Running a 3E Game Without Miniatures*

I won't lie to you. I love miniatures. I love painting them and I love using them in games. However, I've certainly gamed a lot more in my life without miniatures than with them. It was one of my goals in designing 3rd Edition to make it playable without miniatures.

However, I've seen many people say that it's not possible. Even, apparently, the people working on the new revision of D&D.

Besides being a visual aid, miniatures help you with four basic things in playing the game: Attacks of opportunity, flanking, range, and line of sight. For DMs interested in running D&D without miniatures, yet using all the 3rd Edition rules, I suggest these tips:

Attacks of Opportunity
The hardest part about playing without miniatures is determining when attacks of opportunity occur. This is because to determine attacks of opportunity you have to know where characters are in relation to their foes' threatened area. The easiest way to deal with this is to remember this simple rule of thumb: If a character is fighting a foe with normal reach and performs an action that provokes an attack of opportunity (like drinking a potion) without first stepping back, he provokes the attack of opportunity. If a character is fighting a foe with longer than normal reach and takes such an action, even the step back won't save him.

Be verbally descriptive and make your players be descriptive as well. For example, you describe a room in a castle as being 20 feet wide, with an open doorway in the middle of the wall that is about 5 feet wide (or so). A player states that his character is going to stand in the room just to the right of the doorway. You state that a gnoll runs into the room with a howling battle cry. You know that the player is close enough to the door to get an attack of opportunity on the gnoll as it rushes past, because the doorway is only 5 feet wide -- there's nowhere the gnoll could have gone but through the character's threatened area.

Think in terms of the characters' intentions. In the above example, it might even be better if the player said, "I'm going to stand right by the door so that if anyone runs through it I'll get a free attack as they go by." Now it's not 100 percent important where the character is standing. You just simply know that if someone runs through the doorway, they get whacked.

When in doubt, give both NPCs and PCs the benefit of the doubt. If a fighter backs up (a 5-foot step) away from the bugbear he's fighting to drink a cure moderate wounds potion, don't worry about whether he backed into the threatened area of the bugbear fighting his friend. He didn't. Playing the game with miniatures shows you that there's practically always some safe spot to retreat to. If you game with miniatures, you realize that there are far fewer attacks of opportunity going on than you'd think.

Flanking
Again, this can easily be an issue of intent rather than position. "The dire rat moves around to flank you with the dire rat you're already fighting," you say. It doesn't matter where exactly everyone's standing -- just that the character is being flanked by two rats.

Ranges and Areas
The simplest thing to do: Don't worry about range. Unless it's a fight going on in a large area, even close-range spells provide enough range to cover most encounter areas. Unless it's a weapon with a range increment of only 10 feet, the foe's almost certainly in range.

For both range and area, though, simply use your best judgment. If the PCs are at one end of a long room with three trolls coming in from the other end, and the wizard casts fireball, the trolls are certainly in range, and -- unless they were purposely keeping a lot of distance between themselves for some reason -- they're all in the area of effect.

As the DM, just make a declaration about ranges and areas and then keep to it. "The orc archers are two range increments away." "The two medusas are too far apart to catch in a lightning bolt." Take notes if it helps, so that you can remember 2 rounds from now when a character wants to do the same action again, or a related action. As long as you're consistent, you'll be fine. If all the PCs are spread out too far to be affected by the cleric's bless spell, they're not going to all be caught in a fireball.

Line of Sight
Another issue where intent becomes more important than actual position. "I move until I can see the hobgoblin in the next room and fire my crossbow." All the adjudication you need to make is whether this is a 5-foot step or a move action, and that's just a judgment call.

Non-Miniatures Visual Aids
Draw a quick five-second sketch of the room where the encounter is taking place. Have people point to where they are. Write notes about group marching order or character positions. If it's a particularly complex encounter, or the quarters are tight, use coins or anything else that's handy to represent characters -- not for careful adjudication purposes, but just to remind everyone around the table that Gordar the dwarf is in the corner surrounded by carrion crawlers and the wizard is up on the ledge at the north end of the room (or whatever).

In Conclusion
Overall, it comes down to communicating with the players. Find out what their intent is, and adjudicate from there. Take control of the game and make judgment calls -- consistent judgment calls. You'll do fine.

The most important thing I can say about playing without miniatures is this: Don't look at it as if it's some "wrong" or "lesser" way of playing. Use the fact that the game is going on entirely in everyone's imagination, and describe everything with an evocative flair. Forget about tactical rules and focus on the descriptive powers at your command. Enjoy the freedom of having no limitations before you.