When playing D&D I use battlemats...

[Obryn]

If you consider the floor/kitchen table a battlemat as just something to show relative locations of things with minis, then I use them all the time.

I find this at odds with your statements in another thread about how important it is to use proper scales for minis, and insistence that terrain must be 3-D...

-O

 

[MrFilthyIke]

I stated "always" as I love my battlemat. I even used it in Call of Cthulhu games.

 

[Serendipity]

No.

In the Eberron game I was playing in before I moved yes, but that was the GM's perogative. When I'm running a game I don't need the additional headache.
Of course, I don't use minis either.

 

[Admiral Caine]

I have never not used one since playing 3.5.

I can not imagine doing so with 4E either.

I'm not a tactical guy, but my players and fellow GMs use them too.

Hell, I have been running a steady campaign for over a year, and it just struck me that I don't even own a battlemat, but I have never GMed without one.

 

[Ktulu]

Started using a battlemat the minute I started roleplaying (back in the late 90's). I like being able to be tactical. I've got large wet-erase maps that sit under plexiglass (for dry erase use and for covering the paper maps).

 

[Protagonist]

Just as a style preference, I find a grid/battlemap/minis disruptive to immersive RP.

This.

 

[Benben]

Always used, or moaned about not having since 1st-2nd edition.

 

[Shemeska]

Also, it's rather difficult to display certain things on a battlemap like one scene a month or two ago in one game I'm in where a PC was being swung at high speed at the end of a rope from a flying ship on the plane of shadow by a vampiric shadow dragon. Near the end of the first arc, the PC grabbed onto an exposed cannon on the ship, hoping to climb inside while he still had some slack in the line, and then the cannon fired, shooting him back in another arc under the ship and back up into the face of the rather amused dragon and about a dozen skeletal pirates.

Things that don't play nicely by strict rules and require an amused DM saying, "Why the hell not!" don't easily translate onto a tactical grid. However I think we play ad hoc enough that more tactical minded groups might strangle us half-way through a pickup game.

 

[justanobody]

I find this at odds with your statements in another thread about how important it is to use proper scales for minis, and insistence that terrain must be 3-D...

-O

I found it under my french fries.

Strange thing... people are not always the DM and don't always get the choice of what to use, but have to use what the DM says use when they are a player.

 

[Crothian]

Strange thing... people are not always the DM and don't always get the choice of what to use, but have to use what the DM says use when they are a player.

Wow, fire your DM then. i found that buying the DM items I like to use in games usually works or just bringing it to game.