility of minis as the main reason for using them.

Also, unless it's a very large mini (e.g. representing a giant upwards), I always find them strangely unimpressive and small, which is not the effect I want when the party are attacked, for example, by big Orcs. The PCs would be very aware that these are powerful, large warriors attacking them, but the players are looking down on piddly little lumps of plastic, metal or cardboard. For me, there's a threshold where minis begin to look impressive (at the regular scale people use) - which is about the size of a small giant. Anything above this looks good, at least when compared to a PC. Anything below it is underwhelming, except maybe if you're throwing down swarms of foes. I can't have every encounter be Against a Giant just because I don't like smaller minis.

I think minis work well visually for war games (if you want to go down this route) - because there you're less concerned with how the individuals look, but rather the overall effect (except maybe for skirmish wargames). In an RPG, the details are very important, both for PCs (as players want to dictate their characters' appearance), and for foes, because the PCs need to glean information from that, and also because RPG encounters are so much about atmosphere. Presenting minis, and then saying "um... but he doesn't actually look like this, but I couldn't find the right mini - just imagine he's taller, and doesn't have a beard" doesn't really work, because everyone is looking at the mini, so that very quickly over-writes what the player or GM said.

So I suppose my issue with minis is not so much their practicality (although I also prefer the streamlined nature of ToTM), but because I don't minis are remotely good enough, visually, to do the job they're meant to do. Ironically, a more abstract representation would be more accurate, because no-one would visualise their Fighter or Mage as a glass bead, so they would be more likely to remember the description given by the GM or player.

 

[DaveDash]

First, where do you watch him? I assume there's a YouTube channel or something.

Second, we've been using battle mats since 3E was released (TotM before that). I'm finding myself slipping more and more into a TotM style with PotA. Major battles tend to get the battle mat treatment, but a lot of things have been purely descriptive. I'm not sure whether it's the adventure or the 5E rules, but I like it. That said, I do like battle mats if there's any chance of confusion; I remember far too many 1E/2E arguments because people had different scenery in their mental theatre.

Yeah there is an official Dungeons and Dragons YouTube channel.

They've been running ToEE in 5e. Much better than their Princes stuff. Mike Mearls makes THoM look smooth as silk.

 

[Bupp]

I use minis. My players (my 3 kids) used Lego minifigs to represent their PC's. I use paper minis with plastic bases for everything else. I either print out two sided minis that I've found online, or just do a Google image search and resize a picture. All of my paper minis are organized in envelopes, and all fit in a shoebox!

Instead of a map or grid, I use a small metallic dry erase board. If needed I draw on features and walls, but very often I just let the board represent the room and we imagine the contents.

In this picture, the PC's and some cultists are around a large table gambling when a fight broke out. The clear space in the middle is the table.

 

[miniaturehoarder]

Mostly minis with a sprinkling of TotM for simpler encounters or ones where the scope is too great for 28mm figs or the meta of having minis on the table would make things worse.

Like last week when my players made a successful mad dash through the 5.Outer courtyard, 6. Entryway of Fire, 12. Parade grounds and 13. Inner Courtyard in A2 Secret of the Slaver's Stockade. Had anyone stopped for a single round out of "I wanna act"-itis, like to fight the ankheg, whoever fell behind would have likely died.

 

[KarinsDad]

TotM is too hard. I have a hard enough time understanding positioning with minis. Without them, I would be totally clueless as a player. As a DM, I'm too busy for TotM. Multitasking and remembering is getting harder to do the older I get. I would constantly run into:

Me: "Wait, you said you were moving towards the Bugbear after taking out the Gnoll? I don't remember that."
Player 2: "Yes, he said that."
My daughter: "You're getting old Dad."
Me: "Crap! Ok, now I got to figure out why the Ogre didn't attack you when you were in its way. It actually didn't have the movement to attack the Cleric with you in the way. Screw it. The Ogre attacked the Cleric anyway and you get an OA."
Player 1: "That's the reason I moved towards the Bugbear, to block the Ogre's path as well."
Me: "Ok, fine. The Ogre attacked you instead and used some extra movement afterwards to move around you. What did I roll to hit? It hit the Cleric, did it hit you? Cleric, how much damage did I do? You can put that back on your sheet and we'll move it to the Fighter. Crap. Crap. Crap."


Also, I'm a visual person, not an audio one. Even at work, my coworker has to sometimes show me what he means on the computer instead of telling me. As a player, position information would sometimes make my eyes glaze over and I would rarely have the same interpretation that the DM meant. I can immediately tell prone in the game because the miniature is knocked over and so can every other player at the table. I can immediately tell if movement will cause an OA in the game because the miniature is next to the proposed movement path and so can every other player at the table.

As a player, if I or someone else has to go to the bathroom or head to the kitchen for something in TotM, the DM either has to stop, the person leaving misses information, or has to ask more questions when he gets back. At least with miniatures, that missing information doesn't include positioning.


I suspect that TotM, which we often use for roleplaying (although I do sometimes set up miniatures when meeting with multiple NPCs, just to show how many are there, where they are, etc.; I never know when a PC will Burning Hands them and I don't want to figure out their positioning after the player informs me of this) and exploration, works better for those two pillars. It just doesn't work for me for combat.

PS. This is why we use grids with miniatures as well. We tried using miniatures without grids when LMoP came out and it was a minor disaster at our table trying to figure out who could move where, was someone close enough for OAs, etc. Grids instantly solve those "exact locations" questions for us.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Yeah there is an official Dungeons and Dragons YouTube channel.

They've been running ToEE in 5e. Much better than their Princes stuff. Mike Mearls makes THoM look smooth as silk.

hmm I will have to check this out