…And the ONE rule no one EVER wants to look up in the history of D&D or Pathfinder!

(I’ve suffered over and joked about the latter for years now, even in 5e – and I know you have too!  I laughed out loud at that part – enjoy!)

That’s right, D&D has no assumed battle grid.  For lots of players transitioning from 4e to 5e, it may come as a surprise.  It has to some of my players who “got use to” the minis and maps that 4e essentially required due to 4e’s over-the-top combat complexity, duration and focus.

D&D’s balance of combat and storytelling is finally back in 5th edition, so you don’t need maps and minis anymore.  In my group, with this year’s brand new Eberron campaign, I committed to using a mix of grid maps, tiles, minis, graph paper, basic sketches and pure narrative combat in an attempt to move away from the battle grid.

Completing phasing out (my massive collection of) minis and grids has the benefit of saving time I’d much rather spend on developing adventures and the campaign, and studying characters closely as they’re created and as they level to better immerse PCs in the game and story.  See, players don’t realize how time-consuming campaign prep can be for many DMs, never mind all that extra time you might need to set aside for “logistics” like finding the right maps, tiles and minis to use each session.

Meanwhile, what does a player truly have to do to prepare for every single session?  That’s right, update your character sheet – sometimes, as not every session means a significant character update.  Read or review the rules that apply to your character.  That’s it.

So far, my mixed presentation approach has had some good and bad.  Combat lovers and power gamers weaned (unfortunately) on 4e, tend to struggle more.  Poor listening skills and attention spans become obvious.  Visual learning techniques and presentation options are the most comfortable.  The complaints I heard related to this last session were the loudest, unfortunately, now eight sessions into our new campaign.

Complaints, reasonable and otherwise, I’m sticking with my original plan, made clear before we started to everyone: there will be a mix of presentation styles.  This way it’s less jarring for the grid and minis-lovers, and offers a variety of gameplay presentation, which includes saving me significant setup time.

Now that said, there’s always room for improvement when it comes to execution by both DM and players.  How can you ease the transition away from pure grid and minis play?

Highly visual players must make more of an effort to listen, take more mental or physical notes, and not think every unsure or hostile situation needs a combat grid and minis.  Many situations don’t, especially ones with a smaller number of creatures.

Also, story immersion, pacing and creativity is often killed by needless or needlessly complex battle maps and minis presentations, as the assumption is “what we see on the grid is all that exists.”  Grids and minis also put a 3rd person perspective front and center, rather than a more personal, more storytelling-oriented 1st person perspective.

How many times have you stared at your minis and focused on nothing else?  Missed anything important the DM said during said minis-based brain-absorption?

DMs burned out by 4e’s intense grid play simply need to tell players what to expect presentation-wise up front.

Not every player is aware 5e assumes no default combat grid.  Just as important, DMs need to improve how they describe the environment and relative positioning when not using a grid.  You’ll want to use classic teaching techniques, like repetition and prefacing important narration or descriptions with a simple “This is important,” “You might want to listen very closely now,” or “You may want to write this down.”

In gridless combat, you’ll want to help the PCs quickly understand whether something is in close, medium or long range so you or they can quickly translate to their movement speeds, spell and weapon ranges, number of targets they can reach or affect, and so on.  Most combats don’t need a lot of precision, so practice using the previous language and encourage players to ask simple questions that help gather essential combat facts.

For example, when not using grids, tell players to ask you if it’s unclear if something is within range, but otherwise help them realize something is or isn’t in range on their turn.  Tell them to ask things like “How many goblins can my fireball burn to death?” or “Can I reach the prisoner’s cage if I run?”  At the same time, include similar context in your descriptions of the environment as DM.  Say, “The prisoner’s cage is far on the other side of the room – you’d have to run to get there quickly,” rather than “There’s a prison cage on the north wall.”  Help them speed up their decision making by couching your narration and description of the environment with clues or direct information about distances to features and targets.

If gridless, narrative combat is uncomfortable at first, give it time – you and the players simply need more patience and practice!  So don’t get discouraged or frustrated.  It’s really about finding descriptive narration and questioning styles that work for you and your playgroup.

Ultimately, the DM is the PCs’ eyes and ears, so help them see and hear as best you can, and ask them to ask you questions when what they see or hear isn’t clear.  Despite strong visual cues, battle maps and minis have significant drawbacks, so be open to expanding your DMing storytelling and presentation skills – and help and encourage players to expand along with you.

