What's wrong with Mini-Centric?

[Wiseblood]

The use of the miniatures preempts every possible argument about ranges for bows and spells, area of effect spells. It also makes it reasonable to adjudicate the following:

- AoO for movement within threatened areas
- Reach weapons and monsters with reach
- Flanking rules for size mismatched characters
- A meaningful method of penalizing a character when you cut off their ability to move away from you easily (a caster or archer who cannot 5 foot step out of melee range is penalized unless certain feats or skills are used).

I'm not fond of mini-centric trends. The one shown in yellow is the one that kind of soured D&D for me. It is also what is driving the counting squares bus. So when it is a given characters turn he does not act hemust show you all of the steps he is taking over the course of his turn and specifically what order he is taking these actions. With this addition to the rules your focus is the mini. The mini has gone from being a tool to mark positioning to becoming a tool to mark your unfolding progress through a series of hazards not unlike on a board game. One exception is that you do not role dice to see how far you go (well not often). Swift actions and immediate actions will create the same sort of problems as they become more common and players get used to using them.

IMO Attacks of opportunity erode my suspension of sdisbelief and the in game suppositions of simultineity.

 

[Hairfoot]

I have a mixed RPG/wargame background, so miniatures are a no-brainer for me. A couple of years ago I played briefly with a DM who hated miniatures. In combat it was like being blind and playing Yahtzee.

I enjoy the tactical and visual aspect of it. When I see the miniatures in place, I form a greater impression of what the scene looks like, which makes the whole session more vivid for me.

When I DM, I also use miniatures to represent NPCs, so that when the PCs walk into a town I might write each NPC's name & organisation (e.g. Bob, blacksmith; Bridget, cleric) and place a miniature on top so that the players can see what their options in town are, rather than asking for reminders every ten seconds.

Plus, I like having a customised toy soldier to represent the character I created. Juvenile, but there you go.

 

[Desdichado]

to the economic argument-

So don't use the WOTC d&D figures, there are dozen of other manufacturers out there. Or any figures at all use counter, or paper stand-ups. The economics of mini/battlemat use isn't a barrier.

You're missing the point. A tactical chess game with coins, dice, or whatever counters you happen to have handy is lame. Sure, it's cheap, but it sucks.

Frankly, I'm not that much happier with minis either.

plese, enough of that, tha game was miniatures based on day 1. Everyone recall movement scores were listed in "Inches" ? Those were table top inches. sure 2nd edition has more abstract values...the same exact ones they just turned 12" into 12, the same score derived from/for miniatures use. The unique nature of the game allows one to not bother with a game board or miniatures if they wish but they were there and the rules were written with their presence in mind.

Whoop-de-doo. I also left the game back in the early days because it sucked. Minis were a part of that. The way the rules just don't really work that well without a tactical representation of battle is not a feature IMO, it's a bug. It alienates all the people (like me) who simply don't like playing that way. As the game becomes more and more difficult to run without a battlemat, it becomes less and less attractive to me as a system of choice. That's the reason, pure and simple, to make the game able to work without minis. It opens up the game to all the buyers who don't want to play with minis.

Minis as an optional add-on to add to the game of those who like it; nice. Great. More power to them. As you said, minis and D&D have been together for a long time; I suspect that it'd hardly even dent the sales to make minis less integral to the rules, because it seems most players like 'em. But there's still a pretty sizable and significant minority who doesn't.

IMO.

 

[BadMojo]

There are ways around that.

Yeah, I never really understood the cost argument. We originally used multi-color rubber
monster minis, wooden blocks, Benjamin Franklin coin bank, old Thundercats action figure (Mumra) for our game. We didn't spend a dime until we eventually got a battle map. Everything was "found".

We use WotC Minis now but don't feel compelled to have a mini exactly match every single creature. Anything is closer than a giant Benjamin Franklin. Unless that's really what you're fighting.

We use the minis sometimes and other times don't bother using the map. It certainly doesn't preclude any combat hand waving.

 

[Stormtower]

I never played with minis until 3e arrived. My main group has always had at least 3 female players in it, and at first they worried about what others have said in this thread - "Won't they (minis) turn the game into tactical chess? What about roleplaying and imagination?" My players tend towards RP-heavy anyway, especially the ladies.

After two sessions with the minis (actually foam core 1" squares with colored glass beads glued to the top, back in 2000) they were hooked. "It's so easy to tell where everyone is during combat. I can really plan out my moves now," was the most frequent comment from them.

Fast forward seven years and a couple thousand DDM minis later (plus painted pewter when necessary) and those same players still swear by the minis. They have become tactically confident and increased their overall spatial reasoning ability (in and out of the context of D&D games). In our group's case, the minis have been a fabulous and unmatched teaching tool for the visual/kinesthetic learners in our group.

That said, we have a table rule where we don't fiddle with the minis outside of combat too much. Fantastic, magical vistas and scenic environmental descriptions do lose some of their impact, IMO, when a battlemap is plopped down in place of spoken words. There's a fine balancing act between letting the minis and mat do the talking and letting imaginations paint mental pictures. I've had to train myself to still give verbal monster descriptions when putting minis down on the table... so they can be a mental crutch for DMs too.

Overall I love minis and I think they add a great dimension to the game... but playing without them is certainly possible with the right group, and the challenge of properly adjudicating a combat without minis is one that I'd recommend all DMs to undertake. There's no wrong way to play - it's all a learning experience and some folks rely on different tools for their learning.

 

[Desdichado]

I think the biggest problem with a mini-centric game is this. As a kid, my most prominent memory of early D&D was waiting around outside the school waiting for school to start, or at lunch, or during whatever other break we had, whipping out some character sheets and a B/X book or two from our backpacks, a handful of dice from our pockets and playing impromptu sessions wherever we happened to find ourselves. We didn't use minis, and couldn't practically have done so even if we wanted to.

Making the game difficult to run without minis means that the game can really only effectively be played "formally" in a place that's conducive to using minis and a battlemat.

Besides that, I've always been the kind of person who imagines this stuff going on in my head cinematically, and having a reasonably detailed tactical representation takes away from that. That's personal preference, but the other problem outlined above is not.

 

[avr]

IME minis are expensive, fragile, and obviously don't adjust to whatever the scale is on my map (whether it's a sketch or something I downloaded off the internet). As you may guess I don't use them much.

 

[Shortman McLeod]

My problem is with the combat rules that assume the use of miniatures, and are written with miniatures in mind.

Fair enough. In that case, D&D 3.5 isn't for you.

 

[Clavis]

Fair enough. In that case, D&D 3.5 isn't for you.

Which is why I've recently switched over to C&C. I wanted the consistency of a D20 system, without the game-slowing complexity of 3.5 Edition, and I also wanted to to still be able to easily use stuff from my library of D&D materials.

 

[Hairfoot]

Which is why I've recently switched over to C&C. I wanted the consistency of a D20 system, without the game-slowing complexity of 3.5 Edition, and I also wanted to to still be able to easily use stuff from my library of D&D materials.

Ironic. I switched to C&C to escape the rule density of D&D, but my biggest obstacle is using miniatures in play. Lately I've been adapting selected D&D rules to make it more playable.