Playing Without Figures
In high school, I played and ran AD&D, 1st and 2nd Edition. I never used miniatures or any other counters to track position in combat. As time went on, I became a GURPS guy, which had an extensive hex-based combat system.
When d20/3E came out, I was so far away from Fantasy role-play, and set enough in my ways, that I wasn’t impressed with the changes (a gamer not likeing a new edition of D&D, never!). I didn’t really dig into the system till 3.5 came out. I was in the group that was mad that miniatures were listed as required, I mean this is D&D isn’t it? All you should need is dice, paper, and your books…
And I moved on. The funny thing is, sometime between when I stopped playing 2E, and now, traditional RPG’s became a thing that required minis to work. I know this isn’t really true, because I remember playing and having a blast without battlemaps and whatnot.
Just recently, I pulled out my old 1e core books from storage, and went through it. Best I can figure is I either ignored or winged tracking who was and wasn’t in melee, how tough it would be for someone to engage/disengage, and flanking/terrain advantages.
I mostly play 4E these days, and I’ve always so far used counters & maps/tiles to track combat location. What I wonder is, how tough would it be do hold all that stuff in your head, and would it make things more fun?
Are miniatures no different from initiative trackers, power cards, and hit point tracks? Just tools that take some of the cognitive load off the players? And does the clear representation of the battlefield that they provide impair the narrative of an encounter?
Comments welcome.
I’ve only played 4E, but I can’t imagine playing without some kind of token to represent my character during combat. I find it actually helps to better envision dramatic scenes, and of course it takes a great deal of cognitive load off the players.
Plus, there are numerous alternatives to actually buying the official Wizards of the Coast minis (thought I might pick some up because they look cool). We make our own using binder clips and a little Microsoft Word/Google Image search synergy. It’s time consuming, but it sets us back about $5.
Yeah, when I say minis I’m actually including any sort of token. (I like fiery dragon’s counters). For my LFR character, I took an image search image, and traced it onto shrinky-dink, with a bull clip stand.
This was coming from a desire to lighten my prop load a bit, and the fact that while I used to play AD&D 1E with nothing, looking at those rules today, I’d want counters.