"By Pen and Paper." Topic

Greetings everyone.

Just wanted to pop a quick question to you role players out there. Do you game with pen and paper, miniatures, or a mix of both?

This weekend will mark the start of the new campaign I'm rolling out for a few returning players from my first mini campaign. I ran the first one with full 3d terrain and painted miniatures, but this time I am using paper flats and printed dungeon tiles for the combat areas while the mostly RP parts will just be imagined.

My reasoning is that while full 3d terrain and miniatures looks nice, having to mad rush to paint and construct every week lead to me becoming very frustrated with painting and resulted in more than one poorly painted figure.

So I gave them to another GM friend of mine and grabbed some free flats online. Got about 300 monster types and around 900 humanoid/pc types for free and they actually look pretty good!

So what do you game with and why?

I do minis and as much 3d terrain as I can afford because we use GURPS rpg which has a very detailed combat system. Also because using minis in RPGs is a gateway drug to miniature wargames ;)

Paper and pen. Got some prepainted D&D plastics that I use when we do fantasy, don't work as well when doing shoot'em ups. Just easier and quicker to use the pen and paper route.

We did minis and 3d scenery for 4E D&D, but the group vote was No More Minis when we switched to 1E AD&D. Much less prep time, house isn't littered with this week's scenario in progress, wife is happy, all is good.

We use D&D 3.5 with minis and as much 3d terrain as I can make on a limited gaming budget.

I've always used minis (but often dice for monsters) on a battlemat that I sketch dungeon walls with "overhead projector pens".

I do no try to sketch dungeon contents, I just describe them.

However on overland encounters I will sometimes place trees or rocks on the battlemat (and sometimes I'll just sketch them).

Oh yes . . . I use a slightly modified Basic/Expert D&D (the old red book/blue book). I much prefer imagination to overly-detailed table-heavy later rule sets.

-- Jeff

I game mainly CoC in which combat is usually a foolish idea so we only use pen, paper and imagination. However I'm planning to run Achtung! Cthulhu using the Savage Worlds rules which are very miniature friendly and with the expectation of more gunplay and fisticuffs in that setting. I'll probably just use a grid with a few relevent items – perhaps paper terrain buildings – and use my 1/72 WW2 figs.

Mixed.

I am fortunate to have sufficient miniatures for most scenarios but still find that paper and pencil best to get some things over and of course it is still the best way to record things.

x42

Lately it's just pen and paper, sometimes a pic on a camera phone of what the players can see (which works well, actually) based on their location on the DM's map. We are lucky enough to have a scribe who hand draws the maps in her game diary.

A previous DM used the D&D collectible figures, but recent games are more sci-fi or low magic, negating their use.

In the old days, we just did pencil and paper. And it was the player's job to correctly map the dungeon from the DM's description. Only if it was a very confusing chamber layout did the DM step in. Occasionally we'd use minis or markers of some sort to establish combatant's locations, but most of the time it was just all verbal "winging it."

I do appreciate good terrain and minis games, but when I'm going pencil and paper, I'm imagining myself in the scene, rather than staring down at a figure and seeing it in the scene. As odd as it seems, the former approach always stuck me as more involving than the latter. In a RPG, I find that miniatures detract from my imagination rather than adding to it.

I feel the same way with the imagination thing. I use the flats more to represent unit location because it's hard for me (and harder for everyone else) to mentally map a whole room with debris and 20 kobolds running about. Not to mention each one had to be numbered and kept track of. We put our imagination into narrating the battles, while losing some in the area of how things look (thanks to the need for flats) trade off I suppose.

Pen and paper for me. Otherwise I call it skirmish gaming:) But I have done precious little role-playing in recent years – too hard to get everyone together for regular sessions. Irregular wargames are much easier to manage.

Depending on the game and situation, I take different approaches. Some sessions are just pen and paper, others have minis and some scattered terrain, still others have extensive set-ups: furnished Dwarven Forge layouts, minis, the works (plus SFX, etc).

I've been doing this for ages, though, so I have a lot to draw from, I have a gaming table that allows me to set things up beforehand (thus permitting detailed set-pieces, for example, as well as improvised layouts), and it's something that I view as fun, so I don't mind painting up a few new minis every couple of weeks. In fact, it's probably the only thing keeping me on task as reducing the lead pile. :)

Both. There are some RPGs that claim they don't cater to miniatures, but whenever we played them in the past sooner or later there would be an argument about who was too far away from whom and whether it was fair they didn't have time to close the gap and complete a story goal.

Early editions of D&D gave ranges in inches, and recent editions illustrate everything on a grid and give ranges in squares. Kind of a clue the intent is to use miniatures or a proxy such as counters.

I realize there are other RPGs than D&D. See my first paragraph though.

My experience is similar to Parzival with "winging it" in the past regarding chaotic battles, and not letting rule mechanics get in the way of a good cinematic battle.

BUT – unlike him, now I am gravitating more towards CeruLucifus above. Used to do AD&D pen and paper for years and eventually using minis on a graph to curtail movement and placement arguments, now I will not RPG without them.

Unless you have a *really* easy-going group, you cannot do a game of Pathfinder without minis or tokens of some kind, the mechanics of the game almost require them.

The modeller in me would LOVE to do 3D scenery, but it would take up so much space my wife would reach critical mass.

I'm with Brian. Pen and paper only. use of figs would turn it into a skirmish game. I'm not interested in the minutae of range, facing etc. That's all irrellevent. If it looks cool, then it happens. fortunately I game with like minded players who also don't care for the 'tactical' element of encounters.
Ian

Generally pen and paper, since I like to give mine and my player's imagination full reign without being limited to what terrain and/or maps/tiles I have; when GMing battles I sketch positions and movement each turn, thus curtailing any argument.

However, for oldschool dungeoncrawls I dig out the minis and dungeon tiles and play much more tactically.

But in a total reversal, I've been amassing sci fi minis for a skirmish-oriented space opera type game, though I'm pretty sure that much of the game will still be pure pen and paper for all the storytelling and scene-painting in between the battles.