D&D 5E Why I love 5E - the renewal of Theater of Mind

[Charles Wright]

You call it I call it "not having to ask the DM in the first place".

Player: "I move here and cast fireball. Ogres 1, 2, and 4 take... *roll*... 42 fire damage, Dex save DC 15 for half damage."
DM: "*roll**roll**roll*... Ogre 1 makes his save and is still alive, but very crispy. Ogres 2 and 4 weren't so lucky and are piles of ash."

I call that "why bother having a DM" and "what happened to the storytelling element?"

Your mileage may vary.

 

[Mistwell]

Yes. That's about the only difference between 5e and 3e as far as TotM vs grid support is concerned. 5e tells you to use TotM, 3e doesn't label the use of a grid 'optional.'

I disagree, and people gave a ton of examples above explaining many other differences that are more helpful for theater of the mind. To summarize: relative position means a lot less in 5e than 3e, for numerous things such as opportunity attacks, bonuses and penalties, ability and spell triggers, the focus on rulings instead of a rule for everything, etc..

 

[hachface]

I call that "why bother having a DM" and "what happened to the storytelling element?"

Your mileage may vary.

You still need the DM to play the ogres. And create the environments. And devise the traps. And invent the richly detailed NPCs in the nearby village whose grievous plight tugs on the PCs' tender heartstrings, prompting them to set off slaying ogres in the first place. In other words: the DM is still doing all the important things. The grid simply takes the adjudication of precise distances off his plate. As the DM of a long-running campaign, I am thrilled anytime a minor decision can be taken off my plate. It gives me more cognitive space to focus on actual storytelling.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Player: "Can my fireball reach the wizard at the top of the tower?"
DM: "Sure."
Player: "Okay I do it."
DM: "Awesome. The minaret blows off the top like a firework."

TotM is not some magical set of abstractions, it's just the trick of not getting bogged down in the detail.

No one's arguing that TotM isn't legitimate. What you describe, there, though, isn't a game that has mechanics set up for TotM, it's just an example of a DM ignoring (or ballparking) the rules. From the example, we don't know if its because the rules made it obvious it'd work, because the rules were silent, because the player was being kept ignorance of the rules or because the DM decided to override the rules for story purposes.

If you really want to fuss over an extra few feet at the margin of a spell, use a grid. That's what the grid is good at.

Quite the opposite, actually. With a grid, you take the granularity to whole squares instead of feet - you get to ignore the extra few feet at the margin of a spell. A game, like 5e, that gives you areas like 20' spheres, doesn't ignore those extra few feet. A game, like 13A, that's designed for TotM wouldn't bother giving you the exact dimensions of a fireball, instead telling you in more abstract, easier to manage, terms how many enemies it can affect.

 

[The Grassy Gnoll]

I use theatre of the mind - it's what I was brought up on.
Also, I travel to our game that I dm so lugging a bunch of minis would be un ache dans les ballons. Plus, expense. But mainly cause my anal nature would make me have to get the exact right minis and stocking up enough would be open wallet surgery!
But I like totm - yes it's less exact but I tried warhammer and it bored the pants off me, and relying on minis for combat feels too much like wargaming, for me. So far it hasn't caused a problem, we just keep a weather eye out for distances if need be.

 

[SilverfireSage]

The point being that D&D is a game that worries about the difference between a speed of 25 feet and a speed of 20 feet.

It is a game of exact distance, even if people choose to handwave them.

As opposed to say Edge of the Empire, which is a true TotM game and uses only abstract measurements like "close" and "far."

In TotM, 25 feet and 20 feet are good measures of granular speed. So, how fast is this guy getting away? Slightly faster than you, since he has a speed of 25ft and you have a speed of 20ft. Yeah, you could use "Slowest, slower, slow, average, fast, faster, fastest" but now you've lost the people that do want to use grids, and you'll have to make up speeds for them anyway on top of the TotM approach. 5E had to cater to all eras of players. Giving rounded speeds and areas of effect rather than grids was their way of doing so.

 

[hachface]

But mainly cause my anal nature would make me have to get the exact right minis and stocking up enough would be open wallet surgery!

I run combat on a grid almost exclusively, but I think that actually buying miniatures is a sucker's game. Instead I create cardstock tokens with exactly the art I want on them. This is not a $0 solution -- cardstock and printer ink are fairly expensive -- but it's much easier on the wallet than buying miniatures, and you never have to worry about not having the right creature. Some examples:

 

[The Human Target]

I've never found the "Well, you can play this way, (but 99% of the way it's actually played is with grid maps and minis)" to be a very compelling or strong counter argument.

I can't tell if you agree with me or not.

 

[The Human Target]

In TotM, 25 feet and 20 feet are good measures of granular speed. So, how fast is this guy getting away? Slightly faster than you, since he has a speed of 25ft and you have a speed of 20ft. Yeah, you could use "Slowest, slower, slow, average, fast, faster, fastest" but now you've lost the people that do want to use grids, and you'll have to make up speeds for them anyway on top of the TotM approach. 5E had to cater to all eras of players. Giving rounded speeds and areas of effect rather than grids was their way of doing so.

For sure D&D in general and 5e in specific straddles the line.

My argument isn't that you can't or shouldn't use TotM for 5e, but that its not 100% geared towards it nor is it very good at it.

 

[Psikerlord#]

Anyone can easily do that with grids.

That's what wet erase mats are for.

No one says you even need "correct" minis. Or any minis.

TotM and grid have differences, but freedom isn't one of them.

Good luck doing a running battle over rooftops with a grid. Or aerial combat. Or when you split the party. It has a number of restrictions compared to ToTM. I can think of quite a few times in 4e that I shelved a battle idea because it was going to be too complex for a grid. That's just what happens when you have to map out every 5' square.