Worlds of Design: Grounding the Game

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"Battles are won by slaughter and manoeuvre. The greater the general, the more he contributes in manoeuvre, the less he demands in slaughter." --Sir Winston Churchill.

There are pros and cons to theater of the mind style of play, and much of it is determined by the interplay between the game master and the players.

What is Theater of the Mind?​

In a role-playing game, when there is a physical encounter during adventure and possible conflict, the GM uses no board or other way of tracking maneuver and location. It is all done in the mind, or possibly with figures on the table. These are not in any particular physical relationship to one another except for any individual(s) they are currently fighting. This is obviously quicker than using actual detailed maneuver.

From the first time I played an RPG (D&D, original booklets plus Greyhawk) we used a square grid and pieces. This was not required by the rules, though it has become the rule standard for more recent D&D (to the extreme that one presenter at GenCon called D&D 3.0 “Fantasy Squad Leader” – Squad Leader is the famous Avalon Hill individual WW II combat game). Being a wargamer, and a board game designer, it never occurred to me to use Theater of the Mind in RPGs. I’ve always used a board and pieces.

To Grid or Not to Grid?​

The first thing to note is that theater of the mind can sometimes make it harder for the players to specify where their characters are located, to act to block enemy access, to indicate anything else that involves tactical movement. In other words, the “board” is missing. A board is an objective reality in the game that each player can engage with, vs. relying on the GM telling them what they can see. Conversely, the major purpose of a board in a boardgame is to reduce confusion while depicting geospatial relationships and maneuver.

This lack of precision with Theater of the Mind play can bother some people: I knew one well-known board wargame publisher who said that he doesn’t like RPGs because they’re too “loosey goosey”. He wanted the precision one gets from board game rules. Perhaps Theater of the Mind helped engender his attitude – “what, no board and pieces?” But it could be because RPGs derive from miniatures wargame rules, and typically such rules involve negotiation about their actual meaning, that is, they are frequently imprecise.

If treating tabletop role-playing games like strategic battles, where every action and move has consequences, grids make sense. But for players who want more dynamic action, where the dimensions of a room matter less than the cool stuff happening in the game, a grid can feel restrictive. Different rulesets can encourage or discourage this level of engagement. Tactical games, like D&D’s heritage from wargaming, focus on movement and actions. Narrative games instead focus on story and flow.

Get Your Tickets​

It’s no accident that storytelling games tend to rely on Theater of the Mind play; it lends itself quite well to storytelling. The GM is effectively telling you what happens, just as the author of a novel does. There is no board or miniatures to get in the way of the narrative, where PCs are often equally spaced out five feet apart.

Five or so years ago I watched a Dystopia Rising tabletop RPG being played at a college game club. Quite apart from the masses of hard-to-read D10s being used, I was impressed that there was no visual depiction of what was happening. They were using Theater of the Mind for their combat (which otherwise was very detailed, down to what body part was struck, and absorption of damage by armor). On the other hand, at GrogCon in central Florida more recently, a convention for AD&D players, some GMs used a board and pieces, some did not.

Whether or not you use Theater of the Mind is likely decided by the kind of game your game master wants to run, and the kind of game your players are willing to play.

Your Turn: If you use theater of the mind, how do you handle logistics like positioning and spatial relationships to creatures and objects?

 

[zarionofarabel]

Loosely!

Most of the time, not all, but most of the time the only 3 spacial relationships that matter are...

1. Too far away to shoot.
2. Close enough to shoot.
3. Melee.

As long as those 3 spacial relationships are tracked, the particulars don't really matter. If there seems to be a disconnect between what I as GM am imagining and what a player is imagining, the player wins and things are narrated based on their perception. It's like the scene from a movie with "shakey cam" or a martial arts fight where the camera moves all over. Perfect knowledge of position simply doesn't exist. For me it stops combat from becoming a clinical "chess like" experience, something I don't want out of a TTRPG. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love a good chess match, but I don't enjoy that in a TTRPG. I want the action to be fast and loose and either scary and dangerous or cinematic. TotM combat helps create that experience, mapped combat doesn't. At least for me anyway. Cheers!

 

[GM Lent]

I have never used miniatures in my TTRPGs in over 30 years of gaming; if I want to play/run a boardgame I have HeroQuest. I have played in a number of games over the years that did use miniatures, and while there are advantages, it's been my observation that players in such games don't tend to think 3-dimensionally. The old adage that "nobody looks up" holds true in all games I've ever played, but it has seemed especially true of games using terrain, miniatures, etc.

