Theater of the Mind
It ought to be simple. Describe the battle. Remember which NPC is which. Save a bunch of money on minis. As I recently discovered, however, it’s easier said than done.
This summer I ran “Lost Mine of Phandelver” for a group of newcomers. Wanting to give them the full gamut of gaming experience, I decided to pop one of the bandit fights off the grid and into the Land of Imagination. Numerous questions followed.
“Wait, which one has already taken damage?”
“How many of them can I get with my breath weapon?”
“What do you mean I’ll provoke two opportunity attacks if I move? I thought only one dude was adjacent to me!”
This is the kind of mess that appears when you apply Theater of the Mind (e.g. gaming without visual aids) to a tactical system. Games like D&D care deeply about how many feet you are from you opponent. Remembering whether that vampire spawn is 30 or 40 feet out can drastically alter the dynamics of play. Beating up multiple opponents rather than one big guy gets complicated too, as you’ve got to track multiple hp pools without remembering which of the mechanically-identical goblin warriors has already taken damage. Ironically enough, you know where you stand when positioning is unimportant.
In more narrative style games with more abstract combat, it’s easier to justify a theater of the mind approach. Exalted is my go-to system here, with an emphasis on elaborate action descriptions and flashy improvised maneuvers rather than crunchy on-the-grid combat. Without the mechanical need to track exact positioning, free-form play becomes the norm.
And so, for today’s discussion, I’d like to hear about your own experiences with theater of the mind gameplay. What do you gain when you jettison the minis and the map? What do you lose? And do you have any pro tips or best practices for making theater of the mind work in practice? Tell us all about your own imaginary legions and invisible dragons down in the comments!
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This was my big complaint with a lot of 5E adventure modules: they don’t provide battlegrids, but still have elaborate combat scenarios where theater of the mind wasn’t cutting it, so I had to crudely draw my own maps.
Deadlands has much the same problem, now that I think about it, I just don’t notice as much because I’m doing it all online and can Google some decent battlemaps during session prep.
My stance is that any adventure with tactical combat should come with tactical combat maps included. Anything else is just asking for a decrease in quality, whether minor (pulling mostly okay maps from the internet, being actually good at sketching them yourself) or major (the numerous dry-erase sketches I had to do for Hoard of the Dragon Queen).
Wow, yeah… I can’t even imagine (…) a D&D module that doesn’t include battle maps.. like.. I thought that was practically the whole point even. It’s part of why you’re buying a premade, so you get nice fancy maps and stuff
Which module don’t have maps? I’ve only ever been a player in Curse of Strahd and Out of the Abyss, so I haven’t seen too much from the DM’s side.
Disclaimer that I haven’t actually run all that many 5e games, and all the modules were from very early 5e, so maybe this has changed.
Hoard of the Dragon Queen was the big one, because that was a whole campaign series produced by WotC. I’m a little more forgiving of 3rd party adventures; producing these things can’t be cheap, so when WotC says “theater of the mind is viable” I can totally see wanting to save money and time by skipping the battlemaps. But when WotC’s big campaign that was at the front of the shelves at gaming stores doesn’t come with its own tactical maps, I’m a little miffed.
In fairness, it did come with a lot of large- and medium-scale maps, so you knew exactly what the layout of the area was, but when it came time to roll for initiative I still had to crudely draw a bunch of squares and rectangles so my players could tell where they, the enemies, and the obstacles/scenery were in relation to each other.
The saving grace as far as WotC prodcuts are concerned is their popularity. If you can’t find a map with the product, you can still find half a dozen from the community. I believe the Phandelver maps I used for my playthrough all came from an indie cartographer over on Reddit.
Giving your artist an easy week, huh? 🙂
Anyway, this is something we ran into a lot playing D&D/Pathfinder with my group, because we have a blind player. Usually we describe the general situation and for tactics tell her what her options are. This works well enough when she’s playing a caster or simple melee, but when she tried to go rogue it felt like we were playing her character in combat.
Currently we’re using the Fate system, which works much better. She only needs help with reading her dice and the details of her character sheet.
