In 1938 Orson Welles scared America with his “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast. Many people panicked, thinking Martians were indeed invading the earth. Radio is often called “theater of the mind,” and Welles was a master of the medium.
In a way, roleplaying games are a modern version of the old radio plays. While they use visuals like maps, minis, terrain, or handouts, those aren’t the true substance of the game. The real substance of the game is the conversation. Roleplaying games are made out of words. (Including bad ones when the dice don’t cooperate). Some forms of roleplaying are entirely theater of the mind. For example, corporate and educational trainers use roleplaying scenarios all the time. Play by post and internet games (without a Virtual Tabletop) are almost purely verbal games.
So should we run sessions without maps and minis? Rely only on the conversation around the table? Seek to make them more “theater of the mind?”
The purpose of this article is not to provide firm answers. I don’t have them, and I certainly don’t have them for you and your group. I’m also sure I am not the first person to raise the question. Still, let’s look at the role of our imaginations in the game, open up the topic for discussion. Sounds a lot like a gaming session, doesn’t it?
POSSIBLE ADVANTAGES OF THEATER OF THE MIND
I played in a Star Trek campaign in college in which we never used miniatures or other visuals. Occasionally the GM might sketch out a combat situation on paper, but that was about it. In a way, not using figures and maps forced us to create the world in our minds. It didn’t detract from the “reality” of the game. As with fiction, characters in books are no less real because we don’t have a picture of them. We create their faces and voices, and that may make them more real and personal to us. The theater of the mind approach to roleplaying may have this advantage for some people.
This can even help the GM develop better narrative and descriptive skills. Without maps and minis, the GM is responsible for helping to create the world in the players’ minds. It’s a demanding task, but these improved skills may even be useful in real life, such as during job interviews. This may also tamp down some unwanted player behavior at the table. They need to pay attention to what you say rather than their cellphone.
The theater of the mind approach will save you money and time. You don’t need to purchase figures, tilesets, or terrain. All you need are some dice, pencils, paper, and your imagination. Not having to acquire and take care of all the material trappings may even give you more time for campaign planning. It also removes the issue of not having a figure in the desired gender or ethnicity.
Lastly, theater of the mind can help players and GM’s who are blind or visually impaired. This alone makes it worth considering.
POSSIBLE DISADVANTAGES OF THEATER OF THE MIND
However, many (if not most) people are visual learners. Minis and maps help them focus on the game and make it more real in their minds. A pure theater of the mind approach may not work for these players.
Theater of the mind may prove difficult for combat heavy or tactical games. Minis, tokens, or at least a sketched map of the situation are probably better. Marching order, combat placement, and tactical movement then become part of the party’s planning process.
Theater of the mind may not be helpful if a player’s mind wanders. It happens to all of us (even GM’s, heaven forfend) once and a while. If your mind wanders and you don’t have a map or minis available, you may find it difficult to get back into the game on your turn. Or the GM may have to review what is going on, though this is not necessarily a bad thing.
And lastly, maps and minis are fun. Many people would miss them if they were not there.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Hopefully there was something for you in this article. If you use a lot of minis and maps, perhaps your game might benefit from allowing the players to imagine more of the NPC’s and scenes. If you conduct a purely verbal game, perhaps maps, tokens, or NPC cards might make the game more concrete for your players. I haven’t resolved the issue of “how much is too much” in terms of visuals myself, or what types of games might work best as theater of the mind.
We’d love to hear your thoughts below.
When we started with D&D in 1979, most of the group was experienced war gamers. Therefore it became ‘normal’ to put down minis for combat because the group was very tactical. I can certainly see other preferences – there is no right or wrong here.
TotM certainly saves time and money, and whenever I can in game I use it, but if the combat is at all logistically complicated (and my experience with 5E typically falls into that category for us) we fall back on grids & minis.
http://gnotions.blogspot.com/
If you have ever given your group blank paper, then described a dungeon map (20′ ahead, you come to a Y), and then looked at how they interpreted your descriptions, you will see the biggest major pitfall in relying solely upon TotM.
This is true. On the other hand, much as I like the Chessex mat and pens method, it means that the party always has a strategic situational awareness they would not possess in “real life” which leads to arguments anyway.
From my own archives: I once ran a very successful Call of Cthulhu campaign that used only theater of the mind, but was constantly fighting “I don’t understand why my character should find a simple cave system that we have a map for so scary he needs a SAN check” and “How could that thing creep up on us when we’ve already explored the place it came from? We should have seen it coming”. (Not to mention the ever-popular mid-encounter “but I thought I was standing over there” reset that drove me to the grid in frustration eventually)
So I found some dungeon tiles that showed buff-colored voids in black tiles (a light dotted grid could just be made out) and some corridors and so forth to join them together.
