D&D 5e: Theater of the Mind VS Battle Maps
by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
There are two main places used to run table-top roll-playing games- Theater of the Mind and Battle Maps.
Which one is right for your group depends on what your group is looking for from fights, and what you’re willing to put into preparation.
I’ll compare these two in a few different categories to help give you the best information I can to set you on a path to use the method that can best enhance your gaming experience- first, though, I want to quickly establish what these two methods mean.
What is Theater of the Mind?
“Theater of the Mind” refers to using a group’s collective imagination as the “board” in which the game is played.
You still roll physical dice and note things on your character sheets, but no miniatures or representations are present.
What is a Battle Map?
“Battle Map”, for the sake of this article, refers to any physical representation of the space the game is occurring within that is used with representations of characters, monsters, obstacles, and/or other elements.
This ranges from using a whiteboard and letters to represent characters and monsters to detailed miniature buildings with painted specific figures on a grid.
Cost
Theater of the Mind is usually cheaper.
You don’t need any additional resources for an encounter to run it in your and your friend's collective imagination. It is free, always.
Battle Maps can range in cost widely. Free digital battle maps are widely available on various social media platforms, and ample token-producing and other digital tools can offer you free ways to facilitate complex, exciting environments at no cost beyond time. You can pay for some of these features, though, and I’d recommend supporting map makers you use a lot!
At pencil and paper tables, the cost can still be fairly low. A whiteboard and markers can usually come together for $20 or less, and pencil and paper can work as well at an even cheaper price at the potential cost of clarity.
Battle maps can get expensive, though. Custom miniatures and sets can reach hundreds or thousands of dollars easily. For some this can be a boon- if you like painting, miniature assembly, or collecting these kinds of things, there are ample opportunities to purchase things for your battle maps.
Preparation
Both have different requirements, but Theater of the Mind usually takes less preparation.
Most battle map methods require more physical preparation than Theater of the Mind. Theater of the Mind’s largest preparation factor I’ve found is clairty; making notes as to what important objects and creatures are where alongside the room’s dimensions and other notable features. Some battle maps can cover that for you but usually have other assembly time costs.
When using free tools and assembling them on digital platforms, there is a real time sink in making tokens and setting things up to grids as you like. You have to search for the right map, upload it to whatever platform you’re using, and work with elements like lairs and online notes.
Going beyond digital pre-made maps can quickly amount to much more work for battle map users. Some maps need to be physically assembled.
The one exception I find is using pencil/paper or a whiteboard- having dimensions clearly available reduces the amount of explanation you have to prepare as its apparent in the space, and about as many elements can be improvised as Theater of the Mind when needed.
Fantasy
Both have large pros and cons when it comes to creating an immersive experience.
“Fantasy” here is how engrossing an encounter is for everyone.
Battle maps have a leg up over theater of the mind encounters in terms of props. Having physical objects to look at helps direct the mind to a cohesive understanding of whatever encounter is going on. More people will be on the same page as to where a monster is when it attacks you all as there is a physical representation of it, leaving less room for interpretation.
Theater of the Mind leaves a lot of holes people have to fill in on their own even when paired with verbose description. That being said, theater of the mind offers fewer restrictions like physics and dimension. It can be much easier and cleaner to make an encounter on an island falling from the sky in theater of the mind than it would be to define it on a grid or with miniatures.
Additionally, the “vagueness” that can lead to multiple interpretations can be a boon, as it opens up people to come up with their favorite version of events in their headcanon. Everyone can experience very similar stories, but each person has more room to embellish it.
How engrossing the end fantasy will vary person to person, game to game. I find the props enhance encounters fantasy more than retract from it, but others can find them to pull them out of the fantasy, especially when the props are letters scribbled on a board or lego pieces denoting where a banshee is.
Clarity
Battle maps make encounters far easier to comprehend, especially as they grow in complexity.
The biggest issue I run into running Theater of the Mind encounters is clarity. Where each important element is within 3D space gets messy the more complexity you add. You have to have a clear idea of space and even clearer descriptions of it to give everyone a good idea as to how to approach the environment.
Battle maps remove a huge amount of this load. They can show distances, creatures, doors, windows, and every other object all at once. There are far fewer instances of people forgetting an element of the space that’s integral to the encounter, as it is usually physically represented for them to see.
If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like or struggles to come up with verbose descriptions, I’d highly recommend using some kind of battle map if you’re concerned about encounter speed or clarity.
Personalization
Battle maps offer players and game masters opportunities to physically represent themselves.
In the Theater of the Mind, yes, you can look however you want. You’re free to personalize every inch of the world and your character.
That being said, I’ve found that people love getting specific dice and trinkets to represent their characters. It's a major element of gameplay that theater of the mind doesn’t facilitate. Needing a miniature can spur customization and offer more opportunities to represent yourself and your character with a physical object.
Having physical representations of your character or the world can enhance some people’s attachment to them, and offer more opportunities for expression.
There can be issues if you have a incredibly specific character concept in mind, though, as what resources you have available to you to best represent your ideas may be less supported. Theater of the Mind will always have your back in that instance.
Which to Use?
At the end of the day, I use both- usually I lean on theater of the mind for quick, smaller encounters that I don’t expect to take long, and a drawn battle map on a whiteboard with a marker for my other encounters.
If price is a major concern, theater of the mind is a cheap as it gets and still a fantastic way to play. If you want limitless control over your encounter designs, and want to get really wacky with time and space, theater of the mind supports anything you can imagine, where battle maps can be bound to more realistic environments.
If your primary concern is encounter speed or clarity, or you want to engage in other hobbies closely associated with tabletop RPGs like miniature painting or terrain assembly, battle maps offer you a wide range of options to engage with as much as you’d like. You can still use them affordably, and have a variety of options to try out. You can get dungeon tiles or dry-erase grids, customize a full war-gaming style environment, or just pull a piece of paper out of a notebook and loosely mark where characters are and what the room is shaped like.
Happy encounter building!
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