> Giving your artist an easy week, huh?
She works hard and deserves a break every once in a while.
> we have a blind player
Fascinating! Good on ya for shifting the game to accommodate the human. Was the move to Fate primarily prompted by the group’s need for theater of the mind, or were there other factors as well?
> She only needs help with reading her dice
https://www.shapeways.com/product/DK8TG3CM7/braille-polyhedral-gaming-dice-set-8-dice?optionId=65083589&li=marketplace
If it was for her benefit, it wasn’t explicidly stated. But we’ve also done World of Darkness, and we’ve switched back and forth, so I think it’s mostly that we like to swap systems now and again.
As for the dice, I actually made one myself. Took an overside d20, filed down the sides an equal amount leaving the corners, and glued pinheads in place. Downside of it was that she needs to find it again after throwing, and without knocking it over. A dice tray might have been an idea. But it was just a crafting project for me to see if it would work. It lost a few heads by now and it might not have been completely fair, so it’s not suprising it isn’t used anymore.
If it were me, I’d be tempted to go “small dice tower + braille dice.” Super easy to find ’em that way. If I’m being honest though, friends helping out sounds even more useful.
You have to get very flexible and willing to use dice, “how many are under blast/breath?” depending on how packed you imagine the scene to be 1d4 or d6 and maybe a +1 or 2.
and you have to be very very clear and remind people at start of their turn of melee opponents. Ranged is easy.
Though Dune and Conan 2d20 games abstract ranges into scenes, are you in same scene, that’s melee or point blank, in the adjacent, that’s ranged.
Also larger battles I have almost always simplified into healthy, wounded, dead, regardless of system. mobs go from healthy to dead with single shot that does more than bird droppins worth if damage, thougher opponents may stay wounded longer depwnding hiw though I want them. Bosses how ever play by standard rules. Makes players feel like they are engaged in epic large battle without Warhammer game worth of minis on table.
I like the dice solution. Creative indeed!
I’ve played a Final Fantasy tabletop game that used the “close, medium, long” range zones as a middle ground. Seemed to work OK, but I certainly couldn’t remember who was where without a chart.
I might be the exception to the rule but I much prefer playing the way I started way back around ’73 pre ‘box set’ when the entire game came in a little plastic bag with one book and some dice as a fantasy supplement to the ‘chainmail’ game (selling it in University bookstores was probably a bad idea on reflection, skipped many a class due to still having a living character 😉 ) no ‘battlemaps’ to spend hours checking angles and distances just “yes, he’s in range of your fireball but so is your party’s cleric”.
We made our own campaigns and storylines long before there were any ‘official’ ones and had fun doing it dagnabbit !
Now if only ‘Elf’ was a class again 🙂
Did you ever get into arguments along the lines of, “But my Cleric couldn’t be in range! I specifically said he was hanging out at the back. Remember?”
Constantly. That’s what made it fun, that and coming up with uses for spells when they were still new that the DM and probably Gygax himself, never considered. We invented ‘rules lawyering’ (along with every other group that ever sat around a table)
Call me the exception to the rule but I hate battlemaps and miniatures, I don’t like chess and that’s what it reminds me of.
That and being poor University students who were actually planning to pay our student loans back, we could never afford to by them or drag them around to every table we played at.
Besides, my high INT mage knows better than to lob an area spell in the vicinity of the party and to watch out for the dumb ones rushing into it 😉
I have trouble enjoying that style of play in DND. I see the appeal of creativity and flow, but the blood price of bickering is a turn off.
Maybe it’s do with a GM’s attitude? More of a permissive mindset than “trying to get it 100% right.”
Don’t know about preferences but that was how we played in early 00’s teens qith jack shit foe cash for minis nad other stuff at besy we just doodled on a piece of paper with squares and character moves required lot of eraser. often we just let imagination work. first time I saw a mini and mat was just about 5 years ago, most of my gaming having been on fornwly mentuoned ways or on forums.
