Things in RPGs that you used to like but don’t anymore

[FilthyLucre]

Maybe I'm missing something here, but why would theater of mind automatically make combat arbitrary like this? Just because the GM can't point to a detailed map of the battlefield doesn't mean the combatants aren't in specific places in relation to each other. Sure, playing theater of mind probably means the players might have a harder time understanding exactly where everyone is in relation to each other and the GM has an easier time fudging things in one direction or another if they want to, but neither is a certainty.

I never want to *need* to fudge anything. At any given time, all the players should be able to agree on exactly where they and enemies are - I can't achieve that in theatre of mind combat.

[kyoryu]

It's not just an issue of range, but precision relation between two points/positions. My players don't want things to happen because I decide they happen, they want to plan their turns around definite, objective positions.

Right. Which is my point was 'if a system requires that level of precision, you probably want a grid".

[martixy]

Right. Which is my point was 'if a system group requires that level of precision, you probably want a grid".

Poor choice of words.

This is me btw, I do not enjoy ambiguity.

[Telok]

Right. Which is my point was 'if a system requires that level of precision, you probably want a grid".

I'd say "map" instead. Two groups with modern/future weapons & communications trying to ambush each other in a ruined city and you care about sight lines, building height, etc., over distances of a kilometer or more. If your system does it in a single roll then you can escape maps, otherwise it's a bit difficult to ensure that you the DM are being fair. And that's just not going to play nice on a 2m per inch grid.

I've had mild success at breaking people from grids by using it as a rough scale measure for a map and intentionally placing minis, tokens, etc., across grid lines/intersections.

[Xervous]

I'd say "map" instead. Two groups with modern/future weapons & communications trying to ambush each other in a ruined city and you care about sight lines, building height, etc., over distances of a kilometer or more. If your system does it in a single roll then you can escape maps, otherwise it's a bit difficult to ensure that you the DM are being fair. And that's just not going to play nice on a 2m per inch grid.

I've had mild success at breaking people from grids by using it as a rough scale measure for a map and intentionally placing minis, tokens, etc., across grid lines/intersections.

Curse you for sparking an idea. I may have to code or grab a module for gridless movement in foundry. Surely it can’t be that hard... right?

[Telok]

Curse you for sparking an idea. I may have to code or grab a module for gridless movement in foundry. Surely it can’t be that hard... right?

One way to fake it, in programming at least don't know about foundry, is to set the grid really small and only display every Xth line. Say go from a 2m x 2m grid to a 20cm x 20cm grid, 10x all the objects, and only display every 10th line.

[Batcathat]

I never want to *need* to fudge anything. At any given time, all the players should be able to agree on exactly where they and enemies are - I can't achieve that in theatre of mind combat.

And I'm not saying that's mandatory in theater of mind type combat. I'm saying they could, not that they must or that they should.

Right. Which is my point was 'if a system requires that level of precision, you probably want a grid".

Sure, it might be the better choice for some styles of combat. I wouldn't have argued against "I don't like theater of mind since it's less precise", I argued against "I don't like theater of mind since it means the GM makes arbitrary decisions".

[Darth Paul]

I'm dead certain this has been addressed in the thread already, heck, I think it was obliquely addressed in the opening post, but here's my take anyway:

"Realistic" combat systems. Systems that try to simulate actual gunfire/melee/fisticuffs, to the point that they reduce it to 2.5 second combat rounds (I'm lookin' at you, Phoenix Command) and have a detailed range, accuracy and penetration/damage chart for every single weapon.

Yes, it removed the "ridiculous" factor that came with being able to theoretically shoot someone from 1 foot away in the head with a .44 Magnum and only do 2 points of damage, i.e. a scratch, but then again so do the coup de grace rules, and any halfway competent GM could make those up on the fly- as indeed I did. ("He dispatches you. No, I'm not going to roll the dice. Roll a new character.")

It was fun for a while, seeing exactly where someone gets hit, working out the factors affecting your accuracy, paring down the weight of every piece of equipment so your character had the best possible gear:action point ratio; but when it takes 2 hours to resolve a 2 minute encounter, something's out of whack. In real life people don't think, move, or react that fast.

Where these systems themelves reached the height of ridiculous was when they introduced their armor (meaning TANKS) supplement. Try integrating tanks and APCs with foot combatants. Or try running a tank battle on a scale of hundreds of yards, at 2.5 second intervals... when a vehicle may take 5 rounds to cross a single hex at that map scale.

I concluded that I much prefer the d20 combat for all its undoubted flaws, and if you want tanks, let's get out the Avalon Hill games for a night.

