Theatre of the mind

[SliceandDiceKid]

How many of you veteran 3.Xers and 4e players have made the move away from the mat? What are your thoughts and feelings? And to those of you who have tried both in Next, which do you prefer?

[Yorrin]

Well, I've only ever used the mat sparingly anyway unless I'm playing 4e. So I guess what's nice about 5e compared to 3.5 is that the rules are designed more toward the playstyle I've been doing all along. I still need to juggle distances and such in my head, but it's still easier than, for example, 3.5's short medium and long spell ranges and their oddly specific scaling range counts.

[DontEatRawHagis]

Theatre if the mind worked well for my group. Until fights became more complex.

4 players vs 1 Ogre or 6 orcs was no problem.

6players vs 9 zombies, that broke them out of the theatre.

I'm hoping to lower my player count in someway to stop questions like where is everyone or how far away is it.

[Socko525]

I've always been a mat user. I played a small introductory session with only myself, the DM and one other player. With only 2 PC's it was definitely manageable and was really fun.

However with a group of 4-5 players, plus NPC's/enemies I'm not sure how it would be. I suppose that really all falls on the DM and how well they can describe the situation.

I'd love to try it, but the DM I'm playing with now is newer to running games, so I feel he'll rely on the mat to keep the game going

[Shining Wrath]

I think swapping between the two makes sense.

I like terrain, and it's pretty hard to do "raised dais with railing around it" in the mind, or "there are pillars supporting the ceiling" - OK, do I have LOS to the wizard stuff in TOTM.

[Daishain]

I'm a fan of big complex fights with plenty of strategy. As a result, theatre of the mind rarely makes the cut (if I'm getting what I just described. Beyond a certain point, what I'm visualizing in my head is likely to be quite different from that of the DM and other players, which makes things awkward at best.

[MustacheFart]

I definitely like and use both: Theatre of the Mind and the mat. The mat is much more useful for difficult fights or fights in which the party wants to implement some more advanced tactics. You can only imagine so much regarding positioning.

[Broken Twin]

I guess I'm echoing a common opinion here when I say that I prefer TotM for smaller, direct fights, and the mat for larger or more complex fights. Anything with 10+ combatants we usually break out the mat for. Gridless maps are an amazing alternative to the grid mat, but they're more work to acquire and/or prepare.

[SliceandDiceKid]

Thanks for the input, everyone!

I'm coming from 3.5.

I have to echo most of you. We tend to interact and go through towns without a mat. Then significant combat pretty much demands the grid. Otherwise the movement speed just gets ignored and you can end up traveling farther than you should, or not far enough. Just seems like if you have it, it simplifies things.

[Bakakiba]

I prefer seeing what is going on, which is one reason I liked 4e. Just did an adventure, and the DM started off with maps, but then switched to theater. It threw off my using polearm master. I also didn't like how we just whacked on the bad guys without needing to use any tactics.

[cobaltstarfire]

I've always only used the mat for combat. My first game used it all the time, but it seemed really pointless?


I can do without if I have to, but only if I'm playing a ranged character, although I won't be getting very creative beyond "is the bad guy in range?" and "is there anything I can hide behind?" the few times I've tried to do it with a melee character it's just made my head implode. I don't like not having a concrete understanding of how close various enemies are and stuff when it's my job to engage them and keep them away from my allies.

My working memory isn't all that great, so it's extremely helpful to have relevant information drawn out on a map for me.

[INDYSTAR188]

Regardless of the size of an encounter, I either utilize a quick sketch or a mat. If it is a comlex encounter with lots going on then I use the map in detail. If it's a quick skirmish I will sketch something out quick to give an approximation of what I'm talking about but mostly use TotM. This seems to work fairly well, especially with new players (I have two).

[Shadow]

I've always used a TotM style as much as possible, with a map as a guide (but not to scale) for most fights.
I begin the session by drawing to scale a map of any battle which will be a boss fight, if one is coming, on an extremely large 3'x4' dry erase grid.
Then I fold that over and use the other side and draw quick and easy not-to-scale maps for the extreme vast majority of fights. My players use a die as their marker on the unscaled maps, primarily going by TotM, just using the grid to get an approximation of positioning, LoS, etc, if needed.
If and when I turn the map over, it becomes a more tactical fight, like 3.x and 4e. But I've always played this way, even during 3.x and 4e.

Nothing has changed for 5e. It's the best of both worlds, IMO. Quick and dirty most of the time, while tactical for the big fights.

[Submortimer]

Since my gaming group meets via Google Hangouts, TotM is pretty much all we have to use, and it works quite well. I think we would use Roll20 to have a virtual mat, but we really just don't feel the need for it.