I’d say the first two years I played/DMed, it was totally theater of the mind. At that time there weren’t all that many miniatures and no battle mats available where I was and I didn’t know about Amory. AD&D was just coming out so we didn’t have the positioning rules to worry about.
Once I got a fair amount of miniatures and a couple battle mats, we started using house rules for positioning/distance/cover. If we were playing anywhere without those, people tended to use counters or dice and FWAG it for distance and position.
The game I wrote about in today’s OP was supposed to be physical. I grabbed some dice (since I hadn’t planned to play while travelling abroad), picked up a vinyl battle mat, and even printed out some paper minis from the hotel printer. I could not find wet-erase markers anywhere in Berlin. Had to ditch the physical version in favor of “everybody bring their own laptop and open up Roll20.” Biggest bummer of the experience, actually.
I have one complaint about theatre of the mind: fireball. Physical combat is mostly fine; as long as the number of enemies is enough that you can remember everyone, and they’re all within “run up and stab” distance, there aren’t a huge amount of issue. But AoEs are hard enough to deal with even with a map; without one, na way fam.
As for when to use jettison maps & minis? The only thing I can think of is when there’s some minor combat that isn’t worth setting up a map for.
> As for when to use jettison maps & minis? The only thing I can think of is when there’s some minor combat that isn’t worth setting up a map for.
Well I mean, there’s the time you save on setup. You don’t have to spend money either. Plus you can conjure a more evocative setting when you aren’t bound by the strictures of what happens to be printed on the paper. Players have this habit of assuming everything on the map is 100% what is there in the game world, and that can lead into weird situations.
“What do you mean ‘there’s no sign of the victim?’ I can see the blood marks on the floor!”
Yeah, in DnD at least theater of the mind is for RP only, IMO. I refuse to do combat without *at least* a grid. Just too chaotic and confusing and annoying otherwise with basically no upside.
It helps that I play online so I don’t need to buy minis, a picture will do. But even IRL play you can work around that. Plenty of things can substitute for a mini, especially if you already were willing to imagine things anyway. Chess pieces, for example. Or coins, buttons, folded pieces of paper… Candy for the monsters, so you can eat your kills… etc.
My Pathfinder group used super-low-budget tokens and grids for all of our physical days – coins, one of the player’s extra dice, erasers, well-folded pieces of paper. For rooms, we often didn’t draw them on the grid, but instead put index cards around the paper grid so we wouldn’t mark it (and could therefore reuse it). For exploration segments where exact distance didn’t matter that much, I might draw the place and the characters’ positions on a whiteboard.
Now that the group is digital-only (Roll20), tokens are easy to come by. Though the big advantage is that I can put a colored dot on each little minion, which makes HP and turns easier to keep track of. (I can mark “Goblin Red” and “Goblin Blue” on the Initiative/HP list and know which one is which.)
I’ve always wanted to try an “eat your kills” game. I need to think of a Candyland one-shot for the purpose though.
I mostly run Chronicles of Darkness and we basically never use maps. We occasionally pull out google sheets to quickly fill in a map to show placements, but its mostly “the ST describes the scene as best they can, people ask questions for positioning” and we get fast and loose with the exact details. Some systems do this well; exalted 3e and fate both work really well here.
My group mostly does it due to virtual only gameplay to be honest. None of us like roll20 so the best we ever do is google sheets.
Trust, communication and paying attention are the keys here. The players need to trust the ST isn’t making it unfair; the enemy is not always just out of range, they’ve described the flanking force, etc. Communication must be clear from the ST, as there is no guide on the table to keep things going. Playing attention is the key one. The ST needs to know where everyone is and the general ranges; I make a note on a line usually. They players also must be paying attention, as they need to keep up if the enemy is, say, kiting them.
> None of us like roll20 so the best we ever do is google sheets.
I think my Pathfinder 2e group is going to opt for Fantasy Grounds (assuming that game ever gets off the ground). It’ll be interesting to finally try another VTT as a point of comparison.
