What are your feelings on combat mats?

[ForceUser]

Battle mat = good

We use the combat mat religiously, and I will gladly crusade in its defense!

The advantages of using a mat are numerous. First, it's a weight off the DM, greatly reducing the number of arbitrary decisions he must make on the fly regarding distance and position. This results in less book-keeping, which in turn speeds up combat encounters. Second, it's a relief for players. Many feats and spells that would be utterly dependant on a DM's descretion without a mat are more valuable when the player is allowed to control his character's exact position on the mat (Example: Combat Reflexes, Point Blank Shot, Sneak Attacks, Flanking, Summon spells). This leads to fewer he-said-she-said arguments over movement, position, and intent between the players and the DM. We used to have those sorts of conflicts all the time - now we can look at the mat between turns and know exactly how far we can move and what we can do without having to ask the DM. Third, 3E combat is designed with miniatures combat in mind, and many of the examples of play and spell descriptions use a tactical grid to illustrate what characters can and can't do.

Simply put, the battle mat makes life easier for us.

Are there problems with the mat? Sure. My personal pet peeve is that people sometimes focus more on the mat than on roleplaying. I swear, people are always fiddling with those minis! As DM, that can get annoying, because while I view the mat as a valuable tool, it is not the game. Also, as characters get higher level, the mat becomes less useful as movement rates increase via magical or supernatural means. When you can swoop around at a base move of 90' and blast people from 700 feet, and your opponents can dimension door at will, it sort of renders the mat meaningless, since the thing is only so big. Also, higher level combats tend to end up using the third dimension quite a bit as everyone and his brother has some means of flight, not to mention encounters underwater or on other planes. The mat models these poorly.

Overall, though, thumbs up. It's a great tool.

 

[Kyramus]

We use a combat mat in the game.

I have it laminated so that I can use wet erase markers over it. Works great.
and for the encounters that i specifically prepare for, I just draw them out on photocopied grid paper and lay them out as the players come across it.

Lately we have a war in the campaign so there isn't much dungeon maps but the terrain works well when you put piles of hershey bars to simulate hills and such, after conquering the hill you get to eat it. lol

 

[shadow]

I ALWAYS use a mat when I DM. However, when I'm a player, I'm disapointed by the fact that few DMs use mats. I find mats vastly improve combat for two reasons:

1. They encourage more stategy to battle. Back in 2e days, I rarely used mats. As a result combat was simply, "I swing, I hit" or "I swing, I miss". With the attacks of opportunity used in 3e, mats become very important to determine your position in the battle. It also seems the more players think of strategy, the more different maneuvers they'll try. All the sudden players are using bull rushes, disarms, etc.

2. (A corollary of the 1st point) Without mats, combat often seems more like a child's game of cops and robbers to me ("I hit you!" "No you didn't!") Players convieniently seem to forget the distance they are from their foes and suddenly are able to move 120 feet to reach an enemy and still get their full number of attacks. Unless I pay close attention to where I said the enemys were a minute ago, I tend to lose track of where everyone is. On the flip side, players tend to complain a lot more with out a mat. ("Hey wait a second, that monster couldn't move that far and still get to attack!" "The orc wasn't close enough to get an attack of opportunity on me." etc.) Mats are almost essential for attacks of opportunity. In short mats just make life a lot simpler.

 

[tburdett]

I'm not going to dance around the issue with soft words, heck I don't dance around any issue with soft words.

A visual representation is required if you want to take full advantage of the various combat options that 3E provides.

There is no fair, or consistent, way to use attacks of opportunity, area of effect for spells, movement, or any number of other game mechanics with any degree of accuracy if you are not using some type of visual system for mapping the battle.

Any non-visual system, no matter how good, will result in misconception. I don't care how good you think you are at describing the setting.

Why, as a DM, would you possibly want your players to be confused during a battle? I can think of a few reasons, and none of them are flattering to the DM involved.

It is my firm opinion that if you are not using a battle mat, or something like it, you are not really playing 3E.

 

[mmu1]

I also find it frustrating how few DMs seem to use battlemats... In fact, there's basically no way I'm ever going to play D&D without one at this point - the combat feels too much like the DM telling me what happens.

