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When the 3.5 rules replaced the 3.0 rules, many people complained that the use of miniatures became mandatory. For example, Monte Cook commented:
"The game now has an even stronger focus on miniatures. 3.0 had a strong focus on miniatures, but we wanted to at least address the fact that you might not want to play the game that way. But everyone in the Wizards of the Coast offices does, and so now you have to as well. And Wizards has a new line of miniatures to sell you. Seriously, though, for those wanting to play the game sitting on the couch, the game now offers a new barrier for you. The Combat chapter in the Player's Handbook now reads like a miniatures game. More and more of the game stats use "squares" rather than feet (or both). This is a huge step backward toward the "inches" used in 1st Edition."
He also noted that this approach could have some strange side-effects:
"Facing (now called space) is now always square. In order to facilitate miniatures play (apparently), horses are no longer 5 feet by 10 feet when you put them on a grid, they're a 10-foot square. The horse has to "squeeze" to get through a 5 foot wide space. Three 9-foot-tall ogres require a 30-foot-wide passage in order to walk abreast. D&D, with its already abstract combat system, did not need this extra layer of abstraction. Not to mention the fact that this changes game play in strange ways, such as how many of the charging ogres you can get with your fireball spell."
The Pathfinder RPG inherits a strong focus on the use of miniatures from 3.5 and is unlikely to move away from this focus because doing so would break backward compatibility. In addition, a number of combat feats and combat maneuvers are dependent upon the use of miniatures and removing them would penalize characters (particularly fighters) who have invested time and effort into acquiring or using them.
Although I enjoy playing with miniatures, there are times when breaking out the figures for a combat is a chore. Does anybody have any suugestions for changes to the rules that would reduce the overdependence upon minitures?
Perhaps it would be worth adding a brief 2-3 page appendix with an streamlined abstract combat system for those times when the full combat system is too much? Speaking personally, I would find this useful for minor incidental combats, barroom brawls, etc.
I can see that 3.5 (and thus PF) is a bit more minis heavy, but not that much.
I prefer square bases all the way, because otherwise, you sneak in facing into the rules, which I'd rather avoid.
To examples like "3 ogres now need a 30-ft-street" I can only say not hey don't. They need a 30-ft-street to fight abreast, not to walk abreast.
It's no different from every human taking up a square five foot on a side: It's what they need to fight properly, but otherwise you can easily cram several humans into that space without them bumping into each other. Maybe it's not quite the same with ogres and 10' squares, since ogres aren't exactly twice as large as humans, but that's the downside of not having three dozen size categories...
As far as I know, the 3.5e and Pathfinder rules (at least the core stuff and everything from Paizo) still gives distances in feet first, and only then in squares. And if one is left out, it's squares.
This is not 4e, where globes are square and you're supposed to use minis because this is a tabletop board game.
Sure, it's probably more efficient to play with minis, but that's the result of having detailed combat rules like that: It makes it so much easier to track where everyone is.
I prefer minis for my D&D ever since I had that legendary game session where the (slightly to moderately drunk I admit) DM had to re-state enemies' actions a dozen times within one combat round because he just couldn't remember who was where. I think the poor party fighter ended up fighting everyone.
I'd still say it works without, and PF isn't any worse than 3e in that regard.
Personally, I don't use minis for every fight. Simple stuff is just played without any minis or even considering who is where and how far he could go when and whatever.
Creative Director
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Minis DO help the game go more smoothly, I've found. I rarely used minis in 1st or 2nd edition, but with 3rd edition I use them all the time. It's actually really helpful for the GM and the players, I've found, to be able to visualize the environment when you've got maps and minis in play; I think that "requiring minis" is a good thing, as a result.
That said, I also understand that a lot of groups don't use minis and battlemats. Many of our authors don't, in fact; I'm thinking of one in particular who HATES minis and battlemaps.
The Pathfinder RPG is an enormous book, and I doubt we'll have room to talk much about giving advice on how to play the game without minis in there... but I DO think that we'll cover that aspect of play very soon after the book is released.
In any event, the game itself doesn't rely on minis any more or less than 3.5 does, so if you can play 3.5 without minis, you'll have no problem at all playing PF RPG without them.
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I just wanted to point a couple things out.
First, Pathfinder is no more and no less dependent on miniatures than 3.5e because of backward compatibility.
Second, having everything measured in squares does also have one interesting positive effect (IMO): maps will always have 5' = 1" square scale. If game and character stats are only (or mainly) measured in squares, having 10' squares makes no sense. Personally, I'd prefer Pathfinder print all maps using 5' squares and throw out the idea of "non-standard" grids on maps. [For the record, I'd be just as happy with 5' hexes as with squares, so long as whatever the decision is officially standardized.]
