Battle maps - Call of Cthulhu, World of Darkness, Eclipse Phase, etc.

[EccentricOwl]

I'll make this short and sweet. Pathfinder and Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition are two fairly crunchy games with a big focus on combat when it comes to rules, filled with all sorts of mechanics and ideas. Both system recommend but do not require a map for battles, though both recommend it.

But I run other games all the time. Usually with a bare-bones map or 'blueprint' of the area. It's not always ideal.


What do you do? What do you recommend? When you run World of Darkness, do you enjoy the visual aspect of a battle-grid? What about just an area map? Dresden Files's zones? Call of Cthulhu both requires and ignores battle terrain simultaneously. Eclipse Phase manages to be both meticulous and obtuse - just like Shadowrun - as to whether or not to use a map.

[Dingle]

I play a fair bit of WOD, and if there's more than about 6 participants in a battle, or the terrain/area/furniture would have some effect the ST generally draws a vague representation on a sheet of paper.

we then use either dice and erasers and whatever's handy to represent characters, or we just draw xs and circles on the page.

[WalkingTarget]

Yeah, D&D is the only game my group ever used a formal battle grid for. Everything else was just hasty placement of spare dice around the table to indicate relative positions so that we could more easily indicate who was attacking whom or similar things (and even that wasn't universal - sometimes we just kept things verbal if the situation was simple enough). D&D was the only game that had movement/flanking rules that really ever came up that might require an actual grid.