Battlefield control without a battlemap

[Heliomance]

Most of the DMs round my area don't use a battlegrid, instead relying on description and imagination for the battle layout. This means that in my few forays into attempting battlefield control I've found it quite hard and not actually felt that useful. What tactics are needed for effective battlefield control, especially without a grid to say "my effect goes off there"?

[bosssmiley]

I suppose this goes to DM as director/fight choreographer. When running combat without a battlemat your DM needs either good descriptive skills (so you can work out how to lay down the effect to hit the max possible no. of enemies without hitting your side), or a developed sense of the dramatically appropriate ("Ok, it hits their back four, but the other two keep coming...").

The players have to have something of an old school, 'what the DM says, goes' mentality themselves to exploit this to the best advantage. If the DM says you're caught in a mis-aimed effect, or affected by the aftermath of an earlier action (rubble from triggered cave-in, grease effects, brushfires, etc.), then go along with it and use it to make the scene better.

[Malacode]

Battlefield Control without a battlemap is pretty much not happening. When you start to use spells like Wall of Sand or Edvards Black Tentacles, you need to have something to keep track of it on. Make one yourself (Not too hard), bring it along to a game and ask the DM if it can be used. THen just hope he says yes, It'll make things generally easier, if a little harder to make 'cinematic'. If your DM is good enough, he'll be able to deal with the layout and still keep the battle exciting for the other characters.

[Eldariel]

What you need to say is simply at which group you aim the effect. Like: "I conjure up grease beneath the band of the 4 ogres." or "I raise a Wall of Stone to isolate the spellcasters from the rest of the group." or "I carefully aim the Tentacles to raise behind the band so that they only barely hit the nearest enemy." As long as you explain your intent, things should work out just fine. Your DM will surely tell you if you can't do X, Y or Z.

[Kurald Galain]

It'll make things generally easier, if a little harder to make 'cinematic'. If your DM is good enough, he'll be able to deal with the layout and still keep the battle exciting for the other characters.

It's not so much "easier", but more like "an entirely different way of playing the game, that some people prefer and others do not".

[kamikasei]

Your DM will surely tell you if you can't do X, Y or Z.

The problem essentially comes down to "can you trust the DM to be fair with what your spell does?" If you're looking at a battlegrid you can see for yourself where the DM has placed the monsters and where the characters stand, so you can determine "okay, I can put down the spell here, and that'll catch all the ogres and none of the party".

If you have to ask the DM, even assuming that you trust him (let's hope!) the chances are that he's not tracking placement so precisely in his head as to allow the above to be pulled off properly. He may always tend to say that you can catch some of the monsters but not all, or you may find you pretty much always catch at least one player in the effect.

You may find this perfectly acceptable, or it may annoy you. Personally if I trust the DM (and I would expect to if I was playing with him in the first place) I'd be happy enough to go with the rough-and-ready angle. On the other hand, I've been frustrated in PnP trying to figure out what my character would do in a given situation simply because I wasn't clear on where people were and what I could reach with a move action, what I had a clear path to charge towards, etc.

addendum: Referring to the latter specifically, I think it illustrates the difference in the approaches. If there's no battle grid, you have to think of something to try and ask the DM if you can do it; and you may just take the first "yeah, that's possible" when there was a clearly better option available that you just didn't question closely enough to spot. That's tedious and unfortunate. On the other hand, if you're tracking positions on a battlegrid, you can see for yourself what you can do in terms of placement; you can with the options in your own mind before having to start twenty questions. I tend to play mid-to-high int characters with a tactical bent, so the idea of my character missing something that should have been obvious to him because I as a player found it a hassle to explore my options bugs me.

But of course, that mostly applies if you're trying to closely follow the combat rules while also eschewing the battlegrid. If you're being more flexible about the rules too, you could just come up with something neat to try, ask the DM, get an okay or a DC to roll against, and be confident that your action was at least fun and useful if not the strictly best one you could have taken.

[Kalirren]

One thing that I find helps with visual-less battlefield control is to remember to think about things in terms of action economy. Sometimes the precise positioning of a Wall of Iron really doesn't matter; what matters is that those four monsters can't charge us and will instead have to double-move around, which is plenty of time for a grease spell and some more pincushioning from the archer (one round of actions from the party). The 0th-level spell Open/Close, especially when delayed or readied, is a marvelous spell for this, for instance. 1 standard action to essentially force one enemy to not take a full-round action.

I think it boils down to saying, in a sense, that I am spending spell S and action A to attempt to force enemies X (and allies B) to lose actions C and/or accept negative effects D until they make save Y. Our DM at least is quite good about letting us negotiate in such terms when he doesn't nail it down with a map.

The places where this tends to fail tend to be where one feature overlaps with/is orthogonal to another, and then the battlefield becomes split into sectors, where the ability to cross sectors quickly or repeatedly becomes the core of tactics. Sometimes saying that it takes 3 move actions to get from point A to point B just isn't good enough.