Mercurius
Legend
My group has now had three sessions, with our third last night. We had used the playtest rules once about a year ago but couldn't get a campaign going. With each session I find myself loving the 5E rules more and more; actually, just about everything about 5E (except the product release schedule, lack of OGL and online tools, yadayada, but that's another matter).
If I could sum up why I love 5E it would be this: Theater of Mind, baby!
I'm fairly certain everyone knows what "Theater of Mind" means, but for those who might not, it basically refers to the imaginative experience of a roleplaying game - the degree to which the "theater" happens in the mind - and not on the battlemat. It is the degree to which the experience of imagination is alive in the game experience (I'm not entirely sure, but I think the term originated with radio).
Here's a quick disclaimer: I am *not* claiming that my experience is universal, nor am I saying that theater of mind was not possible in other editions, nor that for some, other editions might be equally or even more conducive to theater of mind than 5E; everyone has their own experience. I am merely sharing my own experience and general impressions - so take it with a grain of salt. My experience and viewpoints shouldn't in any way be taken to imply that your experience and viewpoints are somehow wrong.
OK, back to it. I remember that when 3E came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for D&D. The rules were streamlined and modernized; it was as if D&D had finally caught up to the design ideas of the last decade plus. I played with a group for a couple years in 2001-02. I did start experiencing a worrisome trend with that group, which even led to a debate among us. We started using miniatures and a battle mat, not just for combats but for dungeon-crawling. The DM would draw out the dungeon as we went and we would move our pieces along. One of my fellow players protested, saying that it ruined the imaginative experience, because his attention was always focused on the game table, the mat, and the little metal figures. I really resonated with what he said. I can't remember how exactly we resolved it, but I moved shortly thereafter so stopped playing with that group.
Fast forward five years and I haven't played D&D in half a decade. I still occasionally buy books and see what's up in the RPG world, but I'm in one of the few multi-year hiatuses that I've experienced in my 35 years of gaming. Anyhow, it is late 2007 and I discover that a new edition of D&D is coming out. I join the excitement and order the slipcase set and then in June of 2008 experience Amazongate (remember that?). While I don't immediately resonate with the look and feel of 4E, I don't quite get the hullabaloo that I read about in online forums. I was able to get a group together and we started playing in the Fall of 2008. For the next few years we played semi-regularly, usually about once a month. We mainly played a single campaign for which the characters eventually went up to around level 17. I DMed 95% of the time, with a couple spells mixed in with a couple other DMs.
Anyhow, at some point I started tiring of 4E. Nothing really new to say - it has all been said before - but in many ways it came down to the feeling that 4E was like playing two games, combat and non-combat. Non-combat was fairly standard, theater of mind-based, D&D. But when combat began, our attention shifted to the battlemat and, for the most part (although not entirely), we withdrew from the imaginative experience. Given the grindy nature of 4E combat, I would estimate that 50-75% of every session was focused on the battlemat and not in Theater of Mind.
So I started looking around for other options. By that time, this was probably early 2012, I knew that 5E was coming. But I also knew that it would probably be a couple years. I took a long hard look at Pathfinder, because I owned a lot of the books and enjoyed Paizo products, but didn't want to dial back to "3.75." So we hung in with 4E, although by the time we got to 2013, our campaign was dwindling and we were playing less and less. This was largely due to Real Life obligations on my part, and me being the primary DM, it was hard to get things together. In 2014 we decided to give the playtest rules a shot, but it was only once and I couldn't get it together to run a campaign.
So now it is April of 2015. We just played our third session of a new campaign and all seem to be greatly enjoying it and the 5E rules. The main difference is where I started with: Theater of Mind. 5E has brought imagination more fully back into the game experience for all of us. It truly does harken back to the "good old days" where everything happened in the mind and, at most, miniatures and battlemats, were used as supplementary and not the focus of game play. It is so refreshing, and to me really brings forth what is best about RPGs: the play of the imagination.
So good for you, WotC. You've really nailed it with this one.
What about you all? Similar or different experience?
If I could sum up why I love 5E it would be this: Theater of Mind, baby!