"So, can I take an AAO, or not?"

"Wait, those orcs came around the corner 100' away, moved and they're attacking us all in one round?"

"Hold on a minute, we're in a 5' wide corridor, and that guy we captured slipped his ropes, got up, and ran past us to get to his friends in one round, and we're not getting AAO's because he did it unexpectedly?"

"I'm standing next to who now??? Oh, and HE'S taking an AOO? Lovely for him."

And the list could go on... Granted, some of the problems I've had with battlemat-less DMs was simply due to poor knowledge of the rules, but not using a mat made it much worse in every case.

 

[Fast Learner]

I've been DMing since '78 and never used a mat until 3e. Just as others have said, I too love it.

One advantage not mentioned (I don't think): it allows players to pre-plan their moves better, resulting in less downtime. No one has to ask things that their characters would easily know, things like "Am I close enough to charge this guy right now?" and "Are the orcs standing close enough for an area-effect spell to be useful?" and "Can I get in, attack that guy, and get back out with my spring attack, or will I be stuck next to him?" These really are things the characters would know.

As such when it's time for players to announce what they're going to do next, if we use a mat we don't have to play 20 questions before they can make a reasonable choice.

 

[TwoSix]

Using a battle mat makes you realize just how small a 20' x 20' room is when there are 4 PCs and 6 monsters in there. Ever since I started using my mat, all the adventures seem to stay outside.

 

[Mobius]

The system I use was predicated on 25mm miniatures gaming, so I find that I am best served by using a battle mat. As others have noted, it is great for putting everything in perspective for the players.

I have two problems with the mats that I have encountered over the years. The first is one of scale. The largest battle mat I own is 36"x48" - a very big mat that covers most of my gaming table. Even on this mat, I cannot easily draw in a large hill, as from the perspective of the 25mm miniatures, a large hill would be larger than my game room on occasion. As a consequence, I am forced to draw in only a portion of the hill and if the battle spreads out to other areas, redraw the new scene. This is very tedious.

To combat this problem, I have taken to giving my players a clear bingo chip with a colored dot in the middle - a different color for each player. With this instead of a miniature, I can draw maps to generally whatever scale I want and the pinpoint dot of the chip is the character's location. Facing is done with a tiny arrow on the chip showing 'forward'. Enemies are all red chips with numbers on them so I can keep track of damage to individual foes.

This change has opened up a lot of options for my players. Archers, for example, no longer need to be on top of the battle to be effective and combats no longer need to be 'in your face'. Battles can deteriorate into more or less individual fights throughout a forest and I have no difficulty running it with the added scope.

 

[Particle_Man]

I have played with and without battlemats and
think that with is better. I do not find that
anyone loses in the imagination department. It
also encouraged me to buy a minurature. And it
is nice to know where everyone is. I know
who I can attack, who I can heal, etc., without
pestering the DM all the time.

The mat-DM just uses these dark grey, red-spotted
six-siders for monsters (and he has a LOT of them!). It is a low-level campaign. No large monsters yet (although I guess he could just put
4 (or more!) six-siders together).

I have learned to be afraid when he picks up a
handful of these dice...or when he cackles evilly...or when he smiles...or when he cracks open the monster manual...

 

[WayneLigon]

I love mats, and I've used several. Right now, we use a 2'x2' half-inch plexiglass cover over a paper square grid. We used dry-erase markers sometimes, but they tend to dry out and become useless too quickly for our tastes. Normally, we just block out the corridor or room with a couple 3x5 cards, or one of the neat dungeon templates that have been in the Dragon.

One of the best ideas I ever saw was a table covered in 1" quadrile (each small square thus being 1 foot game scale) with an overlay of thin plastic (though you have to watch banging on the table with anything; it can be fragile).

A friend of mine had a gaming table built, with heavy beveled glass 'door' that laid on top of the table and coule be lifted up to put down mats or maps under the thing. Thin foam padding brought the maps flush against the glass, getting rid of most of the glare. We used dry erase and wet erase on it, then glass cleaner for the after-game clean-up session.