2019-10-13 Theatre of the mind

I don't use battlemaps. It’s all *theatre of the mind*.

Actually, it’s worse: it’s so abstracted that we don’t really need to imagine where people are standing, or which of the orcs has been hurt. The rules I use support this:

You can move anywhere on the battlefield and attack: you don’t know how to move from here to there on the battlefield
Anybody can take one attack to a buddy by interposing themselves; your armour and your shield and your body can protect your friend without you knowing where they are on the battlefield
You can’t take two attacks aimed at other people because you can only be in one place at a time, of course.
You usually cannot aim at particular monsters. Just as players can protect each other, the enemies do the same thing. In order to make it easier for me to run the game, I just array enemies in a particular order and every round they get attacked in turn, no matter what players say. When they ask how this is possible, I’ll just say that they cover each other as well (but not optimally so).
Anybody can fire ranged weapons at anybody else without needing to establish line of sight and without wondering whether the enemy is currently engaged in melee. There is no friendly fire. It’s simply quicker and easier that way. If you really don’t like that, then I’d suggest you simply disallow the use of ranged weapons once the surprise round is over. Given those two options, however, it’s simply easier to just allow people to fire at will.
When there are area effects, we negotiate the number of targets affected. Usually that’s not a problem. I love negotiating at the table, but only if negotiations are short. 😅

interposing themselves

negotiating at the table

I’ve seen something similar in *Ryuutama* and at the time I wrote a blog post about combat using two rows per side.

combat using two rows per side

#Old School #RPG #Halberds and Helmets