Are minis old-school?

[tavis]

I was thinking about this in the context of wilderness maps and digital projection. One of the few times I could see wanting to have a laptop at the table for an old-school game would be if I were using a digital projector to display images on the tabletop (typically maps, but I've also seen DMs do this with landscape photos, character portraits, etc. to awesome effect).

At Gen Con, I asked Dave Arneson about going down into the basement during the first dungeon adventure, and he said they didn't use props very often, mostly just a hasty sketch if it was really necessary to move forward. So I can see such digital bells and whistles as not simply something that wasn't available back in the day, but actually running counter to the old-school spirit (for example, it's a short road from "ooh, the DM has some pretty images" to "there's no map and picture for this encounter, it must not be part of the script we're supposed to be following", and the old-school modules that used illustration handouts were designed for AD&D tournament play & its associated demand for standardized rules and restriction of inter-DM variability).

But that made me think about the desirability of minis in general. They're certainly desirable in & of themselves - when I ran Keep on the Borderlands at Gen Con a few years back, it brought out a bunch of old-school players who (appropriately enough) apparently hadn't been to the dealers' room or a game store in a long time. They complimented me on the excellent painting job I'd done on my hordes of WotC pre-painted figures, and I had the mixed 21st-century pleasure of saying "no, they were actually done by Chinese peasants, they cost about a buck apiece." But is using miniatures inherently appropriate for old-school play?

Against:
- One of the advantages of tabletop RPGs over the computer games most everyone in the world thinks of when you say RPG is that they happen predominantly in your imagination. Focusing on miniatures is bad because it replaces the visuals in your head with ones on a tabletop instead of a computer screen, and this is true whether the visuals are crappy (the garishly painted pewter & grease-pencil on Plexiglass maps of my childhood) or slick (mass-produced plastic over a digitally projected map).

- One of the advantages of last century's versions of D&D is that the action is freed from the boardgame-like movement of pieces from square to square. Movements like "I slip inside the reach of his bastard sword so I can use my dagger more effectively" and "I climb the watchtower and attack the green ooze that's above and to the right of me, not the ochre one down and to the left" are both classic pulp situations that are hard to represent well with minis.

In favor of:

- Miniatures are part of D&D's miniature wargaming roots. Even if the move away from purely minis-based situations, like the Braunstein scenarios, was a crucial step in the genesis of the game; and even if "playable with pen and paper" was a key selling point in helping D&D expand beyond people who liked collecting and painting lead figures - it's hard to argue that moving a lot of little guys around the tabletop isn't in some ways essential to the early D&D culture.

- One advantage of last century's versions of D&D is that simple combat rules enable grand tactical scenarios, with masses of warriors charging, flanking, and retreating. To really engage with the strategy of the game at this level, it seems to me you need some kind of dynamic spatial representation (i.e. minis), just as much as you need counters and a grid to engage with the five-foot-stepping micro-tactical strategy of this century's editions.

I personally don't have much of a background in miniatures wargames, and my spatial skills are such that I would always rather describe my troops doing something clever instead of actually having to place them in a seemingly strategically sound position on the tabletop where they will in fact get hosed yet again, so that may color my views.

What are your ideas & experiences?

[coffee]

I don't know if my spatial imagination is just defunct, but I always find that having minis makes it easier to visualize what's going on.

Not to the extent of the 1" grid (in fact, I hate grids and prefer tape measures), but I like to be able to see without asking if (for instance) I have room to slip behind the minotaur and possibly escape that way.

So, I'd say miniatures are old school. But that's just my opinion.

Back in the early 80's when I started playing, we mostly used them to establish marching order.

[Random]

So how well does that work for rpgs, just using tape measures and strings?
I have some miniatures (really kind of like voodoo dolls, since they look like the players instead of the characters) that I made, but we rarely use them. Grids annoy me.

[ontopic] I'd say using miniatures can be old school, but not playing because your miniatures aren't with you would be very not old school.