I'm fairly certain everyone knows what "Theater of Mind" means, but for those who might not, it basically refers to the imaginative experience of a roleplaying game - the degree to which the "theater" happens in the mind - and not on the battlemat. It is the degree to which the experience of imagination is alive in the game experience (I'm not entirely sure, but I think the term originated with radio).
Here's a quick disclaimer: I am *not* claiming that my experience is universal, nor am I saying that theater of mind was not possible in other editions, nor that for some, other editions might be equally or even more conducive to theater of mind than 5E; everyone has their own experience. I am merely sharing my own experience and general impressions - so take it with a grain of salt. My experience and viewpoints shouldn't in any way be taken to imply that your experience and viewpoints are somehow wrong.
OK, back to it. I remember that when 3E came out, it was like a breath of fresh air for D&D. The rules were streamlined and modernized; it was as if D&D had finally caught up to the design ideas of the last decade plus. I played with a group for a couple years in 2001-02. I did start experiencing a worrisome trend with that group, which even led to a debate among us. We started using miniatures and a battle mat, not just for combats but for dungeon-crawling. The DM would draw out the dungeon as we went and we would move our pieces along. One of my fellow players protested, saying that it ruined the imaginative experience, because his attention was always focused on the game table, the mat, and the little metal figures. I really resonated with what he said. I can't remember how exactly we resolved it, but I moved shortly thereafter so stopped playing with that group.
Fast forward five years and I haven't played D&D in half a decade. I still occasionally buy books and see what's up in the RPG world, but I'm in one of the few multi-year hiatuses that I've experienced in my 35 years of gaming. Anyhow, it is late 2007 and I discover that a new edition of D&D is coming out. I join the excitement and order the slipcase set and then in June of 2008 experience Amazongate (remember that?). While I don't immediately resonate with the look and feel of 4E, I don't quite get the hullabaloo that I read about in online forums. I was able to get a group together and we started playing in the Fall of 2008. For the next few years we played semi-regularly, usually about once a month. We mainly played a single campaign for which the characters eventually went up to around level 17. I DMed 95% of the time, with a couple spells mixed in with a couple other DMs.
Anyhow, at some point I started tiring of 4E. Nothing really new to say - it has all been said before - but in many ways it came down to the feeling that 4E was like playing two games, combat and non-combat. Non-combat was fairly standard, theater of mind-based, D&D. But when combat began, our attention shifted to the battlemat and, for the most part (although not entirely), we withdrew from the imaginative experience. Given the grindy nature of 4E combat, I would estimate that 50-75% of every session was focused on the battlemat and not in Theater of Mind.
So I started looking around for other options. By that time, this was probably early 2012, I knew that 5E was coming. But I also knew that it would probably be a couple years. I took a long hard look at Pathfinder, because I owned a lot of the books and enjoyed Paizo products, but didn't want to dial back to "3.75." So we hung in with 4E, although by the time we got to 2013, our campaign was dwindling and we were playing less and less. This was largely due to Real Life obligations on my part, and me being the primary DM, it was hard to get things together. In 2014 we decided to give the playtest rules a shot, but it was only once and I couldn't get it together to run a campaign.
So now it is April of 2015. We just played our third session of a new campaign and all seem to be greatly enjoying it and the 5E rules. The main difference is where I started with: Theater of Mind. 5E has brought imagination more fully back into the game experience for all of us. It truly does harken back to the "good old days" where everything happened in the mind and, at most, miniatures and battlemats, were used as supplementary and not the focus of game play. It is so refreshing, and to me really brings forth what is best about RPGs: the play of the imagination.
So good for you, WotC. You've really nailed it with this one.
What about you all? Similar or different experience?
Ok, so it's better than that. I tried to "get into miniatures for RPG's" back around the late '80s...spent hundreds of dollars on mini's, card-stock dungeon tiles, paints, even foliage (model train stuff works pretty dang well!). At *most* I would use them for 10 to 20 percent of the game. After a few months or trying this mini thing off and on, I realized it just wasn't for me or my group. Players did sometimes buy a mini to represent their character, but only as a "table visualization" to stand in front of the player on the table.