-Skeld
PS: Partially ninja'ed by James.
As a DM (and author of lots of stuff, though not yet for Pathfinder), I rarely use minis. And when I do, it's just a matter of telling each of my players to pick a die to represent their character and setting out a handful of d6 facing up to different numbers to represent the monsters.
If I wanted to play a miniatures game, I'd be playing Warhammer. Which I don't, because it bores me to tears.
Minis or no minis, makes no difference to me.
I've won lots of blindfold chess games. I once played 3 blindfold games simultaneously, though I only won one of them - at least I completed all three without losing track of where anything was.
D&D without minis is like blindfold chess.
I can easily recall that the fighter is 15 feet in front of the mage, and orc #1 is in melee with that fighter, orc #2 is 10' to the right and firing a bow at the mage, etc.
But not all my players over all the years I've DMed have been able to do this.
So I've always used minis of some kind, even back when it was lead figures and dice for the monsters.
I still have a little coffin full of "monster dice" - 60 d6 in 10 groups of 6, each group a different color, so I could place as many as 60 bad guys out there. Orange #5 orc goes here, blue #3 orc goes there, and the yellow dice are hobgoblin commanders. That kind of thing. I don't think I ever used all 60, but a few times I got close when I swarmed mid-level characters with a small horde of mooks.
Now I have nearly $1,000 tied up in D&D minis, and I use them almost exclusively.
Whether or not I need it, I'm sure my players appreciate the graphical point of view, and usually so do I.
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Creative Director
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Second, having everything measured in squares does also have one interesting positive effect (IMO): maps will always have 5' = 1" square scale. If game and character stats are only (or mainly) measured in squares, having 10' squares makes no sense. Personally, I'd prefer Pathfinder print all maps using 5' squares and throw out the idea of "non-standard" grids on maps. [For the record, I'd be just as happy with 5' hexes as with squares, so long as whatever the decision is officially standardized.
This is the main reason we'll NEVER simply give distances in squares, but always in feet. It's nice to be able to do maps to a 5 feet per square scale, but it's not realistic at all to say "ALL maps must be of this scale." Some of the locations we feature in Pathfinder are huge, and at a 5-foot per square scale, we would never be able to fit those maps on a page. Many times we go up to 10 foot squares, and we've gone even higher for regional maps or cities.
Plus... it's kinda a waste of energy, I think, to "re-invent" a measuring method (the square) when there's already two options that EVERYONE knows about already (feet and meters).
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Thank you James, I'm running a game right now, and the cyclopic ruins the characters are in are HUGE! 20 feet per square. They put 4 maps on a single 8.5x11 had the maps been done in 5' increments each one would have required 2 pages...
That would be ridiculous...
I DM with and without miniatures...it really helps in complex locations. I dislike the diagonal movement rules, and would prefer hexes. though it makes weird looking maps heh.
Some of the big advantages of going without revolve around DM flexibility, but otherwise...they do help. Playing with as opposed to playing without also changes play, I've found. Or likewise, playing without as opposed to playing with.
Mileage may vary. :)
ad&d worked well without minis, i never had a battle mat, i used regular graph paper to map out the area, went around the room, then the monsters went.
positioning wasnt really important. 3.5 positioning is important. cover is important. corners are important. flanking is imporant. how you get into flanking position is important. doorways, ranges, everything is.
its really difficult to adjudicate somebody's location without some sort of marker showing where the position actually is. i wish i had a dollar for every ad&d game i played, when the orc attacked a character, and that player said, oh, i didnt enter the room.
i use minis, i dont own very many, but i do use them, i also use those wooden laser etched markers, they work very well.
whether you count squares or 5' increments, its still a game. it should be fun.
hang out, drink beer, role dice
ad&d worked well without minis, i never had a battle mat, i used regular graph paper to map out the area, went around the room, then the monsters went.
positioning wasnt really important. 3.5 positioning is important. cover is important. corners are important. flanking is imporant. how you get into flanking position is important. doorways, ranges, everything is.
its really difficult to adjudicate somebody's location without some sort of marker showing where the position actually is. i wish i had a dollar for every ad&d game i played, when the orc attacked a character, and that player said, oh, i didnt enter the room.
i use minis, i dont own very many, but i do use them, i also use those wooden laser etched markers, they work very well.
whether you count squares or 5' increments, its still a game. it should be fun.
hang out, drink beer, role dice
This is exactly why I use minis now (plus I just enjoy collecting them) I still remember actual arguments over where people were when baddies attacked or when a fireball went off. and if you didn't rule in favor of them hitting all monsters and no players then you were cheating. Minis have reduced combat headaches due to the ease of going "No that doesnt work, see right here?" and they nod and rethink what to do. Plus I just love minis :P
My groups sometimes use minis and sometimes don't, but I don't think that the Pathfinder RPG is any more mini-centric than 3.5E. It is about the same.