When I DM I almost exclusively run theater of the mind because I can’t draw, and since I generally improvise it’s hard to prepare maps ahead of time. I generally give broad descriptions. “The bar is 20′ wide, and 10 from the door to the bar itself, with another 5′ behind the bar. It has the general layout of a takeout Chinese joint: A table on each side.” That’s usually enough for the players.
I blame it on watching a lot of Dice, Camera, Action! when I was getting into 5E. Perkins outclassed all the other stream DMs with nothing but theater of the mind.
> I can’t draw, and since I generally improvise it’s hard to prepare maps ahead of time.
Having a couple of “default maps” prepped and ready to go is helpful for this. “Dungeon, forest, urban, inn” for example. That way you can pull out a printed “close enough” map and go from there.
Pre-COVID, home-gaming was mostly theater of the mind, occasionally a map to facilitate “Where do you explore next?” questions. Game Night crew, on the other hand, had more handouts and manipulatives than a Mission Impossible dossier: maps, phys. reps of the macguffin, illustrations, etc. (Most of my game night group grew up with TSR’s classic dungeons with the “Player Illustrations” booklets.)
Now, for most RP situations, the minis (for those who have ’em) are more of a tiny character illustration than anything else. Unless we have the one gamer with the GINORMOUS tackle box full of minis to supply everyone, if we need positioning cues for party-on-horde combat, I break out a tiny box of distinctive bottlecaps and glass beads (with or without a grid-patterned battlemap) and rough it out just prior to the initiative roll.
Partly I made the move out of fatigue and to speed up game play. If we absolutely have to fight something, we can hash it out with durable and inexpensive found objects. There are few things more frustrating than setting up an elaborate table full of minis, only to have the party do the smart thing and RP their way out of the encounter.
I regret that we never got to do this comic. The concept cracks me up, but Laurel says it won’t work in her art style. Ah well. Into the “rejected scripts pile”it goes!
Text: The true hero practices thrift.
Pic: This one is a simple “marching order” pic as the heroes take a set of stairs down from the sunny overworld into the spooky dungeon. You might do it as a side-scroller if that makes the most sense. The lineup includes Fighter as an army man, Thief as a paper mini, Wizard as a lego minifig, and a glass bead with cleric’s hat in the back. If the glass bead is too hard to do in this style and winds up looking like a slime or something, substitute a sorry piece or a meeple.
Dialogue: —
Scrollover: That dungeon is filled with all manner of terrors. There’s a dire terrier, a literal-iron golem, and an ancient thimble dragon.
I’m waiting to see one of the characters with a piece of graph paper, carefully marking off each square as they ‘explore’.
I’ve still got dozens of hand mapped dungeons in a box somewhere with all sorts of symbols and notes on them, half of which I wouldn’t remember what they were today and the rest in a handy key at the bottom of the page, some of which were mine for players to go into and the rest ones I made, or rather my character ‘made’, as they travelled 🙂
Those served as our ‘battlemaps’ with a fireball filling a certain number of squares depending on the house rule of the day.
Theoretically you don’t need minis even if you are tracking position. You could use chess pieces, or little slips of paper, or even just track everything on a dry erase board.
That said, although it need not be minis, it’s important that you have SOMETHING, because if you don’t the game is likely to implode. That’s what happened the first time I played D&D.
Makes me wonder if this is a skill that needs more teaching? Like… I suspect the Paizo or WotC people would tell you that “you don’t need a grid to play.” But learning how to do that effectively doesn’t see much support.
Just my 2 cents, but I think a bigger issue than most people realize is that DnD is designed from the ground up as a board game, so the tactical field map stuff is very important to the core flow of the game. Further, since DnD is ‘the big game everyone plays,’ a lot of people haven’t had the boardless experience, which FURTHER confounds the issue.
Far as TotM goes though… Pretty much all you can do is be more forgiving of tactical requirements. Try things like telling your players to role play how they are setting up a guy for flanking/advantage. The complaint about not seeing enemy health, to me… I don’t show my players enemy health. I give status updates.
