Tony Vargas
Legend
Oh, please, that canard has been around for going on a century now. First radio was going to render the masses illiterate, then TV, now, somehow, mobile devices even though they're used for texting. As much as it appeals to pseudo-intellectual elitism to think about one's generation as the last gasp of literacy or liberal education or whatever before the fall of civilization, it's never been borne out.D&D is significant in the generation gap between a ‘literate’ culture that reads books and a ‘post-literate’ culture that interacts faster and more visually via computers.
The need for precise positioning and calculation or range and area goes all the way back to the space-filling fireballs of classic D&D. It's not a new thing.The rules for precise positioning became ubiquitous - in every spell, in every space.
'Mandatory' would be a universal claim. Your experience, alone, can't prove that claim. OTOH, any counterexample disproves it. In my experience, in no version of D&D (nor any other game I've run) is the use of a minis with a grid or other play surface 'mandatory.' 3e did not make the grid mandatory.In my experience, 3e made the grid ‘mandatory’.
What 2e C&T and 3e /did/ do, though, was present a system that could use a grid to make movement, range/area and positioning quicker and easier than measuring distances or doing without any sort of visualization aids at all, with only a modest sacrifice in granularity.
I can. I can also run it more easily with one. A grid is /just/ a useful tool.I cannot play 3e well without a grid.
And, I did. Maybe there were just more old-school wargamers in my area. :shrug:Regarding 1e-2e, I never saw anyone using string to measure out mini tactics even if an occasional encounter made use minis and coins.
In other words, it was when the DM chose to run 4e more like 5e.The only time, I ever used a string was in 4e, once, in a dispute about precise positioning during aerial combat. The DM forgot that counting squares diagonally also included upwards, meaning the mini of the hostile who was very far away was in fact within the number of squares of damage spells. Unhappy with the situation, the DM insisted on geometry.
I'm sure you could learn to overcome that disability if you applied yourself.None of these positioning requirements is conducive to my ability to play mentally.In my own experience, *I* can play mental D&D in 1e-2e. *I* cannot do so in 3e-4e.
Running a game with precise range/movement/positioning/area rules like 1e, 2e, or 5e "TotM," is, as you mentioned, largely a matter of hand-waving that precision away. You can do that with any system, regardless of the units or granularity involved. There is no meaningful difference between handling a 1e 'parting shot' or 5e AoO and a 3.x AoO in TotM: both require you to do nothing more than keep track of who is adjacent to whom.