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Message: <blockquote data-quote="spinozajack" data-source="post: 6651332" data-attributes="member: 6794198">Your post surprises me! I assumed most 4e style players would focus on minis. But you're absolutely wrong about 5e not specifically being designed to facilitate TotM compared to both 3e and 4e:1) Absolute positioning is rarely required. The only time you provoke OAs is when you run away, out of melee reach of your opponent. That's a narrative binary yes/no event. Super easy to do in TotM.2) Few push X or slide X abilities and powers, and those that do exist are usually limited in frequency (Battlemaster push) or other ways.3) No flanking or facing enabled by default. Rogues don't need precise positioning to to sneak attack, just an ally within 5 feet. Extremely easy to do in theater of the mind.4) Movement being able to be broken up between attacks means the DM need only estimate the relative positions in his own mind to make a ruling as to whether the fighter can reach this other opponent after finishing off the first one. If anything, theater of the mind benefits players more due to this, since many monsters don't multi-attack and PCs don't drop that easily so it would rarely come up.I'm sure there are many more. And there were actually a few design articles and interview questions with the designers during the playtests to make sure they were focusing on core default rules and assumptions to support TotM. I am starting to think that your anti-5e bias makes you dismissive of all its highly successful design wins, several of which you're actually benefitting from. Try playing 4e without a grid or punishing player abilities, many of which rely on precise positioning. Not so in 5e. 3e without a grid would more likely benefit players instead. All three are different, but 3e and 4e had a definite bias towards using a grid, and 4e basically required one if you were going to let players get the most use out of their positional abilities and hijinx.I personally love minis for set piece battles and end game battles, but for casual skimishes, which could happen suddenly many times a session, I prefer to keep the game moving forward. Minis take time to set up, and the board to draw, and for many battles it's a pointless overindulgence that slows the progress of the story and makes most combats last much longer than they need to.I can think of no greater endorsement for 5e supporting theater of the mind in its design, than the fact that 4e players and DMs are using it and enjoying it, and like me, busting out the minis they love when it's appropriate. That's very smart game design. Being flexible enough to support both styles of play without unduly hampering player abilities when they're used or not. I'm sure there are some cases where minis would be beneficial to PCs in 5e, but they are the rare case. So that makes it fine to use ToTM for the common case (non-final battles with not-especially interesting terrain or tactics). Besides, on a theater of the mind, if there is a misunderstanding between a player idea of the locale of the battle, and the DM's (or other players), it's easy to bust out a pen and paper and just scribble it, and re-align expectations. Or draw it more precisely with colored markers on a board. So instead of it being a binary yes / no optional element, it's more like a slider, how much detail to you need to properly and fairly let players and monsters act accordingly and make the best of their abilities? If you want to push the BBEG over the cliff edge, you can just ask the DM if the BBEG is close enough to be pushed over. It's really powerful, flexible, versatile. I think you'll find, in a lot of scenarios, that minis are overkill and using them takes away time from other areas.</blockquote>

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