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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5206875" data-attributes="member: 4720">Considering that we're talking about recent iterations of the D&D rules, weapon position, weapon style, and facing are pretty far outside the bounds of the discussion.  But I'll bite.Personally, I care about terrain and relative position of players, which have been fairly important to the rules as written for a few editions now.  I'm willing to fudge a grid if I trust the other people at the table, but I want some sort of representation of people, monsters, boulders, cliffs, bad terrain, etc. that I can look at and use.I want to know more or less exactly how close someone is to a cliff/table/boulder/rough terrain/etc, because I love positioning effects that I can use to hinder, incapacitate, or irritate my foes.  There are DMs I've met that can fairly adjudicate that stuff on the fly, but it's a rare skill, IME.  So I'd rather have some sort of common representation.I find that more enjoyable by leaps and bounds, and my personal experience is that the time it saves in avoiding arguments more than makes up for the time spent fiddling with it.Perhaps I should have said "No one in this thread has come up with an example of mini-less combat that didn't involve vague positioning and using player narrative control."  I can't say for certain that no one, anywhere, has come up with such an example.But I'm quite happy to say that some physical representation is absolutely required for accurate positioning.  I enjoy the game play that emerges out of accurate positioning, so therefore I prefer physical representations of the combat space.There is a distinct difference between having a grid where my rogue and your fighter are standing next to an orc and the DM describing the scene with no referent.  The first gives me an accurate representation of which abilities of mine are in play and what I need to do to set up or maintain my abilities.  The second requires me to reference the DM's memory every time.I've studied memory in the lab.  Trusting memory is, frankly, a mistake.  In simple terms, you re-write it every time you access it.  Running a combat requires accessing it many, many times.  The telephone game is instructive here.  I wouldn't trust my own memory about this, so I'm certainly not going to inflict my memory on others or trust someone else's when we can bust out some coins, bottle caps, pogs, minis, or whatever.Paper is a wonderful technology.  It allows us to offload menial mental tasks to the environment, enabling us to spend mental resources on something we find more fun.  I find there to be no particular virtue in refusing to do so.</blockquote>

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