I like the idea of both, but due to financial constraints, I almost exclusively do Theatre of the Mind-style combat.

I might buy some graph paper and use some of my Army Men as impromptu miniatures. My youngest brother (the one NOT in Antifa) has borrowed my Army Men for miniatures combat in D&D 5e before. We used the Green Army Men as the PC's and the Tan Army Men as the monsters.

I like minis. The visual representation appeals to me. I don't use grids. I use TotM, but its too vague to be my favorite method.

Oh and flyingmice, I haven't run or played D&D in years.

Quote from: Simlasa;984243As much as I love miniatures and wargames there's no way stuff on the table is going to come close to what I can imagine.
I've played in groups that had big collections of Dwarven Forge scenics and they were, IMO, limiting on the game. Fun for a skirmish wargame, but too constricting for what I want in an RPG.
Same thing for virtual tabletops with all the bells and whistles turned on... felt like a boardgame and slowed things down.
At most, what I favor, if some visual aide is necessary, is a quick sketch on a whiteboard with some abstact tokens.
I don't really want all the props and handouts in a CoC game, but I'll do it because people expect it.

Same for me. I prefer totm, no grid or minis, maybe a scratched out map to help with relative positions if its complex and matters.

I played with grids etc 4e for 4 years and it was fun, but it required grids. I greatly prefer totm - improv, sidetreks and random encounters are simply easily done in this way - and I think because of that, the totm playstyle facilitates a more sandboxy game.

Quote from: Arminius;984255Part is esthetic--I feel the game's more vivid and more "first person" when visualized than when hovering over a bunch of figures and moving them around.

Yeah I also find this to be the case

I don't have very many miniatures. I have some  neat musketeers and cardinal's guard figures I'll use when needed for Flashing Blades swordfights, especially if I need to keep track of who is where in a larger fight. I have some cheap plastic Greek warrior types but haven't used them because they're ugly and just distract, but I'd like to get good ones for Heroes of Olympus or The Fantasy Trip. But most games I just do theater of the mind as usually exactitude doesn't matter and getting the right miniatures would be cumbersome and expensive.

I have never owned or played with minis. I'm kinda interested in checking them out now but not really for play just collecting or painting.

Quote from: Doc Sammy;984344I like the idea of both, but due to financial constraints, I almost exclusively do Theatre of the Mind-style combat.

I might buy some graph paper and use some of my Army Men as impromptu miniatures. My youngest brother (the one NOT in Antifa) has borrowed my Army Men for miniatures combat in D&D 5e before. We used the Green Army Men as the PC's and the Tan Army Men as the monsters.

I find if you are going to go cheap, it can be best to use something like glass gaming beads or poker chips as minis. You get the benefit of people knowing exactly where everything is, but people still need to engage their imagination to see the characters.

There is nothing wrong with using army men, I just find that when you use representational minis, not matter how many times you tell your players the army men are really meant to be vampire gnomes, the players will still subconsciously respond to them as army men. I find the completely generic nature of glass beads gets around that.

Still, nothing really wrong with using army men.

The vast majority of the time, I'm doing theater of the mind. I don't need to know exactly where everyone is--I can call for some kind of Athletics roll to get a character where he wants to be.

The exception would be D&D 3.X/Pathfinder, because so many of the character abilities interact with precise movement and relative location. In Pathfinder, if we don't use miniatures and a grid, it just means my character is going to get screwed out of using his three Cleave-related Feats, because however close the kobolds are, they're just never quite close enough. ("You want to Cleave? *sigh* Okay, fine, if you must, here's one kobold you can Cleave during this encounter. There, I threw you a bone--happy now?") I mean, come on, we're in a twenty-foot by twenty-foot room, we all know they're close enough together to Cleave, and I'm playing a Martial character, so I've already volunteered to suck--you can't deign to let me use my damned character abilities, why?    

And it's not like I'm demanding that someone else should spend hundreds of dollars on minis and maps--I have a box full of dungeon tiles and a freakin' popcorn tin full of those old plastic D&D minis from a few years ago. Just tell me before I come over to your house that we're doing a pick-up game of D&D, and I'll bring them.

Quote from: Zalman;984315As far as old-school vs new-school goes, I'll add that the more abstract combat is supposed to be in the rules, and the longer the rounds, the less valuable specific representation of position is. In fact, my experience is that miniatures used with old-school combat frequently introduce the issue of players overvaluing their specific placement on the table from moment to moment ("Look though, I have a clear shot to the enemy right here"). In newer additions with shorter rounds (that is, the closer it gets to why I play board games), that exact position may be more relevant each round.

Yes, I recently noticed that too. The OD&D/AD&D 1 minute combat round works very well with theatre of the mind, it forces you not to think in terms of precise positioning the way 6-second rounds do.

Grids are OK but can be too fussy. Pure ToTM can be too loose.

We usually sketch out quick situation maps, and use X's and O's, like in football playbook diagrams. So we know placement and flanks and relative distance between combatants and how movement/maneuver can change things.

Quote from: Baulderstone;984454I find if you are going to go cheap, it can be best to use something like glass gaming beads or poker chips as minis. You get the benefit of people knowing exactly where everything is, but people still need to engage their imagination to see the characters.

There is nothing wrong with using army men, I just find that when you use representational minis, not matter how many times you tell your players the army men are really meant to be vampire gnomes, the players will still subconsciously respond to them as army men. I find the completely generic nature of glass beads gets around that.

Still, nothing really wrong with using army men.

Exactly! Even with fantasy minis they are seldom exactly what's being depicted. Just throws me off big time. "I'll aim at the Goblin, err, Orc, oh whatever its,supposed to be."

Quote from: rgrove0172;984508Exactly! Even with fantasy minis they are seldom exactly what's being depicted. Just throws me off big time. "I'll aim at the Goblin, err, Orc, oh whatever its,supposed to be."

That's partly why I use 6mm minis. First, they're so cheap, you can get pretty much everything you need, especially with most places being very accommodating if you don't want the "army" packs and selling you sprue-sized batches of figures. Second, they're small enough that if you paint one green and say green are orcs and another of the same mini blue and say blue are goblins, people* are unlikely to argue.

*does not apply to therpgsite members. They'll argue about anything or nothing.

This is a divide that been present since the beginning of the hobby. And one heavily influenced by how the referee thinks and like running a campaign. The important thing that is both can be made to work. And one can alternate between using whatever is best for the circumstances.

For me it cuts down on what I have to describe. Also because of my hearing losses using miniatures is a great help making sure I understand what the players want to do. And because I been at at so long I have a lot of parts and pieces which allows me to to inject a bit of Cecil de Mille style spectacle into the game when desired for example.

A Dungeon after the party explored the last room.
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The Plaza of the Gods in the City-State of Invincible Overlord
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The riot in full swing.
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The dead
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Forgot to say I often will just use little square cardboard drawings with an arrow to indicate facing, like the ones that came with the TSR Marvel Super Heroes game and Vilains and Vigilantes still uses. Cheap and easy to make, and fun because you can customize far better than any figure you could buy.

Theater of the mind. I did enjoy my time playing 4th edition with miniatures, but I don't see a reason to do it with other RPGs.