[Telwar]

And I'm not saying that's mandatory in theater of mind type combat. I'm saying they could, not that they must or that they should.



Sure, it might be the better choice for some styles of combat. I wouldn't have argued against "I don't like theater of mind since it's less precise", I argued against "I don't like theater of mind since it means the GM makes arbitrary decisions".

Or, has to spend valuable time and brain power keeping everyone's relative positions in mind and communicate that to everyone, every action.

The downside to the board is that drawing out the map is a non-trivial exercise. People have to move out of the way, move drinks/dice/cats, etc.

While I personally prefer a board, the games I have run have tended not to need them, and/or used "engaged/near/far" range bands, which is a development I do appreciate.

[noob]

Or, has to spend valuable time and brain power keeping everyone's relative positions in mind and communicate that to everyone, every action.

The downside to the board is that drawing out the map is a non-trivial exercise. People have to move out of the way, move drinks/dice/cats, etc.

While I personally prefer a board, the games I have run have tended not to need them, and/or used "engaged/near/far" range bands, which is a development I do appreciate.

the issue is in tight interiors where you have to wonder "If I shoot a rocket in that corridor do we all die and if yes how much destroyed are our corpses?"

[Max_Killjoy]

Or, has to spend valuable time and brain power keeping everyone's relative positions in mind and communicate that to everyone, every action.

The downside to the board is that drawing out the map is a non-trivial exercise. People have to move out of the way, move drinks/dice/cats, etc.

While I personally prefer a board, the games I have run have tended not to need them, and/or used "engaged/near/far" range bands, which is a development I do appreciate.

So have the drawing surface out in its own space as part of the setup for gaming, ready to go, that it doesn't share with drinks, cats, or other stuff.

[Imbalance]

As someone who only knows one thing about HeroClix, and it's that you can use them as miniatures in a pinch, what exactly was so radical a change?

In a nutshell, from my perspective, HeroClix transformed from a miniatures game into a card game.

Spoiler: tl;dr

Show

HeroClix' introduction hailed it as a miniatures skirmish game where the combat dial handles statistics and abilities in place of books full of tables and charts and features dynamic changes to character conditions over the course of a game, with a small amount of modifier tracking by the players. Once a basic understanding of the rules and symbology was attained, players would only ever need to reference what was currently shown through the dial window and the terrain on the board to proceed with the game. Along the way, card elements were introduced, adding off-board data to current combat situations. Later, character cards were added for every piece, granting individual, non-standard abilities to most characters. For most of the game's history, viewing a character's dial beyond what was currently visible was against the rules. At length, character cards now have the entire dial printed on them as a table, and per new rules should be visible to all players. This was the final straw for me. The figures on the grid might as well be chits, the dial is obsolete, and there is far more information present outside of the battlefield than within. It has become exemplary of every barrier it was intended to overcome.

On battlemats, maps, and TotM, first maybe some glossary clarification is needed?

Map - a diagram representing a geographic area
This is the foldout from the printed adventure, or a handout for the players. As an in-game object, accuracy should be suspect. For immersion, of course.

Battlemat, grid, dungeon tiles, 3d terrain build - this is the tabletop setup for the locale where the party presently finds themselves (as simple or as detailed as the DM cares to make it)
The primary purpose should be to communicate relative positioning and spatial recognition within the scene such that all present may share a clear visualization, whether the activity is combat or exploration.

In these discussions, defaulting to "map" as the term for either or both of these distinct means of representation is a sure way to cause confusion. I would advocate that we specify between "paper map" and "encounter map" by openly discussing the codification of clearly distinguishing terms.

Theater-of-the-mind, then, as a communication device, ought to be equally useful at painting a scenario so that everyone at the table may envision a like-minded interpretation. Right? So, if the DM says, "The southern half of the island is relatively temperate, and is covered by a coniferous forest. The central tundra of the island is covered in snow and frequently endures savage blizzards especially to the north. Barren mountains lie to the northwestern side of the island, while one of three rivers flows north to the frigid northeast coast. Beyond the mountains, a massive glacier collapses into the sea. The island's other two rivers flow west and south. A frozen lake to the east is the largest body of water on the island," would everyone at the table imagine something like this?:

Spoiler

Show

Based on personal experience, I have doubts.

Personally, I see no reason to omit any kind of communication tool at my disposal. Running Lost Mines of Phandelver MILD SPOILER WARNING, as the old half-elf in the orchard, I described him giving the party directions to Old Owl Well as he grabbed a stick and drew a line and two circles in the dust, emoting his gestures as I said something like, "you can't get there from here, but if you go out the Triboar Trail a piece you can't miss the old watchtower, here, and besides that's the Well, see?" and handed them a napkin sketch IRL.

