I used to want to have miniatures on a board but these days unless I'm playing a legitimate board game like 4e where you need it to even play, I'd rather not have it. Square-by-square movement is a lot of micromanagement and forces me into thinking about things as a board game rather than trying to engage my imagination to picture the scene.

What I use in lieu of grids is simply defining abstract regions. "In the middle of the road", is one step from "End of the corner block" is one step from "By the nearby bridge." Characters drop into different regions as needed to give a sense of space without having to specify static spatial relationships like a grid does.

I like using miniatures, and have a ton of Dwarven Forge and self-printed terrain to put them around on.  However, for the most part it is abstracted.  I play AD&D and the scales don't work right with modern minis and DF, so it's just to look very cool

Quote from: Jam The MF on May 23, 2021, 02:02:57 AM
Which do you prefer, and do you enjoy both?

Roleplaying without minis.

For me it depends on the system. If it's very crunchy/defined by positioning (Dark Heresy, Iron Kingdoms, DnD 4E, etc) then I'll err on using miniatures. If it's designed with 'story play' in mind (no pun intended) I'll quite happily use theatre. I have no real preference.

Greetings!

I have hundreds and hundreds of miniatures in my collection. It's kind of weird thinking about how I have been collecting miniatures, painting them, and using them in games since 1978 or so. Yeah, I like using both Theater of the Mind and Miniatures. The party is always on the table, at least ready for whatever miniature action that may take place, even if most of the session remains Theater of the Mind. The miniatures are always ready. Of course, in other sessions, the legions of miniatures make more of a prominent showing, it just depends on what is going in with the game session.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Jam The MF on May 23, 2021, 02:02:57 AM
Which do you prefer, and do you enjoy both?

I have found that I don't care for using a grid; but I do have a slight preference for having miniatures on the table, vs running straight TotM.

I prefer miniatures or the like. Makes it much easier to show where someone is facing or what threats are closest. TOTM though works fine for 'net games.

Quote from: Jam The MF on May 23, 2021, 03:24:14 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 23, 2021, 01:14:00 PM

Quote from: Charon's Little Helper on May 23, 2021, 12:55:38 PM
Plus, if you're going to be fighting more than 1-2 foes, minis make it easier to track where everyone is.

I have found that can be a flaw with minis rather than a feature when you're trying to roleplay the fog of war and the uncertainty of the foes numbers & maneuvers. Sometimes showing the players far more (and more precisely) than their characters can/should be witness to is damaging to the overall play experience.

You can maintain the fog of war somewhat; by only setting out what would be right in front of the PCs, or else easily visible to them.  As they work their way through the first wave, set out the second wave.  Don't let them know how close or far away they are from victory.

Yeah, this.  I've never had difficulty doing the fog of war with miniatures,

Depends on the gamesystem and the group.

Having a battleboard and little minis just feels like part and parcel of the D&D game and it's wargame history.  I've had a few TotM games where some spells cast like fireball in a dungeon room should have likely killed as many of the players as the monsters in melee but these days kind of doesn't matter.  It still feels like we're missing a part of the game when we don't use a marked string and little figures on an erasable.

Of course these days, I'm more likely to pull out an iPad and use OwlBear or something similar as it's more convenient or when resorting to online games.

Like mentioned, it does reduce the amount of confusion of who is where and can hit or avoid what: also helps aid the DM in keeping track of everything when dealing with larger encounters.  That's probably why there is so much hand waiving about radius and missile ranges:  it's just too much to keep track of with TotM.

Quote from: Altheus on May 23, 2021, 04:39:30 AM
I prefer theatre of the mind for most things, because it allows players to get creative, swinging on the chandelier, kicking the tables over for cover, that kind of thing, but mini's are great for keeping track of big complicated fights.

Theatre of the mind for the same reason: imagination and creativity. I never used miniatures (something that, BTW, I find very limiting: What if there are 20 orcs but you only painted 10? What if you want to throw an Abyssal Dragon into the mix but you haven't one painted? What if your elf is everything but what the miniature shows?)

If needed we use sketches on a sheet of paper, or even dice ("The white one is the paladin, the green one the ranger...") but only to clarify a confused moment. Theatre of the mind all the way.

I used to use miniatures exclusively back in the 3e days, but since going back to OD&D, I've made my combat system more abstract to make it faster and easier (thanks to Empire of the Petal Throne) so that fighters can kill multiple enemies in one attack. Now you attack "the goblins" rather than individual opponents.