Like this article?  You might also like Chasing the DM’s D&D’s Theatre of the Mind.

What’s amazing is how much there is to consider.  At the highest level, excellent presentation and narration of the action is critical.

So how do you get there?  More on this in future updates, but for now, here are some things to ask yourself and think about for any heavily cinematic-style D&D campaign you might run:

• Presentation.  My playgroup has a mix of preferences and experience for how to represent combat.  2e and some of 3e were heavily graph paper-style in presentation.  3.5 and especially 4e shifted more towards miniatures and grid poster maps or tiles.  5e assumes no combat grid – it’s an optional rule, so the shift to engaging story and away from long, drawn-out, excessively tactical combat is thankfully on.  I love exciting, high-stakes combat, and I love brilliant tactics – but not at the expense of the whole point of an adventure being forgotten or a session completely devoured by a couple of sometimes tedious, hours-long combats.  With a long, varied D&D history of how to present the action, including 5e’s simpler, more organic approach, it’s still good to think about the pros and cons of all the options. What presentation method – or combination of methods – is the most fluid or least intrusive to 5e’s storytelling strengths?  What approach saves the DM the most time before and during sessions?  What approach is clearest to players as far as positioning?

• Narration.  I’ll never forget reading advice from Stephen King on writing when it comes to character description.  He basically said don’t bother.  Let the reader fill in those details, as they’re just not important enough.  That surprised me, and I now understand why I see less or zero of that in many written stories – or even in monster descriptions, such as the bare bones (or rather, zero bones) ones in 4e.  One of my favorite parts of earlier D&D edition monsters were those italicized monster description entries.  The five sense were often represented, complete with colors and sounds and much more.  I think this is important to the actual play experience of D&D – that’s where live D&D games are different from reading a story.  Tabletop gaming like D&D is at its best when we treat it more like a movie than a book.  How do the characters and monsters actually look, smell, feel, sound move, speak and fight?  I like a dash of theatre in my D&D, so strong in-character or vile, vicious monster roleplaying is essential – especially if you want to achieve truly cinematic combat!

To re-spark ideas and fine tune my DMing skill with cinematic combat, I’ve looked up some great articles from an old friend to Leonine Roar.  Glimm the Gnome wrote a host of helpful cinematic combat articles for last edition, and they’re still helpful and inspiring reads now for any TRPG.  Want some tips?  Join me and check out the Gnome’s action-packed thoughts here.

Next time, I’ll share my 5e presentation style decision and the results so far, including my players’ reactions and feedback.

My brother’s recent Ravenloft campaign was a blast, and lasted quite a while.  I’m not sure how our first Eberron campaign experience will go, but I’m excited to be back DMing again after a refreshing break as a player.

I’ve had a few of the Eberron core books from 3e and 4e a while now.  And finally, this past week I’ve been doing a lot of reading and researching and enjoying the fresh feel and content of a new world.  The creative juices are already off the hook and ideas have been flying!

It’s also exciting to take a break from the dominant dark fantasy themes and/or classic fantasy of recent campaigns (Dragon Age, Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft) and even fantasy CRPG gaming (like Neverwinter) and do something slightly – but not too crazy – different in Eberron.

Eberron includes all the classic fantasy elements plus a fair dose of dark fantasy thanks to the Last War and the Mourning – then adds a dash of steampunk or scifi, some swashbuckling and heavy doses of intrigue and cinematic action.  I love cinematic play and feel, so very excited about that.

Brotherhood of the Wolf is the first movie cited as one of Eberron Creator’s Keith Baker’s inspirations, and I love that movie.  Other movies on his list I really enjoy are Sleepy Hollow, From Hell, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mummy and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

I definitely welcome the break (and hopefully so will my whole playgroup!) – with just enough of a different mood and just enough fresh content.  The eclectic mix of both classic and other themes is pretty damn cool.

I love the image here – it sums up exactly what I think makes Eberron so cool and unique – really look forward to running our first session this weekend!  Lightning rail, Warforged and airships – really, what else do you need?!  We start with the Mark of Prophecy starter adventure, included in the most recent campaign setting book.  I really like how it spends a lot of time up front matching up character backgrounds to the adventure hooks – look forward to doing that with my players when we start.

