Anyone else here just play with no visual aids at all? When I first started playing D&D after finding the second edition books in my dad's closet, my friends and I just used our imaginations. No minis, no maps.
It's called Theater of the Mind, I think. It used to be the way we played ADnD, but I guess that the newer editions pushed the minis-and-grid with their more tactical playstyles.
Far from everyone, the game was born out of war gaming so maps and minatures have always been big in the community. I personally see theater of the mind more often these days than when I started.
I haven't played for a couple decades but never used minis when we did, occasionally the DM would arrange some dice if we needed some visual aides but was never measuring distances and hex grids or anything. Some of us even played wh40k at the time so it wasn't that unknown, we just never played tabletop RPGs like tactical games. It was also 2nd Edition not even third, so awhile back. Shadowrun games needed the visual aids more than DnD usually.
My dad taught my brother and I and it was always either nothing or, more often, just simple grid paper and dimes/pennies. Still do it that way if I'm not using Roll20.
It's called Theatre of the Mind. I've definitely done it, and it has it's advantages (cheap, lower prep time) but I don't favor it nowadays. Especially in my last campaign, a swashbuckling pirate adventure, I tried to always have at least some kind of visual aid, because it's critical to that swashbuckling feel - the players can't swing from the chandelier if they don't know there's a chandelier.
I tried doing this but I could never visualize the fight or what something looked like... Turns out I have aphantasia and had no idea for 24 years because I just assumed no one else actually "saw" images when told to imagine something either and it was just a phrase
In one campaign, we started out using tokens of some kind on a battle grid. However, as the campaign went on, we stopped using it. For most part, it went okay. However, keeping track of where everyone can sometimes be too much. In particular, my character, whose modus is either hiding or healing, sometimes both, lead us to a situation when even I forgot to inform of our DM that I was hiding behind a huge statue that fell over. I was too busy keeping the rest of the party alive that I forgot where I was. Thankfully, when it was brought up, our DM just asked me to do an acrobatics check to confirm that I managed to roll out of the way and another check to see whether or not I kept myself hidden.
Keeping track of everyone's positions also became less important because our DM got a bit more lax about imposing those area of effect rules.
Yes and no. I used to do this back under 2nd ed. (Advanced D&D). All the later editions put a LOT more emphasis on measurement, making a play mat/map necessary. It's now close to impossible to keep track of flanking, cones of effect, blast radius, range, etc. for more than 5 or so creatures that way. You'd have to toss a lot of that out and streamline the game, but that might upset the play balance since a lot of tactics go bye-bye along with that.
We once did something really amazing along these lines. Only once, it was a crap ton of work.
We were fighting this giant demon wall thing. We made it out of Graham crackers and chocolate decorations, which we attached with melted chocolate as glue, basically. It was super creepy - I made demon eyes, oozing blood stuff, it's was great.
As we damaged the wall, we would rip parts of and eat it. It was like a solid 2-3 freaking pounds of chocolate and other assorted things. It was glorious to devour the enemy like that!
If I had a 3d printer making negatives of the baddies a before casting them in chocolate, cake, or marshmallow would be wild.
On a budget like I am I'm certain I could do something with cookies to make some or carve a marshmellow down, slime out of jello, etc. I've done 3d trees, but could also make my mini peanut butter cookies and use icing to paint the monster to be a token.
Cheese would be a good medium as well however. Fuck man, I could do a three course dnd session. Charcuterie shiskabandits? Cheese pants, meat shirt, and a grape head all held with a toothpick?
This would be fantastic for a kid, or very kid like adults. Ant on a log direwolf? Strands of twisted liqurice as tentacles for a rope or an abolyth? More ideas are welcome
God dahm I kinda want to do that next time I run assault on gumdrop mountain. I don't know if any of the PCs would actually eat during that specific campaign though lol
I do this too. Instead of minis, I tape a drawing onto a Starburst and whoever kills the monster gets to eat the Starburst. I'm gonna have to get something like a donut for the boss fight at the end of the adventure I'm running rn.
Our poor cleric almost never got to go offensive, mostly because my wizard had a 16 Dex and Improved Initiative, so that she could go first in most combat instances, and well, fireball is effective.
When she did get to go offensive, boy howdy. She had Reach Spell, so all those touch spells just got a 15' range. She walked within 10 feet of a Boss cleric and hit him with a Harm.
DM accidentally uses his roommate's THC gummies for underlings. The battle to kill the cinnamon roll is bloody and vicious as PC turns on PC for the glory and the sweet spoils.