All of the things people say are advantages to miniature use; exact positioning and tactical maneuvering, have turned into limitations.

TOTM most of the time, and a combat place if it gets very elaborate.

I use digital maps, so software provides fog of war.

Quote from: Reckall on May 24, 2021, 03:56:56 AM

Quote from: Altheus on May 23, 2021, 04:39:30 AM
I prefer theatre of the mind for most things, because it allows players to get creative, swinging on the chandelier, kicking the tables over for cover, that kind of thing, but mini's are great for keeping track of big complicated fights.

Theatre of the mind for the same reason: imagination and creativity. I never used miniatures (something that, BTW, I find very limiting: What if there are 20 orcs but you only painted 10? What if you want to throw an Abyssal Dragon into the mix but you haven't one painted? What if your elf is everything but what the miniature shows?)

We have a few smallish boxes of minis, for both fantasy and sci fi. We do a fair amount of proxying and try to get ones that roughly match. Large minis usually get proxied.
Most of my collection are singles from the D&D collectible series. Prepainted and relativley cheap. I also paint my own to fill in the gaps, especially for player characters.
I also have some plastic stands that hold paper so that I can print out fold ups, both purchased and cut out of images from the internet.
So a lot of proxying and sometimes making paper tokens. The important thing is to make each mini clear in what it is (Orc 1, Orc 2, etc...) and how much space it takes up on the grid.

Having things mapped out with at least "representative" miniatures can be a big help to me. It's easy to get things turned around when multiple people are involved.

TotM provides the details to the "representative" things.

Luckily, with Tabletop Simulator, there is no shortage of miniatures or terrain to work with. Just need a screen to show things with.

I can and have used all the choices. I prefer miniatures with no grid for four reasons.

1. Clearly showing the general positioning of the PCs gets everyone on the same page and avoids wasting time with discussions about who is in front of or beside whom and who was next to the door, tree, horse, etc. and who was far away from that thing. I've encountered very few people who can get and keep a clear mental picture of a combat with more than about four participants (not PCs, participants) in their head and I dislike conversations like, "you can't get a clear shot because the wagon is in between you and the evil necromancer." "But I thought I was over by the trees." Those talks are the adult version of "Peww, peww. Your dead!" "No I'm not, you missed me."

2. People often forget about that non-player characters such as that NPC they were escorting, the minion they recently hired, a pet animal or familiar, or their horse or mule. Having a physical representation on the table helps everyone (me included) remember those things.

3. Well done miniatures are nice to look at. If they stay in the tray in the box, nobody gets to see them.

4. Minis and rough sketchs on blank paper or an erasable mat are much faster to create and can easily be done on the fly compared to something like Roll20. That is way less work for me as the GM and it eliminates any extra desire I might have to push for a combat because I spent 4 hours preparing a location in Roll20 and I don't want the time to be a waste.

Due to GMing exclusively over Skype and Roll20 it's been a very long time since I could use any of the hundreds of miniatures that I do own. 

Depends on the system.

World of Darkness and WEG Star Wars are always theatre of the mind.

My d6 Star Trek variant used theatre of the mind for personal scale and 1v1 ship combats, but used miniatures (one advantage of a laser engraving business was being able to etch and cut top down ship profiles out of colored plastic complete with peg stands that I think made a lot of difference in keeping attention on the battles as it's a lot easier to visualize when everything is represented by a piece that actually looks like itself and was (within reason) cut to scale (I used about 1"/500' for capital ships and about 1" for a cluster of 4 for fighters and such).

When I was running Mekton on the regular, that was entirely mini-based.

For my own fantasy system, it's built to use minis, but movement and ranges use the naturalistic "paces" (based on the Roman passum which happens to be about 5') so that it's fairly easy to adapt to theatre of the mind. In testing, people said they could easily visualize when something was said to be 6 paces away a lot better than 6 squares or even 30').

For Palladium Fantasy though, it's absolutely theatre of the mind and a reminder that despite the clunky conversion described in the system of (Spd x 20 = yards/minute), your Spd attribute is actually just straight up feet/second which is SO much easier to use in conjunction with actions and a 15 second combat round (the calculation is way more relevant in 1e when melee rounds were actually 1 minute, but in my experience every GM just ignores that and uses the 15 second rounds of literally every other Palladium game).