Close your eyes and picture a meadow. Got it? Okay, now, see that troll ten feet away from you? Oh, didn’t I mention him, or how close he was? Well, anyway, he’s about to be eaten by the dragon to your left.
Roleplaying games rely on cooperative storytelling about people and places which only exist within our minds. In order to share these images and work together, we need an approach that is going to draw in everyone at the table. It is not necessary for everyone to picture the exact same meadow, for example, but they had better all be aware of the battle between the troll and the dragon.
The problem is that not all people process and picture things in the same way. Some people are entirely abstract, while others are visual. Let’s take a look at a few of the options available for tables.
Theater of the Mind
For groups of imaginative people, this approach may be ideal. Rather than deal with strict range limits and positioning, the group relies on descriptive narrative to facilitate a unified view of the scenario. The GM describes the setting and the room, and players ask questions to help further define the space. Players can also contribute to setting up the environment by providing ideas that interest them. “Is there any chance I could find a large table to hide under?” “Absolutely! You spy a massive oak desk off in one corner.”
The Good
Action is swift and fluid without having to draw, erase, or move anything around. Players are encouraged to stretch their imaginations, which may facilitate a deeper roleplay experience. This setup is entirely free, extremely mobile, and requires no purchases or upkeep. Players will need to keep their attention focused on the game to know what is going on.
The Bad
Visual players may struggle with what’s going on. Action may slow down as players ask for repeated descriptions of the setup. The party may have to resort to drawing things out on a piece of paper to explain the situation. Some players can become frustrated when their vision doesn’t match up with the GM’s vision, leading to wasted spells or unforeseen penalties.
The Chalk Board Approach
We’ve all seen the football movies where the loud, yelling man tells people in various uniforms to move around a field in a certain way. He typically has a chalk board full of indecipherable Xs and Os with arrows drawn for movement. We can borrow this technique for use in our games. Substitute a chalk board for a white board or a mirror, with dry-erase markers of various color.
The Good
This is a fast, inexpensive way to quickly display the field of battle or the room of interest. This can be especially useful for space combat scenarios or large-scale conflicts. Plop down your white board in the middle of the table and let people draw and erase units as they move around or get destroyed. It’s also easy to lay this all out, because there’s nothing to knock over.
The Bad
First of all, this is a 2-dimentional representation. For some space combats, that may be an issue. A second issue is that people may lose track of what each unit is. “What’s that big lump supposed to be again?” It’s helpful to have a different color for each individual, but how jumbled will it look to have ten different colors on the board? Finally, white boards aren’t known for being extremely easy when it comes to applying fine detail. Small rooms may work just fine, but large dungeons may prove difficult with this system.
Roll20
I was recently introduced to this online system. After all the decades of people wanting something exactly like this, we finally have something mostly like what we wanted. People from around the world can now get together, roll virtual dice visible to all or to only the GM, chat, engage in video conference, and move freaking miniatures around on a digital tabletop! This has been the dream, man. And it’s finally here.
The Good
You can roleplay anywhere in the world, with anyone else in the world, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. A virtual tabletop and dice roller gets you involved so no one is left out because they can’t attend a game session in person. Also, it’s free to use!
The Bad
It turns out that gaming in a virtual space is just not as engaging as gaming in real life. Or rather, it’s engaging in a different, perhaps limited, way. A huge part of truly engaging communication is body language, and even pheromones. Gaming with your buddies over a digital interface is fun, but it’s lacking something intrinsic to “hanging out.” Also, this is getting into the territory of having to start paying for stuff, because you’re going to want more and better tokens and backgrounds for your games. It’s not a huge money sink, but cash will probably be involved at some point.
Miniatures
People have been using miniature soldiers to represent forces on a map for a very, very long time. It was only a matter of time until this idea made its way into roleplaying. Now we have entire catalogs of miniatures, some pre-painted and some requiring hours of minute detail to attain perfection. Slap these miniatures on a battle grid designed to show distances, and you’re ready to go. Even better, start setting out trees, rocks, mountains, houses, tables, animals, and garden rakes.
The Good
This is the clearest way to represent a battlefield. A person would have to try pretty darn hard to misconstrue where the troll is in that meadow, when their miniature is being towered over by a massive troll figurine marked out to exactly ten feet away. And players love matching up their character to a neat looking miniature as a quick way of describing what they look like.
The Bad
Money. So much money. A GM can sink hundreds or thousands of dollars into miniatures, terrain, battlemats, and even customized tables for displaying these things. They also take up a huge amount of space on the table, and become the center of the experience (literally). People turn off their imaginations and begin figuring things out spatially while staring at the mat. People don’t even need to pay attention between their turns, because everything is displayed for quick recap. Want to turn your story into a game of chess? This will do it.
Different setups are going to work for different groups. Personally, I’m going to try that white board thing during my next space battle. Whatever you decide, make sure you engage both the imaginative players and the visual players.
So, what’s your style of preference?