I covered a 2×4 foot sheet of plywood in black oaktag and laid out the cave system in tiles stuck down with poster-tack. One cavern was quite large, several inches across in every direction.
I then cut shields from oaktag with which to cover and selectively reveal the caves. In one shield I cut a circular hole to represent lantern light. In the other I cut a cone to represent a flashlight.
I then presented the adventure with Grenadier CofC minis, sliding the sheets of oaktag about as the PCs moved through the caves. The players became very nervous now they could understand how Things could sneak up behind them, and spent a good deal of time spinning around and waving their flashlight all over the place.
Then they wandered into the large space where the flashlight would not pick out the opposite wall from the entrance and something wonderful happened. They wandered about in the big cave and became lost – in an open space! No walls to see, and they completely lost the entrance they’d come in by, and there, in my kitchen, four grown adults started to panic for real.
This was too labor intensive to use for more cave-adventures, but for months I never had to defend my assertion of how scary a cave could be even if you had a flashlight AND a lantern.
Our games tend to have combat that doesn’t suit miniatures very well. One PC will be fist fighting, another with a sniper rifle 500m away, another driving a flying car with someone riding shotgun. In 3D with vastly differing scale. It’s all done on paper because things change so quickly. To help fire up the imagination, there are plenty of graphics to show the locations. Players have to concentrate but then our sessions are short ones and combat can be over in an hour.
Tried minis in a fantasy and they didn’t suit me.
Seems like folks are on both sides of the fences on this. Which is exactly the kind of discussion that is good to have. I’m not firmly in either camp, but I am trying to be more descriptive even when we use minis (well, virtual tokens).
I think it depends on the kind of game and the system you are using. In the more tactical games, D&D for example, minis and maps are very useful, especially in a fight. Same goes for certain types of adventures, like dungeon crawls.
For the more narrative systems or adventures with an emphasis on social interaction I wouldn’t use zhat kind of stuff, because it would be more distracting than helpful.
Not that it has any real bearing on your article, but the Orson Welles thing is a myth: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/history/2013/10/orson_welles_war_of_the_worlds_panic_myth_the_infamous_radio_broadcast_did.html
Thanks for that link. I didn’t know that Welles pumped all that up.
Next time I will only reference Orson from Mork and Minday.
“Mork calling Orson! Come in Orson!”
I cut my teeth on Theater of the Mind in the 80s because my lawn mower money wasn’t going to buy that sweet new Ral Partha ogre, much less the army of goblins I wanted.
Now being more gainfully employed, my group has been playing with minis and grids or terrain for years, and we prefer it. We recently went back to TotM gaming, and it was difficult. I’m a “show, don’t tell” guy both in writing and in DMing, and I found myself constantly re-explaining where everyone was and how far they were from everyone else when I really wanted to run colorful combat and have the players use the terrain to their advantage.
That said, if the combat is only going to last a round, I don’t bother with the minis. For my tastes, the combat has to last at least twice as long as it would take to set up, more or less. I’d prefer it feel like an event, and minis and grids or terrain have that added effect.
I’ve never played with minis or grids, and I’m a bit reluctant to do so. I feel that using a mini to represent my character may reduce my own identification with it, and I’ll start to think of it more like a pawn in a board game. Of course, my preference is more towards narrative-based games and away from tactical systems. (It’s why I far prefer D&D 5e to 4e.) At most, a rough map hastily scribbled on a dry erase board is what works for me. I prefer to keep the world firmly in my head.
I’ve just been thrown into a theater of the mind game, sort of by accident.
I’m GMing Fate Core, which by it’s nature is very hands off on details, through Skype. But it seems one of our player’s internet can’t cope with all the video data coming in, so we can’t even seen each other.
Only one session in, but I’m kinda liking it. I need some practice though (haven’t GMed in a long time)
As an barely-on-topic aside, I’ve recently switched to playing a cleric in our Pathfinder game (on account of the now-essential cleric player only being there 1 time in four, not because I had a burning desire to play a cleric) and I’ve decided to theme his “Summon Monster” around Dinosaurs.
Disgusted that I had to buy a bestiary in order to understand how to play a Cleric, I decided to have some fun and bought a Schleiss Ankylosaur for a figure and mounted him on an MDF base of the correct size.
“Alcibiades” was a great success in every way, so I went ahead and bought the Schleiss Tyrannosaur and a Brachiosaur too, mounting each on a four inch square MDF base. When properly fitted with a greenstuff sculpted dungeon floor and painted up they look like purpose-designed D&D figures.
Only more awesome.
And of course I meant “Schleich”.
Thank you, Mr Brain.
Thanks for all the comments, folks. Glad this spurred some good discussion. Keep it going.