[ffilz]

I have a hard time with combat without a visual representation. If positioning is important then I need some sort of visual representation. I was very much into board games and miniatures before playing D&D, and in fact, initially rejected D&D because it was NOT a miniatures game. Once I saw the actual game in play, and heard that miniatures were in fact usable, I became much more interested in the game.

So to me, miniatures are definitely old school. What is not so old school is 3.x's detailed tactical combat.

Frank

[blackbarn]

In order to avoid the problem of minis taking away from the imagination, we have used plastic chips, colored gaming stones and decorative glass bead-like markers to represent characters and monsters. It has an elegant look on the table and doesn't color the players' imaginations with the wrong ideas. And we don't get confused as to who is who, either.

[coffee]

Sept 4, 2008 11:48:18 GMT -6 Random said:

So how well does that work for rpgs, just using tape measures and strings?
I have some miniatures (really kind of like voodoo dolls, since they look like the players instead of the characters) that I made, but we rarely use them. Grids annoy me.

It works fine; you decide where you want to move, move your figure, and measure the path. If you run out of movement, oh well; you stop at the end of your movement allowance.

But it's a lot less hassle than counting squares!

[drskull]

I'd say: minis are old school. Grids are seriously not old school.

When using minatures with a tape measure, or ungridded tiles (I had some kind of dungeon tiles from the late 70's, that were just stone floor patterns on card stock, cut into rooms and corridors). You could do all sorts of things like cramp lots of guys in a small space if the minis would fit, attempt to slip around the enemy, pile lots of enemies around a dragon (i.e., plastic dinosaur).

Grids shut much of that down, make it much more chess-like and make you count and cypher more, scheme less.

[coffee]

Sept 4, 2008 15:37:50 GMT -6 drskull said:

Grids shut much of that down, make it much more chess-like and make you count and cypher more, scheme less.

Absolutely; that's why I hate them.

Plus there's the whole "Okay, I'm going around here, but I'm staying two squares away so that I'm out of his reach... oh, he has a 10' reach? Then I'll go around the other way..." thing that I've seen way too much of. (Of course, part of that is the DM letting them get away with it...)

[ffilz]

I have a love/hate relationship with grids...

I actually experimented with grids early on, I used a chessboard.

Glen Blacow had a set of cardboard tiles he used with a staggered square grid on them (allowing for straight walls and square rooms, but movement in 6 directions like hexes). I don't recall how anal he was about people fitting in their grid squares, but clearly he was using the grid for movement (otherwise there would have been no reason to use staggered squares).

One thing to consider is that those of us who came to RPGs from board games were quite comfortable with using grids (though 99% of board war games at that time used hex grids).

When we started using the various dungeon tiles, and later the Battlemat, I don't think we were yet strict on people fitting into squares, but I think we started to move that way.

Where I started to become much more rigid about grids was in college when I started running a friend's homebrew (though we used counters not miniatures). Even there, there was some flexibility, but I generally required characters to be in their hex (there was almost no dungeon/indoor adventuring in that campaign, so the use of a hex grid was universal, and hex grids worked fine for the occasional cave).

Of course Melee and Wizard required hex grids...

I do think that 3.x went a bit too anal on the grids. I do like some standardization of how much space people occupy, but I'd like to see a bit of flexibility too. So I plan to use a grid in my upcoming campaign as a guideline.

Frank

[tavis]

Grids and measurement does seem like a more interesting area to consider. On reflection I think the evidence for minis = old school is pretty clear; they're recommended in Vol. 1, and why else would there be so many monsters created to fit something you could use as a figure of the proper scale? The rust monster is a classic example, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the tinfoil monster presented in the Dungeoneer Compendium, which screams "I have just set a wad of tinfoil down on the tabletop", and its percentage chance to contain a treasure, which implies "If any player is crafty enough to actually unwrap the tinfoil, I have hidden a penny in there."