I played and GM’d for years with nothing but a notebook that I wrote in the initiative order and each enemy with their bonuses and their health totals. So for example:
Goblin +2 30/30
Minotaur +6 120/120
These are Palladium numbers, but they convey the idea. It was enough to run games for a small group for five years. But people want displays on everything today, so if I had to guess, you ran into that more than anything else.
It’s more a problem on my end as the GM. Trying to keep track of which of the four identical thugs my players were beating up proved to be surprisingly difficult. The simple expedient of “have scratch paper” should have been obvious in retrospect….
Not much help for health tracking, but the guy in my group with the most minis has numbered them. That makes it easy to both keep track of which mook has which health total and for players to clearly identify which mook they’re trying to attack.
One of my favorite bits of ROLL20 is the little colored dots you can assign to dudes.
Much easier to say “I hit green” or “I charge at blue” than pointing impotently at your screen and gesturing at “that one.”
I don’t disagree, but it’s worth noting that this is more true of some D&Derivatives than others. Compare, say, 4e and 5e. 4e is focused on making the tactical combat more interesting than “I roll to hit him with my sword,” TotM doesn’t gel with that. 5e deliberately tried to distance itself from a lot of 4e’s design choices; it still has that board-game-iness, but more as scattered holdovers from how everyone expects D&D to work than anything integral to the system. It works better in TotM.
It still doesn’t work as well in TotM as a system that isn’t half a dozen iterations stacked atop a tactical wargame, of course.
I started out with Theater of the Mind, and had to get used to the restrictiveness of playing on a grid when I started D&D/Pathfinder. Through these days I am somewhat fond of both.
I think theater of the minds biggest strength is that it allows the players a lot more freedom in how the world looks. If I have a fight in a ball room, in theater of the mind, then my players asks if their are chandeliers to swing from, ropes to cut so they fall down or if they can pull out one of the guests to use as a human shield. If I were to run the same scenario on a grid, I find that players tend to only look at what is on the grid. Often leading to a lot less improvisation. It also means I have to potentially keep track of a bunch of NPCs, instead of just go “The guests panic and run around in a rush, some hiding beneath tables, others trying to open the door”, because those peoples exact location is important when the wizard starts casting fireball.
On the other hand, a grid based system generally works well with more tactical focused games and it can really help visualize where everything is. Especially during bigger combats. Also because you don´t have to remember where everything is during the fight, as you can just take a look on the map.
I think what Ryuutama does is pretty interesting. When you enter combat the party is essentially teleported into a Final Fantasy style grid, where you have two rows of people opposite each other. And the players are allowed to make up (I think 10 objects) on the field that they can use to help them. It fits well with the tone of the game, and I just really like the idea of allowing the players to give input on what litters the battlefield.
I love that. Nice to see a system playing with the division of narrative responsibilities.
I am currently experimenting with giving the players tokens they can use for Narrative Declarations (Such as doing some worldbuilding or being able to declare they have connection that can help them) with a special mention that they can add stuff to the scenes they are currently in. So far they don´t use it much for that, so I am kinda considering allowing them to each add one object to a battle scene.
Because I quite like the idea of giving the players more creative control over the battle map. Both because it allows them to be creative, but also because it means I can focus on the most important things on the map.
I’ve heard this called “meta currency.” In my own hobbyist practice, the “bennies” used in Savage Worlds were my first exposure to the concept.
https://savageeberrontales.com/savage-worlds-and-bennies/
Of course, the risk is that you may give players so much “story control” that it takes them out of the moment, preventing them from immersing as a character. And the real bitch (as I found out with my table) is that some players are more sensitive to this than others.
Good summary. I feel like much of this comments section tends toward grid based play, which makes it harder to spot the advantages in TotM. The “only what’s on the map” thing in particular is something I’ve noticed. There is a sense in which the grid becomes a crutch, and those improv muscles atrophy from lack of use.
Colin, D&D evolved from miniature wargaming. Try running Necromunda, Mordheim or any Warhammer without minies. Even with them measure tapes and rules will see more use 😀
Kind of makes you wonder what DND would look like if it had evolved from Choose Your Own Adventure books or theater sports or similar.