Will there be an official Eberron 5e?  Based on Eberron and related Unearthed Arcana articles (the Eberron update way back when UA started, and the very recent Artificer class), official Eberron 5e support might be in the works.  In the meantime, for my campaign, I’ll cobble together the best of 3e and 4e Eberron, add in some related Unearthed Arcana, and update the rest as we go in 5e.

Any other early 5e Eberron adopters?   Any advice for new Eberron DMs or players?  Or anything you love – or love to hate! – about Eberron?  Please let me know!

Make sure your PCs are the stars.

Sounds simple, right?  Of course, you say, no-brainer.

The real question is how you accomplish this.  One of the best answers starts with the party’s (updated and clear!) character sheets.  Breathe life into your campaign by exploring character strengths, weaknesses and quirks.  Start simple with something like proficient languages.

After several sessions or months, whether I play or DM – sometimes I say or hear: boy, I wish I would’ve had a chance to speak this language, use this skill, cast this spell or use this cool magic item.  With so many cool ideas in your head or on paper as DM, it’s easy to forget the volumes of inspiration and adventure staring back at you from your players’ character sheets.

Fact is, both the DM and PC can always go the extra mile to actively include or improvise any opportunity to use something “cool” on a character sheet.  For example, there’s a reason a character took an uncommon or strange language.  As a DM, make sure an equally unusual NPC with that tongue at least shows up early, if not several times throughout the campaign to exchange pleasantries, information or insults with the goblin-speaking PC.

And as a PC – and I can’t emphasize this enough – play into the story and create the campaign with the DM.  Be your characters – imagine their world, their lives, their desires.  Use that lense while focusing on one cool character sheet detail.

For example, tell your DM you start chatting up the villagers of Bognil, looking for one who speaks goblin.  Or one who knows something about goblin-forged weaponry like Gut-Raker, the shadowy enchanted bear claw wielded by the nearby raiding goblin chief, or one who knows some goblinoid war history, or… get the idea?

Whether you’re a DM or PC, set examples of immersive play for everyone.  Start with odd little details.  Create the story together.  Be the stars.

And one of the most underrated (or perhaps unknown?) parts of D&D 5e right now is its Unearthed Arcana article and survey series – where playtesting for any potential 5e rules expansion continues to this day.

(Side note: I love how careful the designers are being with any official rules expansion.  They’ve said they don’t want to overwhelm anyone, especially the DM, and risk the awful rules bloat and power creep so common in past editions.  So plenty of caution and playtesting – by all of us – makes sense.  Quality over quantity?  Yes, please!)

The many new class archetypes alone in Unearthed Arcana will win most D&D gamers over, and a survey accompanies each of these playtest options so you – as the players and DMs running the characters and campaigns – can tell the D&D designers what works ok, what you love and what you hate!

So if you’ve missed Unearthed Arcana since its dawn in February 2015, check it out now!  While the proposed new class archetypes are arguably the most exciting content (and most frequent in recent months), you’ll find new rules and ideas for mass combat, feats, quicker characters, the Underdark, Eberron and much more.

New bard colleges?  Weapon-master monks?  The cleric domains of Grave and Forge?  Oaths of Conquest or Treachery – yes, Treachery! – for paladins?  How about some beloved classics like the Arcane Archer, Knight or Samurai?  (Oriental Adventures fans, I know you’re out there!)  They’re all here for us to playtest – right now!

So find something you’d like to try in your games, talk to your DM, test drive it a while, and send in your feedback through its matching Unearthed Arcana survey.

Help shape the future of 5e!

Whether it’s my brother’s campaign, yours, or DM Chris Perkins and the #WaffleCrew playing, there are still moments of laughter in the otherwise perfectly dark and deadly Ravenloft setting.  Enjoy!

My favorite part starts at 3:10… now that’s a memorable performance!

What a find!  I must have rolled a 20 on my check!

D&D: Expectation vs. Reality of course!  Enjoy!

My brother’s done brilliant work running us through 20 levels of Ravenloft D&D horror goodness.  It’s a classic world and classic RPG genre.

Whether it’s a quick, nostalgic return to the Castle Ravenloft module or leaping into the Curse of Strahd D&D 5e superadventure, or a homebrew campaign in the setting drawing on the metric ton of awesome Ravenloft material throughout D&D’s editions – or all three, like my brother’s doing! – you’ll love to dread and fear your time Ravenloft.

P.S. Is it Storm King’s Thunder time yet??  I can’t wait to DM this!!