[foster1941]

Gary Gygax in The Dragon #15 (June 1978):

For about two years D&D was played without benefit of any visual aids by the majority of enthusiasts. They held literally that it was a paper and pencil game, and if some particular situation arose which demanded more than verbalization, they would draw or place dice as tokens in order to picture the conditions. In 1976 a movement began among D&Ders to portray characters with actual miniature figurines. Miniature figure manufacturers began to provide more and more models aimed at the D&D market — characters, monsters, weapons, dungeon furnishings, etc. Availability sparked interest, and the obvious benefits of using figures became apparent: Distances could be pinned down, opponents were obvious, and a certain extra excitement was generated by use of painted castings of what players “saw”. Because of the return of miniatures to D&D, the game is tending to come full circle; back to table top battles not unlike those which were first fought with D&D’s parent, CHAINMAIL’s “Fantasy Supplement”, now occurring quite regularly.

[tavis]

A critical hit quotation! Very interesting; does a trend beginning in 1976 count as old-school?

I also realized that minis aren't in fact recommended in Vol I - they're discussed above the section on recommended materials, but don't make the list (while Outdoor Survival does, and a three-ring binder for each participant).

[badger2305]

Except that you have to be careful about Gygax's commentaries about what the "majority" of gamers were doing at any time. A majority of gamers he had contact with, to be sure, but judging by editorials that appeared at the same time at that quote, Gary was busily trying to tell lots of other people who had been playing outside the Lake Geneva orbit the "proper" way to play. So it isn't as clear as that quote would make out.

If you look at the articles in various gaming publications, you will find that grids are very much old school for *some* people - the comment by Frank about Glenn Blacow's campaign is telling in that regard - and there's a great article by W.G. Armintrout in The Space Gamer entitled "The Balrog and the Finger of Death" which was a critique of using miniatures in gaming.

In games I played in run by Michael Mornard (Old Geezer to many of you), we used miniatures quite a bit, to show marching order if nothing else. I recall using them for combats sometimes, but I don't recall if we used a grid. We also played a number of fantasy miniatures battles, so there was still a fair bit of overlap between wargaming and role-playing, back then (roughly 1975-1978).

[James Maliszewski]

I came into the game a lot later than many here -- late 1979 -- but we never used miniatures to play. We certainly owned miniatures, but they were just "toys" we found little to no use for in running our adventures and campaigns. In fact, I never used minis for a definite purpose until I played 3e, whose combats were complex enough that they were a necessity.

This isn't to say that Gygax's quote is in any way universally true; it almost certainly isn't. However, I think far fewer gamers, even among the first and second generations, used miniatures in play than those who did.

[ffilz]

I suspect the incidence of miniature use varies depending on the culture the players are involved in. Most all of the gaming I saw at MIT from 1979-1981 used miniatures.

Prior to gaming at MIT, I had miniatures but didn't make a huge use of them, partly due to not having a good way to represent the battle area (having experimented with a chessboard). When I started gaming at MIT, they introduced me to using dominoes to mark dungeon walls, and soon I got some dungeon tiles, and near the end a Battlemat.

For a while, I packed some 20-30 lbs of miniatures in a backpack, hiking downtown, then two buses, then subway, then a short hike to MIT... it was nice when I started to drive...

Frank

[ewilen]

When I played OD&D and AD&D, starting around 1977, we didn't use minis. I think some of my friends may have bought a few but I didn't see much benefit to the game in having them. On the contrary, although I was an avid wargamer, I felt that using minis in an RPG induced a sort of "third-person" or "omniscient" perspective that was antithetical to the character-perspective approach implied by the structure of the game. (By that I mean one player=one character, and use of a GM.) What I would do, as GM, was similar to what I've read recommended in Robin Laws' Feng Shui game--I'd describe the evolving situation to each player more or less from his character's perspective, while maintaining a private sketch behind my GM's screen of where all the combatants were.

The only time we used minis in one of those early games, that I can recall, was in a largish battle involving a many dozens of caravan guards fighting maybe a few hundred humanoids. There I used a miniatures-like system of having each figure represent a group of combatants that would move and fight as a "unit", but I still rolled each attack using the normal D&D rules. (Yes, there was a *lot* of "wristage".)

