Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6588701" data-attributes="member: 996">I don't doubt it.  I've run Champions! in that mode when a play surface wasn't available, and it's far more 'dependent' on the grid (actually hex) than any ed of D&D.  I never meant to imply you /couldn't/ (the OP said the same thing, so it didn't seem to be a point of contention) just that the rules have never done anything to facilitate it, while they have been written in ways that facilitate using minis (or tokens, chits or whatever) and a play surface of some sort. At least one.  None the less, 5e doesn't have rules that actually do that.  It just flatly states that the default mode of play is 'TotM,' then goes on to give rules for range, area, movement & positioning that are fairly typical of D&D in the 20th century.  D&D has a long tradition of being adapted to a variety of play styles, worlds, settings and even entirely different genres.  Most editions have come right out and said that you can change the rules however you like, and even games that maintain a pretense that you shouldn't can be.  So that's a given, yes.  Play it how you like.  Always could.  The zietgiest of the community has changed over the decades, though.  In the 3.x era, RAW ruled with an iron fist, 'Rule 0' notwithstanding.  In all other editions, though, there was less resistance to variations of one kind or another - 5e is particularly strident about being 'meant' to be changed by the DM ('rulings not rules'), so if there can be said to be a mode of play it doesn't encourage or support, it'd be 'RAW' (sorta like:  "here are some rules, but whatever you do, don't actually play by them.")  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> As with so many things, it seems to fall between 2e & 3e in that regard.  The DMG module for 'tactics' is little more than a token gesture toward using a grid to facilitate movement & positioning, the game already works fine for play on a surface using counters of some sort.  If you can divide by 5 you can use a grid or hex to simplify play (just as, in 4e, if you could multiply by 5, you could complicate play by converting everything to feet if wanted).None of that necessarily means it's delivering 'tactical' play, though.  You can lay out a play surface, move mini's around, and measure everything carefully, and the combat can still devolve into simple focus-fire tactics, with static front & back ranks or the melee types surrounding a single monsters while others shoot it from a safe distance.  By the same token, you can run a more dynamic and interesting combat with some tactical depth 'TotM' if the DM & players are up to the challenge.The rules don't seem facilitate TotM in any specific way.   There's nothing about needing to know exactly where all the combatants stand relative to eachother in order to figure out who is caught in a cone, cylinder, sphere or other geometric shape, for instance, that facilitates TotM.  To the contrary, 5e  rules can be more readily resolved if some sort of surface and position tracking is used (even if it's just X's & O's on a sheet of graph paper).  What 5e does do is not facilitate TotM, but validate it as the 'default' mode of play.Sometimes a little affirmation is all it takes to make people happy.</blockquote>

Verification