Theatre of the Mind

[Mike]

Do people still do rpgs using nothing but their imagination?
So many games these days seem to have associated figures, and buildings, and terrain, and stuff, and…
What happened to just imagining it all.

 

#getoffmylawn

 

 

[Jim Webster]

When called upon to run one I will tend not to bother with figures, perhaps a sketch map to give people a feel for place

https://jimssfnovelsandwargamerules.wordpress.com/

[Tony Hughes]

Back in the days when D&D was a big thing many players would only play ‘official’ scenarios so it isn’t a new thing to avoid imagination.

 

[Whirlwind]

Yes. That is the way  I play with the bairns. Occasionally I doodle a quick sketch or outline of something, that’s it.

[Russell Phillips]

I never use miniatures in RPGs. I’m currently running one campaign and playing in another one, both of which are very much theatre of the mind. There are maps of the setting, and we occasionally use them to refer to where places are in relation to each other, but that’s it.

In the campaign I’m running, the characters have come across a monster of a type that they’ll probably never meet again, and various NPCs that are unlikely to be seen again. I don’t want to buy and paint figures that will only get used once.

Military history author
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[Mike Headden]

I use figures, maps, scenery, handouts, etc for RPGs and always have. I’ve been running tabletop RPG games since the mid-1970s so it’s far from a new idea.

All, bar one, of the RPGs I’ve played in did the same.

The one game where we were all using our imaginations it became rapidly apparent to me that we were not all imagining the same thing.

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[madman]

I try to keep it all theatre of the mind. I find as soon as miniatures come out it is a wargame and the role playing changes to roll playing.

 

[Darkest Star Games]

There have been RPGs that I have run or played in where minis and stuff were used, mostly in D&D and Pathfinder where counting squares is important.  Usually it’s TotM style with maybe a pad of paper or dry-erase mat to sketch or doodle maps or rooms or what the facade of a building looks like.  Lately all of my RPG stuff has been over Discord (though occasionally a VTT like Forge or Roll20) so there really isn’t a good way to do any of that, all just words and laughter.

"I saw this in a cartoon once, but I'm pretty sure I can do it..."

[Andrew Beasley]

Jake does not use figures at all face to face or over Discord and Alice uses figures all the time for their face to face games but a dry wipe sheet for the area IIRC.

Wonder if it’s dependant on how combat orientated the game is?

 

[greg954]

I remember years ago when I was a kid playing RPG with my Dad and Sister. Dad would narrate from a book (which was only a guide for the storyteller) and we rolled some dice to determine the outcome of battles. But that was all, the rest was filled in with our minds.

When miniatures, scenery etc.. gets added I think then it’s easy to change the dynamics of the game. Take Dungeon Scum for example, it’s not a true mind of theatre game nor a true tactical experience. It aims to be somewhere in the middle. A fair amount of imagination is still required to fill in the blanks. So is it a case that less pure mind of theatre games are being played and more games like Dungeon Scum instead?

[Mike Headden]

Andrew Beasley wrote:

Jake does not use figures at all face to face or over Discord and Alice uses figures all the time for their face to face games but a dry wipe sheet for the area IIRC. Wonder if it’s dependant on how combat orientated the game is?

I’d say it is absolutely dependant on how combat oriented the game is.

Things like D&D revolve around combat so exactly where everyone is matters. Your thief can’t be 25 metres away from the party checking a door for traps one moment and backstabbing the beastie that just walked through the door behind the rest of the party the next if there is to be any semblance of reality.

Who’s sitting where round the conference table as you negotiate a treaty between the Klingons and the Vorlons, not so crucial.

If the default conflict resolution mode is negotiation then Theatre of the Mind is fine.

But if the ethos of the game is “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid” then I’d go for figures and scenery (even if it’s just a playmat and pens) every time.

 

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Mike]

Andrew Beasley wrote:

Wonder if it’s dependant on how combat orientated the game is?

I think maybe it is people orientated?
I have played DnD (well AD&D as it was?) Star Wars, Heavy Gear, and many other RPGs that have a strong fighty aspect to them, as well as games not so much.
None of us ever used any models or terrain we just said where we wanted to be in relation to the world and that was all we needed.

?

[Andrew Beasley]

Apologies – should have been more clear (blush)

By ‘game’ I meant the gestalt ‘game’ not a specific rule set so you could play a combat orientated D&D where I think figures help clarify LOS or an adventure orientated D&D game where description rules.

