Maps and Minis

I read a lot of webcomics. One of them is called "Up to 4 Players" and is about a group of tabletop gamers. Their current series focuses on a campaign playing Savage Worlds.

With today's post, their blog entry that accompanied the comic talked about tabletop maps and use of minis. It's an issue that I've considered for a while, with differing thoughts on it. Here's the part that stood out to me:

"The group is using an erasable play mat (I personally use this one, from Paizo), with some meeple-like things to indicate who’s who. That’s not very high-tech, but that’s intentional – I find that if I use maps of specific settings or miniatures of specific creatures, the players’ imagination is fixed on these forms and go back to them even if I say “this orc-like mini represents the one-armed bandit”. If there’s no mini, but just a red token, their brains know it’s a representation of something, not an example of it, and so they can imagine whatever it needs to be."

The GM of the first campaign I played in used D&D minis and generally wouldn't have a playmat, but used dominos to measure distance and make representations of walls and stuff. He had talked with me about not wanting to have too much more in the way of detailed scenery or specific tokens because he wanted to encourage the players to use their imaginations.

However, using the minis he used definitely had an effect on our ability to imagine the situation. There were several times when he didn't have minis for the creatures that we were actually fighting. Or, at least, not enough of those minis. Therefore, he would substitute in minis of other creatures. However, sometimes if one of these creatures appeared larger or more intimidating than the other minis being used, it influence the tatics of the group trying to handle the battle, regardless of if this was a conscious fallacy or not.

I know that I usually use a digital program called Maptool for my maps. It allows for a detailed portrayal of settings, and it allows me to use specific images for creatures and characters so that I the tokens used directly represent what it is that the players are facing. I would say that this demands a lot less imagination on the part of the players, but it also allows everyone to have the closest idea of what things are supposed to look like.

Even so, it does fail to have some of the emotional impact that minis can generate, even if players can more successfully imagine what things look like. I can remember one fight that a group faced against a gigantic sea monster that was terrorizing a slowly flooding town. I thought that the fight was pretty epic, but I remember in talking to one of the players afterwards that he said he didn't really feel the scale of it, even though the monster's token was so much larger than those of the group.

With physical minis, I do think that there's something to be gained by the three dimensional representation. When you see an angry giant token looming over your group, it creates a greater sense of scale than just the idea that this flat circle is much larger than my flat circle.

Of course, buying a bunch of minis that are dragon sized, or really anything larger than a traditional "Large" base can be prohibitively expensive.

I have also used Legos before, making the closest approximation with minifigures for characters and trying to do simple and quick builds for varying monsters. This has had varying results.

The idea that the comic proposes, of using generic pieces like meeples, is interesting to me. I think that, especially if one could get enough things of the right sizes, that it could be a good way of representing things and getting the players to imagine without being limited to the portrayal of the piece in front of them.

However, this might still fail to pack the punch that a well designed and graphic minifigure or image might have. Not to mention, if the creature is unique or the player doesn't have familiarity with them, they would have no reference point for their imagination unless shown an image.

How important is the focus of imagination in the game? How important is it that all the players have the same vision of what is going on?

I don't know, these are just relevant questions and musings in thinking on this topic.

Of course, some games can do away with maps, minis, and props altogether, playing in the theater of the mind. This doesn't work for all games though. Some games, like D&D 4th edition, are pretty rooted in having a physical representation of things in order to work tactics and powers.