There is no encounter map in the published adventure, but a simple folding dry-erase board with a 1" grid upon which I drew lines for the road, stacked Jenga blocks in a ring for the ruined tower, and placed another round object for the well plainly fit the old farmer's scribble and description. A crude oragami tent was the only additional feature of note as I told them what they saw (and smelled) on their approach, and I even grabbed an atmospheric illustration of their view that someone else had posted online that I showed via tablet device. For a party of all new players, nobody had to ask where the zombies were coming from or how many there were with a swarm of miniatures spilling forth from the ruins toward their own scale effigies.

And yeah, I'm a toy guy whose tabletop builds are getting progressively more elaborate as I gradually acquire terrain, but I just can't see being all one way and never another when it comes to bringing the game world to my players. I will say that there are elements and props that can detract verisimilitude - I'm not a fan of dollhouse details or anything that I have to place with tweezers that nobody can see from three feet away, using a TV screen seems...un-ergonomic (though I've yet to try it), and there's nothing subtle about LEDs at 25mm scale - but I'm pleased to be able to have a variety of means on hand to aid the imagination.

And since I prep that way, there isn't a lot of shuffling of accoutrements when I fly the scene in for the table. Nobody's drinks get spilled, maybe they needed to tidy their sheets anyway, and for crying out loud keep the pets off the furniture. No joke, if you let your cat walk where we eat or play, I'm not coming to your house. I won't be able to breathe.

[Quertus]

Yeah, I remember someone talking about how 5e sped up combat and they could finish an average fight in 45minutes and I was just thinking: I was looking for five. This would never happen (for several reasons) but I always have a vision of someone trying to spring a "deep" combat system on me and as they are pulling out the minis just looking at them and asking for the combat's DC. Impossible, but it gets the point across: Why spend so much more time on this than anything else? I guess because it is its own draw but I'm not into switching between two games back and forth.

Curious how you would handle the reverse at one of my tables, where 3e combat is handled hyper-competently in a matter of minutes, but conversations can have strategic depth and last for extended periods, and can involve more rolls than combat.

Or the games where the players do ALL the rolling, and all NPCs have things that the players roll against and the GM never ever picks up a single die.

You had me until there.

I could play D&D where the PCs roll their AC against the monster's attack value, roll their DC against their opponents' saves, etc. I'm just adding 10 to the DC rather than to what your accustomed to.

Would you take issue with "player rolled D&D", that was mechanically statistically equivalent to "normal" D&D?

[Cluedrew]

On Theatre of the Mind: I feel like most of the complaints about theatre of the mind are trying to apply a system designed for a grid to it. Which doesn't seem like it would usually go well. There are systems designed to be run without a map, like Fate, and they usually remove the exact numbers from the system anyways, ranges might be melee, near or far.

Curious how you would handle the reverse at one of my tables, where 3e combat is handled hyper-competently in a matter of minutes, but conversations can have strategic depth and last for extended periods, and can involve more rolls than combat.

I can't say for sure without trying it out but maybe, my main indicators would be this:

• Does it connect to the story? If the conversation is about things and people that stretch beyond this one scene that helps. If we are just going into a lot of detail about how we haggle the prices down then it will probably be kind of boring.
• How often does the situation change? Or rather are we making the same kind of decisions again and again through-out the conversation or are significant changes happening.

Plus a few things that I know about but are really hard to describe/make general rules about.

[Pex]

I could play D&D where the PCs roll their AC against the monster's attack value, roll their DC against their opponents' saves, etc. I'm just adding 10 to the DC rather than to what your accustomed to.

Would you take issue with "player rolled D&D", that was mechanically statistically equivalent to "normal" D&D?

That was a mechanic I didn't like about 4E. The attacker always rolls to hit, even for "saving throws". It's an aesthetic dislike, not a reason d'etre why I hated 4E. I can accept as something new and different for D&D as a try, but I prefer the nuance difference between rolling to hit an opponent and rolling a saving throw against an effect. In my opinion it wasn't a Thing of D&D that needed to be changed.

[Max_Killjoy]

You had me until there.

I could play D&D where the PCs roll their AC against the monster's attack value, roll their DC against their opponents' saves, etc. I'm just adding 10 to the DC rather than to what your accustomed to.

Would you take issue with "player rolled D&D", that was mechanically statistically equivalent to "normal" D&D?

I'm not suggesting or promoting the idea, just pointing it out as an example of extreme mechanical disparity between PC and NPC in some systems.