[hachface]

I ran a few encounters without a grid but I found them boring compared to gridded play. Also at this point I've invested a fair bit of cash into dungeon tiles so it'd be a shame if I stopped using them.

[WickerNipple]

I don't think 5th makes for a particularly interesting miniatures combat game, so it's TotM for me this edition.

[MrUberGr]

We use a grid only for combat. On other occasions we rarely bring it forth. When in a town, we won't bother counting how many steps we do to the tavern or how far that suspicious/wealthy looking person is. If a player asks, then we set up the map. We have a basic grid and use markers and other stuff as crowd, houses etc. But, I can't see how you can play a combat without a grid. potential hide spots, LoS, Area effects etc. If it's a boss fight I guess it could be easier considering you're fighting one enemy. But, when you have multiple enemies then I don't even want to think about it.


Since my gaming group meets via Google Hangouts, TotM is pretty much all we have to use, and it works quite well. I think we would use Roll20 to have a virtual mat, but we really just don't feel the need for it.

There is some website for this exact purpose. Everyone can communicate with webcams, the dm can draw out the map on a grid, use e-miniatures etc. Can't remember the name unfortunately

[dexrom]

I absolutely LOVE how much easier it is to use theatre of the mind in 5e. I played heavily in AD&D 2nd back in the 90's and dipped a bit into 3rd when it came out before taking an extended hiatus from table top gaming until a few years ago. All we ever did back in the day was TotM. Never once did we touch miniatures or maps and we had crazy encounters and adventures. When I came back it was to play non fantasy games but got talked into joining a game of pathfinder (which has been going on for two years now). It was weird for me initially but I have acclimated to the maps fine enough. My main problem with the mat and figures is that everyone seems to focus too much on their miniature and it feels less imaginative to me and starts to feel like a board game a bit too much. I missed the old style of dungeon delving I used to do in my youth though and 5th has brought that back for me. Been running a game since the PHB came out and I'm loving it.

[Socko525]

We use a grid only for combat. On other occasions we rarely bring it forth. When in a town, we won't bother counting how many steps we do to the tavern or how far that suspicious/wealthy looking person is. If a player asks, then we set up the map. We have a basic grid and use markers and other stuff as crowd, houses etc. But, I can't see how you can play a combat without a grid. potential hide spots, LoS, Area effects etc. If it's a boss fight I guess it could be easier considering you're fighting one enemy. But, when you have multiple enemies then I don't even want to think about it.



There is some website for this exact purpose. Everyone can communicate with webcams, the dm can draw out the map on a grid, use e-miniatures etc. Can't remember the name unfortunately

www.Roll20.com is the website I believe you're referencing. It actually has a LFG tool as well, so you can join other people's games as well, and they're working on optimizing the in game interfaces/calculations for 5th edition as we speak.

[Totema]

I actually like the middle ground approach. I use the mat, but not the grid.

[Falka]

I use maps for adventures such as HotQ and usually, we use tokens for big battles. I have the Monster Vault, so we can use a lot of tokens. However, unlike 4e, I do not tend to use grids or overly precise maps.

[rollingForInit]

My group has started using maps less and less. We only ever use it for combat, but we've tried to move away from it during smaller combats as well. By which I mean, fights with few enemies. I don't think it'd work for complex fights, since our group is pretty keen on tactics and mciro management. But for anything else, Theatre of the Mind feels a lot better.

[stitchlipped]

I think a map is still necessary for most fights. 5th edition really wants to break away from the grid, but the whole game is still too reliant on precise measures of movement distance and range for that to actually be practical. And there's other stuff that prevents it from doing this as well as it would like to as well - how are you meant to rule on things like moving through an enemy's space, attacks of opportunity etc, without knowing precisely where everyone is?

If the DMG has optional rules for zones like in Fate, or something similar which does away with exact ranges, I may start running TotM combat more often. For now though, I only do it for the simplest and shortest fights, and obviously any non-combat encounters.

[VoxRationis]

My group almost never uses grids (and we play 3.5 so far; my brother now has a 5e book, but we have yet to play it). Sometimes we find it useful to use miniatures, such as with my current campaign, where there are 6 party members and enemies generally come in the flavor of "2 or 3 x (party size) fighters", but the grid almost never comes into play. If terrain becomes a feature, that's what the extra books are for. As it stands, a lot of the group DMs with a no-miniatures assumption anyway, particularly for mounted combat or ranged fights where everyone is in range of everyone else.

[TheCrowing1432]

Well, I've only ever used the mat sparingly anyway unless I'm playing 4e. So I guess what's nice about 5e compared to 3.5 is that the rules are designed more toward the playstyle I've been doing all along. I still need to juggle distances and such in my head, but it's still easier than, for example, 3.5's short medium and long spell ranges and their oddly specific scaling range counts.

This,

Ive only ever used a mat a handful of times.