Miniatures, music, and the perils of gaming ‘aids’
How to destroy immersion and imagination.
“I move six squares and attack the kobold!”
“That’s not a kobold, it’s a clockwork spider rat. I didn’t have a miniature for that.”
“Okay, I attack the weird kobold rat thing.”
“Doing so provokes an attack of opportunity from the puppet-ghoul guard.”
“But it only has claws and I’m a square away.”
“If you’d listened to the damn description, you’d know it has a ranseur, with reach.”
Miniatures or pawns, in theory, allow more accurate tactical choices for players, illustrating range and positioning clearly and helping to avoid confusion, especially with area of effect magics, movement around a busy battlefield, attacks of opportunity and flanking. But things can still get confusing pretty quickly if the visual representations are inaccurate, which they are bound to be as soon as the GM deviates at all from the generic models available.
The use of miniatures limits scenes and encounters to a smaller scale, as any flight or pursuit can swiftly leave the table. Even small scale combats can require a large amount of space. Time is wasted each time a new scene is set up, breaking immersion as players’ focus shifts from the scene in their heads to the visual ‘aids’ on the table, discouraging creativity and imagination, and potentially reducing the RPG to a board game.
The more accurate the visuals, the higher the financial cost. This applies to scenery, as well as miniatures. Using visual aids, you are no longer limited only by your imagination. You’re limited by your budget, storage space, and table size. The fancier and more costly your scene, the less likely you are to allow a sandbox approach, or even any player choice at all. You invested a hell of a lot in that Anubite hell-crypt. The characters are damn well going to go there, and they’re going to have a fight, no matter what. And in a few weeks, they’ll be there again. You paid too much for that dungeon layout to only use it once. Who cares about repetition? It’ll have a different name, right? If Dragon Age 2 could get away with it, so can you.
Music, as with miniatures, can be a distraction as much as an aid. In a DJ booth it can be complicated enough keeping the tracks themed and flowing smoothly without any additional multitasking. But as a GM, the music is yet another additional task to distract you from your main focus. Every party choice in a campaign increases the possible atmospheric choices exponentially. To access anywhere near the amount of audio needed to cover campaign eventualities would require a massive library of files on tap, supreme knowledge of it, plus some damn impressive concentration and reaction speed. Otherwise, you’re looking at repetition, cliché, and a whole lot of missed cues. If you use music from movies or video games, you also risk transporting your players’ imaginations to those worlds rather than your own. Unless you’re just using it for a single session, linear showcase module, it’s probably not worth it.
Don’t spend half the session with your head under the table rummaging for the right figures for the next fight. Don’t force the party into that fight. And if they’ve descended deep into some gloomy eldritch cavern unseen by mortals for the past few millennia, make sure that tavern music isn’t still tinkling away merrily in the background.