Grid Combat or Theatre of the Mind? The Table's Oldest Argument

When a fight starts, one of two things happens at the table. Either a squared surface is laid out in front of you, tokens go down and everyone sees with their own eyes who is standing where; or the narrator describes the scene, you say what you are doing, and the battle runs on words from beginning to end. The first is called grid combat, or playing on a battle map; the second is theatre of the mind. This is one of the oldest and most good-natured arguments in tabletop roleplaying: an argument where both sides are right, because both sides are giving something up. This page lays out the argument first, then shows where the equation changes at a table whose narrator is an AI.

What is the argument actually about?#

Both terms are simple. Grid combat means running the fight on a squared (sometimes hexed) surface: every character is a token, distance is measured by counting squares, and the question of who can reach whom is answered by looking. Theatre of the mind is combat without a board: the narrator describes the room, the distances and the obstacles, the players say what they are doing, and position is held inside the sentences being spoken.

This is not a beginner-versus-veteran split. Tables that have played for years run without a board, and tables playing for the first time start with one. It is not really a matter of taste either: both approaches take something off the table and put something else in its place, and which one suits you depends on what your table is willing to pay.

There are three questions worth asking before you decide for your own table:

• How much of your session does fighting take up? If two hours of a three-hour session are combat, the board pays for itself. If a fight is a short scene between story beats, setting the board up can take longer than the fight does.
• Is anyone at the table playing tactically? A player who has chosen a class that draws its strength from position cannot use half of their best tool at a table without a board.
• Where does your patience run out? Some tables will put up with a long round but not with unfairness; others are exactly the opposite. Both are legitimate preferences.

What the grid gives you#

The grid's biggest gift is something most people never notice: an entire argument leaves the table. Nobody has to remember, describe or defend where they were standing.

• The distance argument ends. "Can I reach him?" is answered at a glance; you count the squares. Nobody needs a good memory, a persuasive tone, or the narrator's goodwill in that moment.
• Tactics become real. Flanking, putting your back to a wall, plugging a narrow gap, leaving the archer isolated, stepping in front of a wounded friend: on a board these are not things to describe, they are things to do.
• Position has a price. Walking onto the wrong square really is wrong, and you cannot take it back afterwards with a sentence. That is exactly where the weight of the decision comes from.
• A new player can see what is possible. The answer to "what can I do?" sits there on the screen: the squares you can reach, the enemies you can hit, the actions in your hand.

The player the grid helps most is the one playing a class whose strength comes from position. A ranged class gains from holding the distance, a nimble one from slipping around the flank, a heavy one from blocking the way. All of this can be narrated at a board-less table too, but there it exists only as far as it is described; on a board it exists as far as it is done. That is the difference between a player saying "I played well" and a player saying "I described it well".

There is a learning side to it as well. For someone playing for the first time, the hardest part of combat is not learning the rules, it is working out what counts as an option. The board answers that on its own: an empty square on the screen is a suggestion, an area shaded red is a warning. Giving the same information in words is both long and tiring for the narrator.

What the grid costs#

The board's bill is real too, and it usually comes in four lines.

• It slows down. Every round the tokens move, distances get counted and everyone waits their turn. A clash that takes three sentences of narration can take ten minutes on a board.
• It takes preparation. Somebody has to bring out the map, place the obstacles and set out the tokens. At a classic table that work sits on the narrator's shoulders and gets done before the session.
• It puts imagination in a box. Anything not drawn on the board tends to be treated as absent from the game. The chandelier on the ceiling, the shelf that could be toppled, the well just outside: if they are not on the map, most tables never think of them.
• It weighs small scenes down. Setting up a board for a three-round scuffle with two guards starts to make that scuffle look far more important than it is in the story.

The sneakiest of the four is the third. The board is a helper, but it is also a boundary: what the eye sees becomes the space the mind works in. A player without a board says "I pull the curtain down on top of him", because it occurs to them to ask whether there is a curtain. The same player with a board never says it, because no curtain is drawn on the screen. What is lost is not a rule, it is a habit.

