Do you use miniatures?

[drablak]

On 3/3/2019 at 1:51 AM, Djday45 said:

I have noticed that although most people here advocate using minis, the rules themselves do not mention hexes or squares, grids or such rules for things such as facing, flanking, attacking from the rear etc.

 

The rules mention movement rates in metres not in terms of 'hexes' or 'squares,' so we use those rates and translate that depending on the scale we use. When we use miniatures, we place them on a hex mat like Styopa showed, or more often we use tiles for corridors and rooms. These have a scale, for example the corridor is 3 metres wide and 20 metres long. I'm guessing Styopa uses 1m hexes. We simply approximate how much to move the miniature on the tiles/mat depending on the move the character makes.

In our games minis don't have to be exactly in a hex or a square, and are not constrained to moving within those hexes/squares. And as Womble mentioned facing and such is visible from the way the mini is placed.

[g33k]

I follow table preferences, as a GM.

As a player, I have used mini's, and I have used TotM.  Both work just fine IME.

At one point, there was a reasonably well-respected maker of small-scale (platoon/etc) skirmishing wargames -- DishDash Games -- who was going to bring out a Gloranthan skirmish-game & mini's.  Haven't heard anything on this front in over a year, and their prior "Glorantha" project page now HTTP:404's... so I presume it's not happening (and after some Googling, I see a thread from another mini's - maker remarking to the effect of DishDash "getting hammered on the forums" and "pulling out of Glorantha."   😥  )

 

One concrete element I use even in ToTM is a rough map -- just a display of the environs, so that everyone is visualizing approximately the same thing.  I follow this practice for all RPG's where we don't use mini's.  This is after repeatedly experiencing (both as player and as GM) sudden breakdowns where someone states an action that is physically-impossible according to what someone else at the table envisions; in some cases, leading to character fatality.  I find a shared map, however minimal, vastly reduces these debacles.  It doesn't need to be a map-on-table with mini's/dice/markers for PCs & NPCs and etc - a rough sketch passed around is enough.  I only skip this when the tactical environment is simple... an open field, a bog-standard 20x20Room, etc.

RQG really doesn't have rules to interface with most elements of a "tactical" battle-mat oriented combat... facing, flanking, number of foes who can engage, etc.  Ranged-combat & movement is about it.  Weapon-size vs StrikeRank is similar in some ways, but it's just WAY too fine-grained to be relevant on hexes or squares of a battlemat!

 

Edited March 4, 2019 by g33k

[Mechashef]

I use minis too

[Skovari]

We use minis and a battle map.  If I don’t have an appropriate mini then I have round pieces I can write on with a dry erase marker for the enemy.  But all the PCs have a painted mini, and I pretty much do all the painting as I like the hobby aspect of that.  One I painted attached.