I would be VEHEMENTLY opposed to any sort of inkling to even consider moving to measuring things in squares rather than feet or meters or to 'simplify' diagonal movement a la 4E. I am a metric person, but feet don't bother me - it actually gives the game a bit of nice medieval charm. The only imperial measurement that I find irritating is the Farenheit scale - that is just incomprehensible to me without doing the calculations to convert it to Celsius.
As to the bases of minis, I would prefer a return to non-square bases for long creatures, but I will settle for the 3.5E square bases if necessary.
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The only imperial measurement that I find irritating is the Fahrenheit scale - that is just incomprehensible to me without doing the calculations to convert it to Celsius.
LOL, i feel the same way about Celcius..... And centimeters, and weighing in ounces or what ever you guys use. I am not 205 cm tall i am 6 feet 1 inches tall... of course America does have one of the worst education systems in the world. At least they didn't use measuring systems out of the bible. :) now that would be tough.
Anyway, back on subject. Mini's or no mini's it is all how you want to run it. Personally, i love mini's. it encourages the use of tactics, as well as judicious use of limited movement. Plus maps can really bring a battle to life.
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I use maps, but not battlemaps or minis. This is mostly because of when I play (after work with no opportunity to go home), where I play (in a room at the local pub so only getting a decent sized table if I'm lucky) and my personal preferences (I don't want to spend a lot on minis and as the superscriber tag might indicate, I'm something of an obsessive). The Paizo maps fit nicely onto an A4 side and provide enough detail that my players can point to their positionings. As most of the AP combats do not involve hundreds of participants, keeping track isn't much of an issue yet. If it becomes so, I'll probably manage with a small representation on the map rather than a whole battlemap and minis approach (which some of my group used well when they DM, it's just not for me)
Wasn’t there a US/EU Space mission that went wrong because the Europeans measured in metric and the Americans took the measurements as feet ?
Feet complete confuse me, and everyone at the table always uses all three systems (feet, squares, meters) at the same time. So I decided, as a DM, to only ever talk in squares when we are in combat.
I love the miniature play of 3.5. In 2E our fights had been very static, just hit, hit hit. Now everyone is moving around, flanking, getting out of flanked positions, taking 5 foot steps.
Miniatures and squares make the fights more fun for me.
LOL, i feel the same way about Celcius..... And centimeters, and weighing in ounces or what ever you guys use.The only imperial measurement that I find irritating is the Fahrenheit scale - that is just incomprehensible to me without doing the calculations to convert it to Celsius.
I only feel that way about Fahrenheit. The other imperial measures I can do in my head - the conversions are easy because the base is the same.
I am not 205 cm tall i am 6 feet 1 inches tall...
You are indeed not 205 cm tall - you are 185.42 cm tall! :P ;)
I think imperial measures are fine - they give the game a medieval feel/charm. Fahrenheit being the only imperial unit to have a different base to the metric system could make it useful to also include Celsius conversions*.
*Technically speaking, Celsius is not metric either, Kelvin is, but you get my drift.
LOL, i feel the same way about Celcius..... And centimeters, and weighing in ounces or what ever you guys use.
We guys use grammes. And only grammes, if you get down to it. We don't have ounces and pounds and what not - only grammes. We do have kg (kilogrammes), but that's really meaning 1000 grammes. Even our tonne is nothing else but a mg (megagramme) with a different name. And on the other direction, there's milligrammes and microgrammes and so on (you can basically use all the SI unit prefixes there).
Just as we do with fluids. There's the litre. Nothing else. No fluid ounces to a quart to a gallon or something like that. A millilitre is just a 1/1000 litre.
And of course distances, which are metres. All of them. From the nanometre to the kilometre (though I haven't seen things like petametre used for interstellar distances - once you into outer space, the big ones like lightyear, parsec or AU are usually used), it's all the same basically, just renamed mulitples of 10 (or, rather, 1000). And that's not just us. I doubt anyone is using 1/1000000 inches or something. If you want precision, you go metric.
I don't mind the inches and feet system - as the others have said, it does have a medieval charm.
I am not 205 cm tall i am 6 feet 1 inches tall... of course America does have one of the worst education systems in the world.
Was the miscalculation a deliberate error to showcase that educational system ;-P
By the way, you don't need a calculator for this! Google can handle a lot of conversations. Google "6 foot 1 inch in cm".