What theatre of the mind gives you#

What board-less combat gives you can be summed up in one word: flow. The fight stops being the place where the story pauses and becomes the place where it speeds up.

• Speed. A round lasts as long as the player's sentence and the narrator's answer. A three-round fight actually feels like a three-round fight.
• Continuity. There is no ceremony between combat and everything else. Conversation turns into a fight, the fight into a chase, the chase into a negotiation, all at the same rhythm.
• Freedom of the fiction. What happens in the scene is set by what a sentence can build, not by what the map allows. A burning ship's deck, a narrow tower stair, a field sunk in mud: all equally easy.
• No preparation. Nobody draws a map, nobody sets anything up in advance. The fight is played the moment it breaks out.

The most underrated of these is the third. Setting up a board means limiting the scene to what can be drawn; playing without one keeps the scene as wide as the fiction allows. It costs the narrator nothing to say "the ship is listing, staying on your feet at all is an achievement"; showing the same thing on a map is not free.

The second gain gets talked about less, but it is the one that really carries the table: in board-less combat, players say what they are doing in their own words. Saying "I throw the lamp onto the table and set the oil alight" instead of "I attack" is a move that could never be found inside a list of options. At tables where creativity is rewarded, board-less combat is the widest space a player has.

Where theatre of the mind cracks#

The bill for board-less combat comes down to a single sentence, and every table has heard it: "wasn't I standing behind him?" The problem is not that the question gets asked; it is that the answer is not written down anywhere.

• The position argument. Two people build the same scene differently in their heads. One thinks they were by the door, the narrator remembers them in the middle of the room, and the matter only closes when somebody backs down.
• Fairness rests on the narrator. Who can reach whom comes down to the picture the narrator is holding at that moment. If the narrator is consistent there is no problem; when they miss something, the player has nothing to appeal to.
• The tactical class gets short-changed. The difference between an archer holding their distance and an archer standing under the enemy's nose disappears if nobody is tracking distance. A character built on position becomes ordinary at a table where position is not measured.
• Crowded fights blur. A scene with three enemies carries fine in words; in a scene with twelve, nobody can keep track of who is where.

The real issue here is not anyone's bad faith, it is memory load. In board-less combat the narrator has to hold the whole geometry in their head: who is where, who is behind whom, who is how many paces away, who ran where last round. A human narrator does this very well for a while, and then gets tired. The moment they tire, the fairness of the game tires with them.

The mixed approach: when the board comes out#

Most long-running tables are not really on either side of this argument. They use both, and they treat the board not as a mode but as a tool: something you bring out when you need it and put away when the job is done.

• The board comes out when the outcome of the fight will change where the adventure goes, when there is a crowd of enemies, when the architecture itself matters (a bridge, a tower, a narrow pass), or when the fight is long and runs in phases.
• The board stays away in a scuffle that will be over in three rounds, in a chase, an escape, an ambush, or a short clash that erupts in the middle of a social scene.

The mixed approach has its own price, and it is usually paid at the moment of transition. When a fight that started in words gets moved onto a board, everyone haggles over who was standing where, and that haggling is exactly the argument the board was supposed to prevent. This is why plenty of tables make the call at the start of the fight: board from the beginning, or narration from the beginning.

For the same reason, deciding at the start of the campaign is a common choice too. The tone of the table is settled, players build their characters accordingly, and it never comes up again. Giving a whole campaign a single answer looks crude, but in practice it is usually the route that produces the least friction.

What changes when the narrator is an AI#

This argument comes from the tabletop, and there the narrator is a human being. When the narrator is an AI Game Master, some lines of the equation genuinely change and others do not change at all. It is worth keeping the two apart, because mixing them produces an easy and wrong sentence: "we don't need a board any more".

Here is what changes. The classic weakness of board-less combat was, in large part, fatigue. If the narrator does not tire, does not get bored and does not lose the thread halfway through a round, the most common cause of the "wasn't I behind him?" argument shrinks on its own. Keeping a scene's walls, objects and distances the same from round to round is cheap work for a narrator that can do it.