If you smith the goblin go to page 675 of the DM rulebook.
If you cast healing wounds on the fighter go to page 770 of the player rulebook.
So pretty much normal D&D 😛
lol. nice.
My group has accumulated so many battlemats, inch-grid graph paper, and random map-props with grid lines printed on them (one of our players has a 3D printer and a laser cutter) that we hardly use theater-of-the-mind for anything except the simplest squabbles.
Now, for those squabbles, theater-of-the-mind offers one big advantage—low overhead. You don’t need to spend time drawing/assembling a map, picking miniatures, and positioning everyone; you can just roll initiative. And at the same time, these little squabbles are usually simple enough that there’s not much room for the sort of tactical confusion Theater of the Mind so often causes. If the fighter, the paladin, and the drunk a-hole the paladin is protecting from the fighter are all basically within arm’s reach of each other, there’s not much question about whether anyone’s within everyone’s reach or whether the wizard can catch all three idiots with calm emotions (or burning hands if he’s feeling cranky).
So…yeah. Battlemap when you have a lot of creatures, or terrain/range is important. TotM when you have something simple that doesn’t need a map.
Define “simple.” The combat that prompted this post was 4 thugs in a market square. Is that already too many bodies for TotM?
I’ve never had an issue with Theatre of the Mind and I run GURPS, which is just as tacticalliscious as D&D (actually moreso in some ways).
You have to be very thorough in your descriptions, remember if a picture is a thousand words, a battle amp with minis is a thousand pictures… (okay, probably more like five to ten pictures)
You have to have good Players willing to sacrifice some tactical advantages and be willing to sacrifice them on your end as well. Sometimes you just have to let the mob of minions fall over after a few “well placed” fireballs, instead of judiciously tracking every bit of minutiae.
Now, I will admit, Play-by-Post lends itself to TotM a lot better than tabletop does.
The thing about GURPS is, it’s designed so that it’s very easy to ignore entire subsystems if you don’t want to bother. GURPS has facing rules, for instance, but it’s not hard to ignore them at all if they’re inconvenient. And I suspect most people do ignore inconvenient tactical rules—I know my table did, on the rare occasions we played GURPS.
The bit about PbP is more than an aside here. It absolutely defines the experience, and makes double checking the verbally-described scene an invisible process rather than an immersion breaking conversation.
Yeah, that’s about how I view 5e too. It’s really best if you just have a battle map of some kind.
But I have had theater of the mind games and the ones that handled it best were the GMs who weren’t running heavy combat focused games and would just go with whatever seemed to make sense to everyone. (Like I am pretty sure they weren’t even keeping track of how far exactly enemies were from us and so on.)
Still, I’d rather have a battle map. The one thing I find in D&D that I won’t find in other games I prefer more generally is the list of spells and combat abilities to play with. And those all get the most out of tactical combat. So if you’re playing without a battle map…. I’m not sure why we’re even playing D&D at all instead of something else.
(Of course the reason is that people are familiar and comfortable with D&D and would often rather stick to what’s familiar than go try and find something that works better and attract less attention.)
> Of course the reason is that people are familiar and comfortable with D&D and would often rather stick to what’s familiar than go try and find something that works better and attract less attention.)
Sounds as though you’ve been hanging out on r/RPG. 😛
I think that your point about distance tracking is key. If mechanics are based on 5″ blocks, the grid makes that easier. If not, you gain more than you lose by giving it up.
While I’ve never been to that particular section of the internet, I can easily imagine that being a common sentiment.
Rather it’s just the perspective I had from the one forum I play pbp games on. Even extremely poorly thought out/implemented/otherwise clearly doomed to fail (or just be a bad time) D&D games attract plenty of attention and almost everything else winds up with a much smaller audience. If it’s something most people haven’t even heard of…. often it’s just “good luck getting enough players to even run this”.
