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Easy, don’t use grid squares, use zones.
This meme brought to you by theater of the mind gang.
I would love to play theatre of the mind, but my table collectively has the spatial awareness of a barnacle.
This brings us back to zones, a good middle ground. Draw rough map, or great map, and on it mark intresting combat zones. Some are separated with emptiness, others by obstacles.
For example a tavern brawl. Zones could be the Bar, Kitchen, Common Room, Balconies, Private Rooms, Out Front and Out Back.
Fighting on the Balconies could be tight, only one in width and with the risk of being thrown off it into the Commonroom. In the Kitchen there would be fire hazards, improvized weapons, knifes and the Stew. Not to forget other ways to spice things up in there. Around the Bar there would be some cover fighting someone on the other side, bottles to be broken and combatants to glide alond the bar for maximum mental damage.
And so on. Make each zone memorable and with special features. Did I mention drawing it out really helps?
Just drawing the situation out, even roughly, is already an enormous step forwards from theatre of the mind, and is doing most of the heavy lifting here. It’s also not “theatre of the mind,” like the original poster is implying. It’s a map, just one without grid-spaces or precise distances.
The more abstract the map is the more of a support for TotM it becomes. I selfom do a map, rather a flowchart. Quicker, easier and knocks out the last desire to measure things.
This works for situations where exact positioning isn’t too important. When want to have AoE spells, move speed, flanking, and battlefield control, it generally because difficult to ensure that the GM and the players have the same picture of the battlefield. Even just drawing it out roughly can help a lot, but pure theatre of the mind really works best when you only care about distance rather than relative positioning and complex battlefield conditions.
No grid only effect templates. Freeform battlemapping y’all!
And rulers.
A group of my players brought this up. I let them know that was fine, but the monsters would be able to return the favor.
We decided “the weave” determines the angle of squares (no diagonals).
The four cardinal directions are, themselves, a fact of the weave
Generally I tell players they need to pick a specific point for the cube so that it exactly fits the grid. It just keeps things more objective, speeds up combat.
I also generally prefer more structure and strict rules for things though.
Jesse you’re supposed to use Manhattan space not Euclidean space.
I prefer the Vibes-Based Magic SystemTM, where you grip it rip it and and tolerate
a littleok a decent amount of variance in order to speed things along and avoid anything resembling powegaming.
Oh your fancy spell isn’t working exactly as you intended 100% of the time? Guess magic is mystical and imprecise and ultimately subject to the whims of indifferent godsMy friends in high school and I didn’t even use minis or maps. We just used our imagination and math.
You can only do this as a 4th dimensional being.
This is another reason hexes are better than squares
This is a legitimate problem with the measurement of parts.
Square grid
Hex grid
B-but… that goes against the Holy Texts!
