Anything is permitted in any roleplaying game as long as the DM/GM/Guide permits it.
The rules are there only to provide a scaffold to hang your fun from.
I've been playing for many moons now, and never use miniatures.
Pathfinder assumes a grid.
That being said there are plenty of people that don't use a map, but it does change the dymanics of the game a bit. One example would be movement and attacks of opportunity. There are typically less AOOs in narrative combat so feats like Combat Reflexes become less useful unless you work hard to incorperate it.
It works really well for some groups, less well for others but it is doable.
I personally like maps and the way it makes a battlefield more layed out before me. To me it gives the game a more tactical feel.
One slight tangent. Although for the most part they work well both grids and hexes maps can sometimes annoy me. Grids because diagonal movement and diagonal reach can be weird. Hexes because you can't be 'side by side'. I do sort of wish there was a grid-like style where you could combine the best of squares and hexes maps and not have it be measured in 'inches'. I guess I am just picky.
If your group prefers to play that way then I see no problem... Pathfinder does not force you to use a Grid or battlemap each time a combat happens.
Some people do like scenery or to enhance the flavor and experience in combat. For example, a DM that says "You see a hundred Zombies in the distance closing in on your campsite" isn't as frightning when a DM puts down a battlemap, draws out your campsite, and dumps a 100 Zombie Figures (or Dice or place holders) and says the same thing.
Also when I DMed I like to add a little flavor text to combat... just simple things instead of " you hit and do X damage"
For example, back in 3rd edition a PC picked up a Greensteel Vorpal Longword and never had it identified (Stupid Paladin)... whenever he rolled a CRIT I told him to roll damage and then explained how he severed the neck of this creature or chopped the skull in half plus then decapitated,ect...
The Look on the party's face when it was finally realized what the Longsword really was was priceless. Everytime the Paladin had rolled a Crit he killed whatever he was attacking, but never figured it out.
Hey all,
So I'm a very new GM, only having GM'd one campaign of D&D 4e, but am interested in running some Pathfinder sessions for my friends. I have a question, though. Even as a new GM, I found D&D's 4E rules to be extremely confining in terms of creativity and narration. Because 4E seems naturally more geared toward miniatures-based combat, my group became bored of all the fighting. To avoid burnout, I finally started just house-ruling a ton of the action in the game, often throwing the rules out the window and employing a lot of narrative combat scenarios. My group loved this, but I always felt guilty knowing I wasn't following the 4e rules as they were designed. I also ran into some serious balancing issues with the combat because of these house rules, which only made my job all the harder, more stressful, and generally not as enjoyable.
Thus, with reading up on Pathfinder, I'm finding out that the game encourages roleplaying over actual map-based combat. There seems to be plenty of miniatures-based combat in PF, but it doesn't seem so rooted in hard and fast rules. So I guess what I'm wondering is if narrative combat is a possibility in Pathfinder? To clarify what I mean by "narrative combat", let me provide an example.
With my 4e campaign, my PCs were investigating an old manor, and were suddenly attacked by some assailants. Instead of breaking out the map and counters, I just simply asked the group: "what do you do?" The archer of the group responded back with, "I want to fire an arrow from the cover of the window facing the approaching enemy". I simply just had him roll a check, and that was that. The group would later barricade a door, jump out a window, bat some incoming arrows out of the air, and kill the group of baddies, all without ever using a battlemap.
Is this sort of thing allowed in Pathfinder? If anyone could answer that, I'd greatly appreciate.
Please excuse my excessive newb-ness.
Cheers,
Azure
I think it will work fine, but I think it works fine in 4E too, so I would expect you to run into the same "issues" in either game (once the players are as used to their PF abilities as they presumably were with their 4E abilities).
You might like to look into some other RPGs - in my opinion 4E/PF are right at the tactical end of the spectrum. As such, I think you always run the risk of missing out on some of what they do well if you minimise the rules-heavy nature of their combat systems. There are a whole lot of games which are less structured when it comes to combat options and they might suit the style you're looking for better. I'm a fan of Swords&Wizardry myself (the core rules are available here for free, the complete rules provide a few more options the PDF is available from Paizo here), but there are plenty of other games with this style.
I'd say it's fine as long as all your group members like a similar setup. It can be very restrictive for players if they've made a build around something like AoO's and then narrative combat style takes the teeth out of their character concept.