Of course I’m not fautless in this myself. I too am the kind of person who doesn’t want to run around learning new systems every couple of weeks. But I would still give new things a shot if the premise looked good/not doomed to fail or even just to try something new out from time to time. (I mean sure, I often came to the conclusion that I didn’t really love said new system I’d learned or the game would die shortly and I never saw anyone offer to run it again but… *shrug*)
I think it’s a style thing too. “Learning systems every few weeks” is great fun for some people. Researching game designers, short-form aficionados, and I-like-lots-of-genres folk get a lot out of the frequent switches.
But I think people want that 100+ epic that spans years. And D&D usually looks like the best way to get that in practice. Whether that’s a healthy thing for the hobby is another question.
Once did a completely off the cuff RP with no dice, much less combat maps. How did we get rolls without dice one may ask? The dm thought of a number then they player said a number (bounding range is whatever die you’re rolling) and the DM added the two and overflowed the numbers for your die roll. Example: roll d20. DM thinks of the secret number 6. player says number 17. total is 23, so it rolls over to a die roll of a 3. then add your modifier (we were using well known characters and had most of the important skill mods memorized) it was however mostly a roleplay impromptu so no combat to fuss over.
i don’t have an issue with lack of a grid per se, had some freeform maps where we used a ruler deciding 1 inch or 1 cm or whatever measurement fit the table as one 5 ft square. made diagonals way less headache too. minis i can do without but at least a paper we can draw/erase on is pretty important for me in combat situations. too much to keep track of especially with spell ranges/areas, etc.
It always bothered me in that one episode of Futurama where they were stuck in an infinite void with Gary Gygax. How could they possibly play DND for eternity without dice, I wondered? Nice to know they found a way.
I’m with fighter. I hate theater of the mind.
there is always something you miss in theater of the mind that can be easily seen in at LEAST a simple layout drawing on a piece of paper.
I don’t need minis and Dwarven Forge models, but I heavily prefer some kind of representations of characters and enemies along with a map to indicate the walls and doors and such. Doesn’t even need to be a grid, but as long as it is showing me a rough idea of what I am supposed to be seeing, that is good enough… but when all I am supposed to be seeing is entirely in my mind, the biggest flaw in that system, is no matter how good at describing things the DM is, everyone “sees” things differently and what the DM is seeing as they describe it is different from what each person is “seeing” from that description.
5 people playing? 5 different ideas of what is being described in their heads. It may all be similar, but never exactly the same. The more you can narrow that description down with actual imagery, the better off everyone will be when they are all on the same page.
I wrote part of my MA thesis on this point. On the off chance you find it interesting, here’s the relevant passage. Feel free to skip it if it’s too much pedantry:
In the context of literature, reader-response criticism “claims that the meaning of the text is the experience of the reader” (Culler 63). When the narrative is on the tabletop rather than the page, however, the text resists the individual. When the narrative is created as it is enacted between collaborators, each author’s evocation remains valid for the individual, but they are not necessarily shared by the entire group. “What I think the story means” is no longer the deciding factor in the group’s joint evocation, but one possibility among many. The various mises en scene at work in the players’ minds can all exist simultaneously, but they collapse and reform when shared aloud. Therefore a player’s clarifying question will often give rise to an odd species of democracy. There the convention of the Game Master acts as a sort of tiebreaker when determining “what is really happening in this scene.” Suppose, for example, that an encounter calls for the players to be attacked by a giant spider. The GM describes its descent from the ceiling by saying, “You hear a soft skittering in the gloom overhead, and eight legs like a deformed, grasping hand fall rapidly towards you. It is an enormous spider!” One player, perhaps new to the fantasy genre, might assume that this creature is enormous in terms of the primary world (say the size of a man’s hand) and declares that he steps on it when it gets to the floor. The more experienced players know that an aberration the size of a pony is about to engage the party in deadly combat. It’s a simple example, but the principle applies to everything from room configuration (“I thought the sarcophagus was standing upright!”) to the famous Dread Gazebo. In that example, the anecdotal player assumed that this unfamiliar thing called a “gazebo” was some kind of monster. According to gaming legend, what followed was a comedy of errors in which the player hailed the gazebo, cast a spell to determine whether the ‘creature’ was evil, and eventually shot it full of magical arrows. The encounter ends, of course, with the player attempting to flee. “It’s too late,” shouts the frustrated GM. “You’ve awakened the gazebo. It catches you and eats you” (Aronson).