These days I run two regular DCC games: one in a locla shop and one online. In the local shop, I tend to place the dungeon grid on the table in front of everyone and use scraps of paper to emulate a "fog of war" until doing such is no longer practical; online using Roll20 I just use the Fog of War feature. I do this mostly because the maps in DCC products tend to be gorgeous works of art and I don't want to hide them from the players. Town and countryside maps I tend to just lay out and let everyone see.

In a clash between verisimilitude and keeping folks engaged/keeping the game moving, engagement will win every time at my table.

 

[Hussar]

It’s no accident that storytelling games tend to rely on Theater of the Mind play; it lends itself quite well to storytelling. The GM is effectively telling you what happens, just as the author of a novel does. There is no board or miniatures to get in the way of the narrative, where PCs are often equally spaced out five feet apart.

While I agree with much of what you've said here, this is a pretty bad misrepresentation of storytelling games. Most of the time in storytelling games, the players are telling each other and the GM what happens. At least, that's how it works in the story games I play.

 

[payn]

While I agree with much of what you've said here, this is a pretty bad misrepresentation of storytelling games. Most of the time in storytelling games, the players are telling each other and the GM what happens. At least, that's how it works in the story games I play.

I was gonna say the same thing.

 

[Koloth]

My first RPG games mostly didn't use minis or maps. We were poor college students who had to choose between buying weekend food or PHB or dice or minis or maps. Minis and maps generally lost. If a scenario was complicated, we sometimes would layout change, spare dice, bits of paper, etc. When 3.0 came out, we used minis and maps a lot more. Metal minis and paints had gotten easier to use. Plus the D&D Combat minis were cheap on the secondary markets. But even today, we sometimes skip the maps because the scenario isn't that complex. We generally have a good feel for if the rogue can tumble behind the ogre or the wizard can cast fireball without getting half the party in friendly fire. And the range on an ACR in Traveller is longer then most gaming tables and maps can handle. "The sniper is setup off map...."

I agree that lots of players tend to forget the z-axis in combat. (queue up the 'two dimensional thinking' from ST-Wrath of Khan.) But a lot of that is due to the difficulty of properly showing altitude. There are lots of stands but most don't tell if the flying critter is 10' or 100' up. Plus they still take a ground level spot on the map and are often easy to knock over. 3D printers are helping but printing out a nice wall to defend still takes a fair amount of time for something that might get used once a year.

 

[overgeeked]

Wow. There’s a whole lot of badwrongfun in that article.

 

[payn]

Your Turn: If you use theater of the mind, how do you handle logistics like positioning and spatial relationships to creatures and objects?

I dont use D&D Illl tell you that much. I dont see that as an issue, I like the complex combat systems in RPGs as much as I like the streamlined ones that facilitate TotM. In the latter, I usually let the narrative drives spatial relationships to creatures and objects. We dont have codified rules that tell us how far a character can move in a turn (30ft per action in 3E for example). So, we talk it out and figure what seems plausible for our situation.

There is a middle ground where you do have some simple codified action mechanics. Traveller, for example, has a concept of personal,short,medium,long range distance between creatures and objects. An action changes the distance from one level to the next. So, in this instance I often use a map without a grid. Its purely for visual queues on where characters are in relation to each other. It tracks the placement because by the rules it matters, but its not granular to the level of positioning and every foot/meter actually mattering. I would assume since some visual aid is used, it wouldnt be considered TotM by purist, so I call it middle ground for lack of a better term.

 

[Marc17]

Your Turn: If you use theater of the mind, how do you handle logistics like positioning and spatial relationships to creatures and objects?

Breaking out the grid and miniatures usually involves more time and effort than actually doing the combat. Everything is described by the DM, with player input, and described. For things like one enemy, there is usually not that much description needed. For more complicated combats, it might be necessary to just put dots on a piece of paper to show positioning and get the spacial awareness between characters in eveybody's mind. Unless there is some conflict it what the DM thinks is happening and what a player thinks is happening, then everything is fine.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I like to use both depending on the situation and would ideally prefer to save the board for certain highly tactical battles.

But...in practice I haven't had a lot of great experiences running TotM combat in D&D. D&D has all kinds of things measured in feet that are supposed to matter. It has opportunity attacks and other things in the rules that rely on positioning. All of that means that I as DM have to keep a mental board anyway, and not having a shared board just means players are sometimes going to see something different than I did and there will be confusion. (Maybe that's a me problem, but it happens with other DMs too).

I would really like to do more TotM, but I would also like to use lightning lure and have different ranges and areas of effect matter, and it's really difficult to do that without a shared visual representation.