I did use the hexes and counters for TFT and Dragonquest, both of which I enjoyed. (TFT via the programmed-paragraph adventures, DQ via a pre-release combat game called Arena of Death.) I still had the sense of loss of character perspective, but those were well-designed games that made good use of the precise positioning and movement made possible by hexmaps. So it was a trade-off.

Moving into the mid-late 80's, the homebrew games I played mostly used abstracted positioning and no minis. Some did use minis in a loosey-goosey fashion, while an RQ game I was involved in use a highly detailed minis-based approach to combat. The loosey-goosey approach is really my least favorite but I've come to understand that many players really enjoy the spectacle.

[ffilz]

Yea, loosey-goosey can suck. I don't think we were too particular about exact positioning in the early days, but we also didn't use many combat options so positioning was only of general importance, as opposed to the hex/square counting style that TFT introduced and 3.x brought to the masses.

TFT was perhaps partly responsible for being slow to take up hex counting. We quickly saw that Melee had a serious problem allowing a fast opponent in an area with some maneuverability to always attack from behind with the slower opponent unable to turn as the faster opponent was circling. By the time I started doing hex counting in college, I addressed this in a couple ways. First, we did simultaneous combat. Second, while we did mark facing, an opponent was allowed to adjust at least to some degree (two people in an unconstrained field can guarantee one got a shot from at least partially behind on a single opponent though). One thing that helped was the system in use (my college friend's homebrew) only allowed 4 humans to attack a single human. That made it clear that the hexes were not king (which allow 6 to attack 1). A few players would grumble, and then accept things. The system was also not super specific about facing (just that if you were generally "behind" the defender couldn't use shield, and more general (1st opponent attacked best defense, 2nd 2nd best, 3rd unshielded, 4th unshielded w/penalty, 1st opponent had to be the one you attacked also).

Frank

[ewilen]

Somehow I don't remember running into that problem with Melee at all. Without pulling out my old copies, I suspect the answer is that, first, if you have initiative, you can always opt to move second so that you can react to shenanigans like someone running around to your back, and second, if you don't have initiative and are faced with that possibility, you can either retreat to a position where it's impossible, or move forward to engage (which would basically pin the opponent in place). Someone would have to be very fast to be able to get around to a careful enemy's back and move/attack (only half movement allowance is allowed for this).

If you used similar rules for D&D, I think the problem would be similarly minimized.

EDIT: Basically the elements are (a) engagement zones (like a front-only ZOC in wargame terms) which make doing an "end run" much harder, (b) restriction of movement rate when also attacking, (c) distinguishing the "move phase" from the "fight phase" so that both sides get to move before any attacks occur.

[ewilen]

Rather than editing the last message, I'll double-post to address the original question of the thread. I don't think using minis in the precise hex-counting manner is "old school" when it comes to D&D. For large combats with lots of room, taking out the tape measure to evaluate movement and missile weapon ranges makes sense; but aside from that, I'd see minis mainly as a tool for illustrating a situation, rather than mechanically modeling one. I.e., in TFT (also Champions), and (apparently) post-3e D&D, the precise rules of movement through hexes or squares will determine what can or can't happen in the middle of a battle. In old school D&D, those issues are instead handled by common sense, with the DM having the final say, and the minis just serve as an aid for visualizing and keeping track of things.

[ffilz]

Eliot, I concur that use of miniatures more as an illustration with common sense prevailing and not a hex counting game characterizes what I saw of early miniatures use.

I suspect there might have been some misreading of the Melee rules. Part of the problem was fights in an open arena (hex counting systems tend to fall apart with open arenas). But I still see problems all the time with turn based initiative where the system lets someone run by others frozen in place. The counter is that everyone waits and you have a standoff. My preference is definitely how we played in college where yes, there was hex counting, but everything was assumed simultaneous. Only very rarely did we get into arguments. It was not too uncommon for someone to want to change their action slightly, but that's easy to deal with. Every once in a long while, someone would try and react to the changed actions and things would cascade, but it was always resolved pretty well (the good part is that usually most of the other players were open to whatever logic I was proposing to resolve the situation).

Frank