What’s interesting here is that within these situations—How giant is a giant spider? Is the sarcophagus upright or lying down? Isn’t a gazebo something like a jabberwocky?—the difference in perception only matters when the narrative calls for specificity. The gazebo was only a minor background detail before it became the object of player interest. Like some form of narrative quantum mechanics, its exact nature was unimportant until observed. Was there a weathervane on top of the gazebo? Did it have built-in benches? Was it built low to the ground, or was there perhaps a small stair leading up to the gazebo’s deck? If this were a purely written narrative, the author might pass over these details without fuss. Unless some narrative beat called for closer examination, the gazebo could happily recede into the background. In the game world, however, objects serve as semiotic placeholders, a potentiality in the mind’s eye of simultaneous authors. Such an object’s nature only becomes concrete when it must: I look at the weathervane on top of the gazebo to see which way the wind is blowing. I sit down on its bench. A goblin bursts out from its hiding place beneath the gazebo.
I’ve strayed somewhat from the idea of reader-response as a cipher for TRPGs, but the critical mode reenters the conversation in this way: Just as a game world object like a gazebo might become the subject of player inquiry and interaction, becoming concrete when examined, the less concrete aspects of narrative work on the same principle. For example, imagine that the players encounter a thieving goblin character. Is this character truly evil? The statistics on the character sheet say so; its alignment reads CE for Chaotic Evil, and the game master intends to portray the character as such. However, his conception of good and evil is based on the absolute of the game world. There evil is a force of nature, and can be detected like some bizarre form of moral radiation. The game rules say that goblins are evil; evil is a palpable force; QED the goblin thief is evil. It sneaks into the players’ camp at night, intent on stealing their rations, because it is evil. Fortunately for the players, this goblin is not an especially good thief. In the hypothetical example, the creature is summarily caught, subdued, and questioned.
“Who sent you?” demands a PC. “What do you want?”
“No one. Me hungry.”
The thief snivels and whines, and despite the GM’s intentions, it manages to arouse the sympathy of the players. Suddenly the “objectively” evil creature is a Jean Valjean figure, and only driven to theft by circumstance. The players may try to take it on as a hireling. If they treat the goblin well, the GM may change the character, making it a helpful ally rather than a wicked antagonist, and essentially bringing his view of the goblin’s nature in line with the players’. In other words, the object was examined. It became the focus of narrative attention. Its nature was refined through multi-author interaction. In terms of the reader- response, “expectations are brought into play, connections are posited, and expectations defeated or confirmed” (Culler). Narrative is the result of this process.
I usually play without minis. Minis are a hassle.
Just gotta remember to describe your baddies with details that are easy to differentiate. Maybe you’re up against some thieves, and one is bald, one wears a bandana, one has a scar, and one has a goatee. Or each wields a different weapon. Or each is wearing a different brightly-colored outfit.
…The weapon one works pretty well, because mechanical differences tie differences in description to thoughts of strategy. I’ve never seen players go “Hey, which one were we trying to hang up on again?” when the answer is the obvious “And one of them has a greatsword”.
The problem is remembering which baddie is fighting which party member which is adjacent to which other party member.
“No, I wanted to hit goatee! I hit him last round, remember?”
“I thought you hit baldy?”
Having experienced Theatre of the Mind in play for a multi-month 3.5 campaign, it was… awkward. It can be entertaining for a dedicated group who wants it but TotM is intended for situations not reliant upon specific numbers and positioning.
I’ve run theater of the mind for years with 2E, 3E, PF, 5E and with Savage Worlds. They all work fine; battle maps and minis just get in the way. The most I have is some scratch paper. Tactical RPGs work fine
The first trick is either have your mooks be mooks and therefore dispensable, or make them visually different.
The second trick is to use zones – enemies in the same zone are melee, the next zone is short range, and so on. This makes tracking distance irrelevant.