What does not change matters more: distance still needs an arbiter. A narrator that only produces text, however consistent, can be talked round. A well enough written sentence can bring a hero from the far side of the room under the enemy's blade, or do the exact opposite. If responsibility for fairness sits entirely on the narration's shoulders, the player is once again left with nothing to appeal to.

So there are two honest answers: either the referee of distance is the board itself and the server works out who can reach whom, or refereeing is delegated to the rules given to the narrator and you trust the fiction to stay consistent with itself. These are not the same guarantee. Thavernia's two modes sit exactly on that distinction, and the two sections below spell out plainly what each one gives you.

The tactical board in Thavernia#

Tactical mode is the game's default combat style. When a fight starts, a grid opens inside the room: 14 columns, 9 rows, which is 126 squares. Cells are named with a letter and a number (A1 through N9), and that naming is not only for you to read: the board, the dice referee and the narrator all talk about the same square by the same name. If the game has a common language, this is it.

Movement is a budget of 6 steps that refreshes every combat round, and you do not have to spend it in one move; you can split it into several short ones. Steps are orthogonal, so there is no diagonal walking. Rough ground costs 2 steps for a single square. Walls and living bodies can neither be crossed nor stood on, so a friend plugging a corridor really does plug it. Paths are worked out around obstacles, and every step of the detour really is paid for.

Reach is measured separately from movement, and that distinction is one of the board's most useful subtleties. For reach, a diagonal neighbour counts as adjacent; for movement it does not. The result: you can stand diagonally beside an enemy and hit them, but if there is a wall in the way, getting there costs real steps. "Being able to hit" and "being able to get there" are two different sums, and on the board both are visible.

Positions are a server fact; the board on your screen only draws them and offers options. You move your own hero's token, and you cannot walk your AI companions' tokens by hand. While the narrator is weaving the round, the board is frozen and movement requests are refused. The reason is not arbitrary: the referee has already noted that round's reaches from the positions the round started in, so walking while the round is being processed would mean dodging a blow that has already been resolved.

The ground under the board is not a ready-made template either. The scene the fight happens in is drawn as a top-down battle map; then a separate image-reading step reads the objects actually standing in that picture and re-derives the obstacle squares. So the edge of a table, an overturned cart or a pillar is an obstacle on the board as well. If that step fails, the squares predicted beforehand are kept: the feature can only improve the board, never empty it.

There are two small habits worth picking up on the board itself. When you touch an enemy, their threat area is shaded: the squares they can hit right now are solid, the ones they could hit after closing the distance are dashed. When you double-tap a square, it lights up with a ring on every screen at the table and the name of the person pinging is shown; the colour is derived from the name and stored nowhere. There is no pinging from the spectator seat. On a touch screen a single tap on the board selects and a double tap pings; on action cards the first tap opens the card and a second tap on the same card spends the action point. With a mouse and keyboard a single click is enough.

The action kit: what you can do on the board

The board's counterpart is a list of actions. There are 51 actions in total: three universal ones that every class uses (Attack, Defend, Help), and the remaining 48 split four apiece among the 12 classes.

• Level gates. Not everything is available at once: 38 actions are open from level 1, 3 unlock at level 3 and 10 at level 5. The kit grows rather than overflowing from the start.
• Action points. Every action costs 1 or 2 points. Points per round are 2 or 3 depending on the class; they rise by one at levels 5 and 9 and stop at 5 on the class side. The signature action of an equipped legendary item can add to that on top.
• Cooldowns. Not every action can be repeated at will: 14 have no cooldown, 7 wait 1 round, 17 wait 2 rounds and 13 wait 3 rounds. A one-round cooldown means "once per round": a second press in the same round is not accepted either.
• Free text. Outside the kit there is a free action costing 1 point: you write what you are doing in your own words, and the referee decides which dice that action calls for. No level gate and no reach check are applied.