It even knows that "1 Parsec = 30.8568025 petameters"
At least they didn't use measuring systems out of the bible. :) now that would be tough.
You mean funny stuff like cubits, palms, digits? When being big meant you got more from the store, just because you had a longer arm? Fun times.
Mini's or no mini's it is all how you want to run it.
Sorry, cannot resist - shame on you for bringing up that educational system. Plurals don't use apostrophes. The plural for mini is minis, not mini's.
I know, I'm a pedant, but I go to PA for that. (Or I adopted Dogbert's motto: "I've become a perfectionist to have more reasons to hate people - by the way, the rock you sit on erodes wrong")
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yes i was just joking about my hight. I just grabbed a number. Yes my punctuation and spelling sucks! but considering i went to 5 different Junior high and high schools, i figure i do all right. :D
Yes our education system sucks, my wife is a teacher (very good at punctuation and spelling) and i am disgusted with some of the problems she has at school. She started a new special ed program and they gave her $400 (roughly 200 pounds)for the whole year. she spent it the first week on ONE program (history) and had to copy out of other books for the rest....we are so jacking this thread, i'm done now, before i rant some more... What were we talking about? Oh yeah measurements in D&D.
Hey, nedleeds, I like the idea of using the colored paperclips to denote which Orc is which. Bright idea. May I steal it for my game?
I don't think going off gird is such a bad idea from time to time. Using moderation of real world... uh, realism to adjudicate things like a crowd all packed together or a horse (better yet a donkey) going down a 5 ft. wide hallway is good.
Although this really falls under a more general heading of "how to run a game well" advice. Something you'd see in a publication thats a bit more draconic.
My group has had mix success with minis. Now we primarily use a smallish white board for a quick sketches of the tactical situation. When I infrequently DM these days I often just keep the tactical grid in my head and when players move their PCs about with generic description I make "best assumption" moves.
Now what I'm really itching for are cheaper portable projectors and a good portal laptop/handheld to use digital miniatures and maps at the table. Who knows maybe with this resurgence in 3D by Hollywood we could use that in such a setup as well.
Overall, I don't think the game is overly dependent on miniatures.
I've played games by PbP with no mapping whatsoever, and plenty of home games have been done the same or with "graph paper" maps with maybe pennies (or other coins) as counters. If the game is going to have ANY degree of 'tactical combat' or be affected by the spatial relationships of PCs and the rest of the world, a map-centric REFERENCE is certainly called for. Minis are just the most developed tool for that, but are not REQUIRED.
The only change I've seen mentioned here that I really like is allowing Horses (and other longer-than-'normal' creatures, like SNAKES) to not officially require "square" (really, CUBE) dimensions. The rules for Size Category just need to be SLIGHTLY de-coupled from the space the creature occupies: There could still be a "default", but each Monster could basically list Size Category, Space (i.e. 15'x15'), and Reach (15') as non-linked qualities. Animated Couches could be an example of WIDER-than-normal creature/ Giraffes would be TALLER than normal. This is pretty intuitive, IMHO.
Yes my punctuation and spelling sucks!
It's suck, not sucks! ;-P
Sorry, sorry, cannot help myself. All in good fun!
Yes our education system sucks, my wife is a teacher (very good at punctuation and spelling) and i am disgusted with some of the problems she has at school. She started a new special ed program and they gave her $400 (roughly 200 pounds)
... or about €310 according to the exchange rate google used today. I'm German, and for me, pounds are a slightly obsolete unit to measure weight (which we still use hereabouts for food), and not a currency.
Hence the old joke: "The Pound took a plummet today at the stock exchange. In Frankfurt, it's only worth 11 ounces as of this morning" :D
but back to the scheduled post.
for the whole year. she spent it the first week on ONE program (history) and had to copy out of other books for the rest....
That sort of thing really sucks. And though the US educational system probably is really bad, it's not as if it's pupil's paradise around here. Not realising that education is one of the worst place to cut your costs to save money seems to be a general politician trait.
we are so jacking this thread, i'm done now, before i rant some more... What were we talking about? Oh yeah measurements in D&D.
Actually, we were talking about miniatures. :D
Miniatures all the way. If you want story telling then play another game.
That's male cow manure. I could counter that if you want to play a board game, go play a board game. Hero Quest or Warhammer or 4e or something.
Using miniatures doesn't preclude storytelling, and storytelling doesn't preclude using miniatures. I know that for a fact - we manage to do both in the same campaign all the time.
I agree that minis are really helpful in 3e, and I wouldn't want to do without a mat, but I understand if people don't want to do so, and the game should support that. It definetly should actually force you to do it.