I do think figures add to the game (bar from combat) just for the fun of collecting and painting them and I cannot remember any RPGs I’ve played where the dominated the game and normally they did not replace the descriptions of the rooms / positions but added to combat.

Figures do add other problems though – LOS and cover can become a sticking point and even laser pointers are not a 100% fix – here the relaxed descriptions win (e.g. ‘I will hide behind that small bush’) even if your figure is twice the size of it on the table 🙂

 

[Mike Headden]

Every RPG I’ve played where we used figures and “scenery” – for whatever value of scenery was in use – also used a grid, hexes or squares, to regulate movement.

Also, whether or not you could hide behind a bush in the games I’ve played was down to the DM/GM. It wasn’t,”I’ll hide behind that bush.” It was,”My character is looking around for cover, what do they see?”

I know some (many?) games these days are collaborative but in my day the GM’s word was law and you were firmly in their world.

“You play in the man’s game, you play by the man’s rules”

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Mike]

Mike Headden wrote:

Also, whether or not you could hide behind a bush in the games I’ve played was down to the DM/GM. It wasn’t,”I’ll hide behind that bush.” It was,”My character is looking around for cover, what do they see?”

See that is interesting to me, in the games we did, the bush would have been described/implied already by the GM.
The scene would be set and the players would know what could be reasonably be expected to be there.
So if you were on a highway maintained by road wardens between villages and you had fields on your left, the players would say I hide behind a bush or in a drainage ditch and the GM would be cool with that, as it seems fair that there would be some bush/ditch of some sort in the area travelled through.

Also interesting to me is the I will hide vs my character will hide distinction.

We played very much as one troupe rather than GM vs players (except of course for Paranoia!)
We wanted to create great stories.

Our regular group of about 5 also had 2 long term GMs as part of it, and when the 2 GMs were bouncing off one another in terms of character dialogue or describing scenes and actions it was on occasion just wonderful.

This was in my day, which was about 30 years ago or so.

YMMindeedV.

It is interesting to see/read about how different people play for different reasons and in different styles.

Since moving I have not done any RPGs as the local gamers are what I call roll players, in that they say ‘my character tries to bluff the guard and rolls an XX, what happens?’
The GM then says ‘the guard rolls a XXX and your bluff fails’…

This is not for me, which means I am missing out, whereas they are not.

But you have to play in a way that you enjoy, or why play at all?

😀

[Ivan Sorensen]

Currently all my RPGs are played over voice chat (Discord) so we use theatre of the mind. If it is a complex battle, I recap every turn to make sure everyone knows exactly where they are compared to everything else. For whatever reason, I am pretty good at keeping a “mental map” so that works fine.

Face to face, we have occasionally used miniatures but I tend to prefer them as more of a general “you are here, the lizardman is over there, you guys are here” than counting out hexes or anything. I’d say half our games use no visual aids at all, for the rest its sometimes just a sketch on paper and sometimes its a few minis.

I did run a GURPS ww2 game where we played out the firefights using hexes, minis and the whole thing, treating it as a skirmish wargame, then role played in between. I’ve done the same with Inquisitor. That was good fun but a different experience intentionally.

[Patrice]

(Very long ago I began with AD&D, but) the tabletop RPGs I’ve played in recent years are: Call of Cthulhu, and “Te Deum pour un massacre“ (late 16th C. French wars of religion).

For both we use a few figures, only when we think we need them: exploring a place, or fighting, to see where is everyone and what everyone is doing… on a whiteboard, with dry-erase drawings on it.

For CoC it’s Copplestone or Pulp Figures adventurers. For Te Deum it’s our usual wargame figures. We use them because we have them (and I must confess, because we like to show them) but we would certainly not have bought and painted more especially;  and if a very unusual encounter happens (in CoC…!) they don’t need a miniature.

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[Ivan Sorensen]

I did play with a fantasy RPG group some years back (some homebrew game of theirs) where everyone was expected to paint a miniature for their character but they just sat in front of the player at the table. They just liked the visual representation I suppose.

[Patrice]

Mike Headden wrote:

It wasn’t,”I’ll hide behind that bush.” It was,”My character is looking around for cover, what do they see?”