Cooldowns are enforced in three places at once: the box on screen greys out, the server refuses the request, and your AI companion's brain never proposes a locked action either. A cooldown lasts for the fight, not for the life of the campaign; everyone enters a new fight at full strength. Damage is priced on the server as well: every action has a damage range set by its type and its point cost, and a hit draws a number from that range. How much health an action takes is not a number the narration picks.

The free-text action is the answer to board combat's "putting it in a box" problem. There may be no curtain drawn on the screen, but you can write that you want to pull it down: the list does not run out, the list is only the fast route.

How the dice work

A combat round runs in three stages. First the referee decides which checks the round calls for and files the dice; then the players roll the dice queued up for them; finally the narrator resolves the round from the bound results. There is one die type in the game: the d20. A natural 20 succeeds whatever the difficulty and a natural 1 does not; advantage and disadvantage mean rolling two dice and keeping the better or the worse.

Where the result is decided matters: the d20 turns on the server, during the planning stage, and pressing the button reveals that number. The die on your screen is an animation sitting on top of a number the server already gave; there is nothing to tamper with. The order is strict too: only the die at the front of the queue can be rolled, and a die can be rolled only by the player who controls it. If an automatic die at the front of the queue is left waiting for 30 seconds, the server rolls it itself, so the table never stays locked.

There is also the case where dice are tied to one another: one check can depend on the result of another. If the prerequisite fails, the dependent die is never rolled, it is cancelled, and that action counts as never having happened. There is no "I failed to vault the wall but my axe hit anyway", because the axe die never turned. The look of the dice is purely cosmetic: 25 skins are defined, three are open to every account, and none of them affect play.

The enemies' turn and the board as referee

This is where the board really earns its keep. Every round the server produces a snapshot of who can reach whom and hands it to both the dice referee and the narrator as an authoritative block. An enemy who can reach nobody spends that round closing the distance, taking cover or trading taunts.

This is not merely an instruction handed to the narrator, it is an enforced gate: in tactical mode, hero health loss written by the narrator is measured against that reach snapshot, and a wound larger than 5 points on a hero no enemy can reach is dropped. Small damage passes, because room is left for things like falls, stumbles and catching fire. What does not pass is the non-existent sword of a distant enemy.

The enemies' turn belongs to the server as well. Ordinary enemies with a hero in reach make at most three strikes per round; each strike arrives at its target as a defence roll, the incoming damage is settled in advance, and it lands if the defence fails. The ability used for the defence roll matches the class: heavy classes resist with constitution and strength, nimble ones leap aside.

Enemies do not choose targets at random either. A melee fighter takes the nearest body; a ranged one ignores distance and would rather shoot the archer. Both punish whoever just hit them, favour the wounded, and give up on last round's victim when another target is available. Reach and speed bands are fixed too: an ordinary melee fighter reaches 1 square and walks 6 squares a round, a ranged one shoots from 6 squares. Whether a creature fights at range is inferred from its name, and an unknown creature counts as melee, because guessing "ranged" would harm the party unfairly.

Boss fights and ground that changes

Big fights run in three phases: composed (more than two thirds of its health still standing), bloodied (more than one third) and desperate fury. The phase is not just narrative decoration; it both raises the difficulty band of rolls made against that creature and sharpens its counter-attack.

Damage from a single blow is capped: a normal hit takes at most 10 per cent of the health maximum (at least 15), a critical at most 20 per cent (at least 25). So the sentence "I take its head off" does not drop a large creature in one strike. That clamp closes the most exploited spot in board combat.

A phase change sets up a signature attack: on the creature's next move, everyone within two squares beyond its reach rolls a defence, the damage lands harder, and a hero whose defence fails is left with a lasting condition. A creature that can reach nobody does not spend its signature, it keeps it loaded. A desperate melee attack made from a distance is not refused either, but it is expensive: the server files it at a difficulty only a natural 20 can meet, and when it lands it is a normal critical, not an instant kill.

The story can change the ground too. A terrain order from the narrator can pour rough ground onto an empty square or clear an obstacle from one; at most two squares change per round, and walls cannot be softened with words. Burning oil really does spill onto the board, but a sentence cannot remove a wall.