[RandomPeasant]

That was a mechanic I didn't like about 4E. The attacker always rolls to hit, even for "saving throws". It's an aesthetic dislike, not a reason d'etre why I hated 4E. I can accept as something new and different for D&D as a try, but I prefer the nuance difference between rolling to hit an opponent and rolling a saving throw against an effect. In my opinion it wasn't a Thing of D&D that needed to be changed.

The fact that 3e casters could reasonably often go entire sessions without having cause to pick up the dice (particularly in combat) was a real issue. However, I think there is a legitimate mechanical problem there: if you hit a group of enemies with an AoE in a "players roll all the dice" system, it's very all-or-nothing. If fireball is a pile of fire damage each target saves against, individual results flow naturally. But if it's an AoE fire attack against the targets' Reflex defenses, it tends to either kill all of them or none of them (particularly because your group of enemies is probably "six standard MM Orc Warriors" and not "six individually-designed Orc Warriors"). 4e "solved" that by having group enemies be Minions and accepting that they would behave like video game mobs, but that's a solution that they rightfully took a ton of flak for, and it causes problems elsewhere in the system. I've yet to see a proposal that squares that circle without making major compromises elsewhere, so I'm inclined to write the mechanic off as not worth trying to make work.

[KorvinStarmast]

As for me, what I want out of a TTRPG is something that neither board games nor video games can provide, because they lack the human element. The open-ended human element. I seek exploration--to go beyond what I know. To go beyond the limits of the system.

That for me has always been the best part of D&D. It was for the little Traveller that I got to play, but we had the darnedest time keeping a game going for a variety of RL reasons.

When I hear about DMs or systems that try to "teach" their players "life lessons" or even "how to play tactically", I cringe a bit.

Likewise.

I used to think realism was super important, but it's not. It was verisimilitude the whole time that I wanted, internal consistency.

Took me a long time to appreciate that.

In personally finds that a map increases immersion, and a grid decreases it. {snip} It helps to know roughly where everybody is in order to form a mental picture, but I don't need it in exact detail.

Our first maps didn't have a grid. Used gridded battle maps for years, and I prefer a map with no grid now. IMO: What 13th age does with the three different kinds of distance is a good ToTM approach.

I like my RPG fights at tabletop to be quick, dirty, and deadly.

That means that the players are paying attention and the DM requires people to take their turn or lose their turn. I still like that.

Theatre of mind combat.

some systems lend themselves better to it than others.

The trick is that a game relying on TotM combat shouldn't worry about that level of precision.

Thanks, you put into words what I was thinking.

What I used to love: detailed and varied equipment choices. (See AD&D weapons and armor tables as an example). I now dislike it.

I used to like: marathon RPG (D&D, Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Met Alpha, etc) game sessions that lasted hours and hours and hours. Entire weekends devoted to one or two campaigns. (Give a DM a break so that he can play before we go back to class on Monday, so two campaigns full of players from Friday afternoon to Sunday early evening).

I now can't do them; not sure if I'd like to do one again.

[HappyDaze]

What extra layer of immersion? Battlemats remove immersion, they don't add to it.

They add to the ability to play tactically, but at the cost of immersive elements.

To elaborate on my confusion: The representation of the character by a miniature/token automatically creates a degree of "my guy" thinking about the character instead of "me" thinking. Thats a decrease on immersion, and its unavoidable.

I agree that battlemaps promote tactical thinking over immersion, and it's not just for the players. As a GM, when the battlemap is in play, my thinking cab revert to my old days of wargaming. I'm really good (and vicious) at such gaming, and I can often turn balanced and even supposedly easy encounters into TPKs if I'm not very careful--and then my players know I'm pulling punches, which isn't satisfying either. With TotM, things tend to go more smoothly for us.

[Jorren]

For me it is not so much the battlemat/miniatures themselves as it is the sudden transition from a descriptive, conversational style to a tactical minigame.

I suppose if the characters are cyborgs with wireless combat computers designed to coordinate their actions it might seem immersive to me. It is part of the whole top-down perspective which makes it feel more like a war-room scenario than a skirmish. I think if there was a way to provide a first person perspective to the players while reserving a top-down one for the GM it would seem more immersive, but the tools to make that work on a practical level are not here yet.

[noob]

For me it is not so much the battlemat/miniatures themselves as it is the sudden transition from a descriptive, conversational style to a tactical minigame.

I suppose if the characters are cyborgs with wireless combat computers designed to coordinate their actions it might seem immersive to me. It is part of the whole top-down perspective which makes it feel more like a war-room scenario than a skirmish. I think if there was a way to provide a first person perspective to the players while reserving a top-down one for the GM it would seem more immersive, but the tools to make that work on a practical level are not here yet.

a first person perspective would already avoid the common pit of TOTM: "I am surrounded by 30 soldiers and somehow they are all within 1 meter of me how are they all fitting in?"