That’s fascinating. That’s exactly what I cannot do (or even think of) in a game. 😉

http://www.argad-bzh.fr/argad/en.html
https://www.anargader.net/

[General Slade]

I have done theatre of the mind playing Call of Cthulhu and it was okay but honestly I like playing with toy soldiers and if there are no toy soldiers on the table I feel there is something missing.

[Mike Headden]

Mike wrote:

Since moving I have not done any RPGs as the local gamers are what I call roll players, in that they say ‘my character tries to bluff the guard and rolls an XX, what happens?’ The GM then says ‘the guard rolls a XXX and your bluff fails’…

In cases like that I’d try to get the player to role play the encounter. If they persuaded me then no roll needed. If not, but it was in the balance, make a roll. If they failed completely then we’d move on to consequences unless they insisted on a die roll. Some players always role played, some never did, others only wanted to roll if they felt their character would be better than they were.

There is, after all, only so much an INT 12 player can do to role play an INT 18 character and if the player’s version of extrovert is to talk to your shoes not their own then a roll for their CHAR 15 character may be in order 🙂

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Mike]

Mike Headden wrote:

There is, after all, only so much an INT 12 player can do to role play an INT 18 character and if the player’s version of extrovert is to talk to your shoes not their own then a roll for their CHAR 15 character may be in order

100%

For knowledge or simple brain power situations I would as GM often describe the scene or situation to the comprehension of the group average, but then give extra details or clarifications to the player whose character has the more knowledge.

To the Group:   “You see a guard who looks like XXX”

To the Player with the knowledge:  “YOU notice that his emblem on his shield is from before the time period in question”

etc.

Or when the wizard sets a snare to catch a rabbit.

To the wizard:  “You set what seems to be a pretty sound trap”

To the hunter character:  “You can see a number of flaws in the wizards snare”

etc.

I then rely on the players to play as their character would given what their characters know.

[Mike Headden]

I think in any game I GM’d a wizard catching a rabbit goes like this.

Wizard casts Fireball. Rabbit caught, skinned, roasted all in one go. 🙂

I do have fond memories of two of us pooling our character’s abilities to create Osquip* Head Soup. Osquip flesh in that campaign was poisonous. My character was a fighter with a sideline in cooking. The other character was a healer who could purify tainted food. I killed and cooked them, he made the resulting dish edible. Simples! 🙂

 

*The osquip is the size of a small dog. It is a rodent, distantly related to beavers; it is hairless, with a huge head and large spade-like teeth.

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Sane Max]

The last D&D campaign I played in was all miniatures and scenery. It felt more like a free-wheeling boardgame than an RPG. All of my best games as a player and GM were all in the head. The mind does more than a figure and some hexes ever can.

older ‘Paranoia’ players will recall a simple example of how a GM should run things, and how players should behave that was both informative and hilarious. To paraphrase;

GM ‘You hear chanting, figures start appearing on the edge of the clearing. Toys-Y-US?’
Bob ‘Hmm what are the figures wearing?’
GM. One of them stabs you in the chest, you are dead. They seem to be wearing bits of dead Furry thing and carrying pointy sticks. Dee-v-8?’
Mark ‘I start blasting, while also reporting Toy’s careless waste of Alpha Complex Property, namely his chest, to our beloved Computer’

and so on. I also remember some cracking games where the lack of ground plan really came in handy. People leaping off balconies and carrying out Errol Flynnesque escapades, that would not be do-able on a clearly delineated map with toy soldiers, that since it was all in our heads that the GM could allow in the interests of fun.

I would always hesitate now to take part in a Figures-and Hexes game.

[Whirlwind]

I still prefer theatre-of-mind for combat-orientated role-playing games, because for me the focus has to be on what each character sees at any one point. Miniatures and floor plans actually detract from that IMHO because then the player’s primary experience is God-mode, looking down.

[Ivan Sorensen]

Giving info to players based on their character is also a nice way of loredumping a little bit.
“As a knight, you know that the men serve the order of the enlarged spoon, known throughout the North for their love of spicy soups”

[Mike Headden]

Ivan Sorensen wrote:

Giving info to players based on their character is also a nice way of loredumping a little bit. “As a knight, you know that the men serve the order of the enlarged spoon, known throughout the North for their love of spicy soups”

How do you tell that a man is a member of a particular order of knights?

Don’t worry, he’ll tell you! 🙂

 

There are 100 types of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who can work from incomplete data

[Author]

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