Narrative mode in Thavernia#

In narrative mode the board is never built. This is not a display setting: the server never creates a grid for that table, no map image is drawn, the image-reading step does not run, and no enemy-portrait cost is incurred. The scene itself is the battlefield.

The action kit and token movement are switched off on the server side too; both are refused. What replaces them is simple: the line you write is your action for that round. "I throw the lamp onto the table and set the oil alight" is not the selection of an action, it is the action itself, and the referee decides which dice it calls for. One of the rules given to the referee is this: an action that makes concrete use of the scene and takes a real risk earns advantage, or a difficulty one step easier, compared with a plain attack. A plain attack dressed in flowery words does not earn it, and the same trick does not earn it twice in the same fight.

What holds distance here is the geography of the fiction itself. The narrator is told to keep the scene's walls, objects and distances consistent from round to round: someone at the far side of the room stays at the far side of the room until the narration walks them somewhere, and an enemy at the end of a corridor has to close the distance before their blade can reach. To be honest about it, this is not the same guarantee as the reach gate in tactical mode: there the server works out reach, here consistency is the narrator's job.

In exchange, something comes back in narrative mode: the artwork of the fight. In tactical mode scene art is switched off while a fight is running, because the picture of the battle is the board itself. With no board, the art keeps coming. At most three scenes are drawn in a single fight and never more often than once every two rounds; so not a picture every round, but a few frames at the moments the fight turns.

AI companions play their part in words here too. Instead of the board and the kit, they say what they want to do in a sentence and ask their leader; once you approve, that sentence lands at the table as the companion's own player line and counts as their action for the round. In tactical mode the same companion pings the square it wants to move to, proposes a kit action, and the square it wants stays marked on everyone's board while it waits for approval.

Plenty of things do not change, and the list is not short. Dice still turn, the referee still files the checks, the enemies' turn still belongs to the server, and an incoming blow still arrives as a defence roll. Boss phases, damage clamps and friendly-fire rules stay in place as well: a hero who drops to zero does not die, they go down. Narrative mode is not rule-free mode, it is board-free mode.

Choosing the mode and changing it#

The combat style is chosen while the adventure is being set up: two cards sit in the setup wizard, one for the tactical board and one for narration. The choice belongs to the adventure, not to your account; the same player can play with a board at one table and without one at another.

It can be changed afterwards as well. The host can switch the mode from inside the room, but only outside combat. While a fight is running the server refuses the request and the buttons in the interface lock. The reasoning is plain: taking the board away in the middle of a fight set up on it would be pulling the ground out from under dice that have already been rolled. Once the fight is over the switch is free, and the next fight starts in the new mode.

The one exception is tables with a human Game Master. A table narrated by a person is necessarily in narrative mode and cannot be moved back to tactical. The reason is technical, and worth saying honestly: at that table the server does not run the enemies, so any board built would be a frozen diorama. A human narrator describes the scene themselves.

Honestly: which one for whom#

"We have both" is not an answer, it is a dodge. The real answer is this: the two modes are two different states of the same game, and which one suits you depends on what you want out of combat.

• The tactical board is for you if you enjoy a fight as a puzzle, you want position to count for something, you never want to have the distance argument, you want to be able to follow crowded fights, or you are new to the game and want your options sitting on the screen.
• Narrative mode is for you if you want combat not to break the rhythm of the story, you like writing what you do in your own words, you are building an adventure that moves through short and frequent fights, or you have a human Game Master at your table.
• If you want both: make the call when the adventure starts. Set up an adventure that expects a long, phased fight in tactical mode, and start one that puts pace and narration first in narrative mode.

At a mixed table you cannot please everyone at once, and that needs saying. The player who loves tactics will not see position pay off in narrative mode; the player who loves narration will get bored of the long rounds in tactical mode. At a table like that the best answer is to alternate from adventure to adventure; the worst is to argue about the mode in the middle of a fight.

Frequently asked questions#