[Quertus]

a first person perspective would already avoid the common pit of TOTM: "I am surrounded by 30 soldiers and somehow they are all within 1 meter of me how are they all fitting in?"

The last time a GM did that to me, I said, "are you sure?" before great-cleaving through them all, and the horse they rode in on.

[RandomPeasant]

I agree that battlemaps promote tactical thinking over immersion,

Those things aren't opposites. If the situation your character is engaged in is a tactical combat (as I would imagine is typically the case if you're breaking out the battlemat), promoting tactical thinking is promoting immersion.

[Pex]

a first person perspective would already avoid the common pit of TOTM: "I am surrounded by 30 soldiers and somehow they are all within 1 meter of me how are they all fitting in?"

The last time a GM did that to me, I said, "are you sure?" before great-cleaving through them all, and the horse they rode in on.

In my previous campaign I ran a Theater of the Mind combat where the party faced a creature with a breath weapon. As it was Theater of the Mind exact distances and placement weren't prioritized, It was enough that you were near or not near someone or one or two Movement speeds away. In this combat most of the party moved up to the creature and attacked. If it was a battle mat grid that couldn't happen. They wouldn't have had the exact space and movement required. When the monster went it used its breath weapon and all PCs who went near it were affected. It was officially a cone, and if there was a grid they all wouldn't have been affected. However, because I allowed them all to attack it even when by grid they couldn't have the monster could breathe on them in return. The players accepted the logic when I was asked about it. It was this encounter though that got me thinking I should be using the grid more for this group. Using the grid in my new campaign has made combat play more smoothly for us.

[Hytheter]

Despite the 5e PHB presenting grid combat as an optional rule (to dodge "too much like a video game" criticisms, I'd bet), it's pretty obviously designed around it. Playing all TotM is doable, but it's definitely awkward and leads to either a lot of hand-waiving or a lot of clarifying questions about the layout of the battlefield thanks to everything having very specific ranges and sizes in 5' increments. How are you really supposed to properly adjudicate who gets hit by a cone attack without any visual reference?

The system could have been built from the ground up to support TotM play if they were really committed to it. Maybe not without sacrificing the identity of the game, though, and at the end of the day a lot of people do actually like grid-based combat systems.

[Willie the Duck]

Despite the 5e PHB presenting grid combat as an optional rule (to dodge "too much like a video game" criticisms, I'd bet), it's pretty obviously designed around it. Playing all TotM is doable, but it's definitely awkward and leads to either a lot of hand-waiving or a lot of clarifying questions about the layout of the battlefield thanks to everything having very specific ranges and sizes in 5' increments. How are you really supposed to properly adjudicate who gets hit by a cone attack without any visual reference?

Other than a lot of the distances being divisible by five, is that any difference from AD&D or basic/classic?

[noob]

Other than a lot of the distances being divisible by five, is that any difference from AD&D or basic/classic?

In ad&d it was normal (according to the rules) to say "oh so you threw a fireball? let us see how it bounces then let us do volume calculations to see if you are caught in the blast and how much of the corridor is burnt" even if you could in theory do TOTM for that you better have interest to know at an high precision the 3D shape of the dungeon. (in fact a mere grid will be insufficient if you do not have low amount of roof height variation.)

[Morty]

I think the PC/NPC symmetry thing is an outgrowth of my general growing lack of care for RPGs simulating anything consistently. They're not going to model reality and I'm fine if they're just abstracting things based on the kind of experience they want to produce.

[noob]

I think the PC/NPC symmetry thing is an outgrowth of my general growing lack of care for RPGs simulating anything consistently. They're not going to model reality and I'm fine if they're just abstracting things based on the kind of experience they want to produce.

And the issue I have with this view is if you wanted the system to be simpler why not simplify both npcs and player characters by making all of them use the simplest system?

[Max_Killjoy]

I think the PC/NPC symmetry thing is an outgrowth of my general growing lack of care for RPGs simulating anything consistently. They're not going to model reality and I'm fine if they're just abstracting things based on the kind of experience they want to produce.

What if the "experience"* I want to produce is one where the mechanics of the game give results that are in line with the range and likelihood of results that could occur given the current circumstances withing the setting/character layer of the game? That is, I don't want the dice to produce results that throw me out of what's going on between the characters, etc.

This is part of why I've lost interest in some dice systems I used to like. WEG d6, oWoD, etc... variable dice pools in general.



(* Kinda hate that word at this point, between RPG design/theory discussions, and tech idiots talking about "user experience".)