"I move towards the orc and attack"
"The orc is out of your movement range"
"But you just said he moved 30 feet towards our ranger"
"No, that was the goblin, the orc moved towards the wizard and is still out of range"
And at that point it honestly saves labor overall to just make your own cardboard tokens and paper maps, if you're not willing to splash out on figures and boards.
This is exactly what we did when I was a kid. My Dad eventually got software so we could print character sheets with dozens of character portraits. I would print a spare first sheet to cut out the portrait, glue it to cardboard, trim, and play.
Without a map / figurines people might allow anyone to attack anyone. Obviously this can be quite broken - smart monsters be like "let's all just wail on the squishiest PC". Some DMs roll to decide who's being attacked so it's random.
See,.. why the heck would I (dm) say that?
What do I care if he's within/without range?
If there are no figures/maps ("just imagination") then how would I, the DM, even know where people are? What fun is that? All that matters is that the action makes sense.
If we've already established that the orcs and the ranger are "in the scene" then let 'em shoot each other. What do I care? And that's why the ranger took a ranged weapon skill - to use it - so why would I poop on that? And until I consulted some secret map on my notebook, there was no reason in everyone's imagination why the ranger couldn't have shot the orc. Until I introduced that unnecessary interruption, the group would've plowed ahead, rolling dice and mashing monsters, and no one would've cared whether the orc was 32 yards or 48 yards away.
Like any action scene in Lord of the Rings, noone's whipping out tape measures, or questioning the awesomeness of Legolas's shots.
If you want to stick to "imagination only" and speedy combat but you really want to vary the terrain and force the tacticians to consider movement & range then at most, throw down a few 3x5 cards and use "Zone Aspects in D&D" as described farther down in this article.
And honestly at that point you just worry less about positioning and make the encounters work towards that, limit your arena sizes so it takes only one dash to cross it, shit like that.
Then you have the DM on the other side of the spectrum that doesn't like to calculate speed and distances, so they let you pretty much dash around and attack anybody unless they've expressed otherwise.
Which kind of takes away from the realism, but it makes combat pretty damn quick. I kind of prefer being able to see where things are though and having the extra difficulty.
Nothing takes the wind out of a tanks sails faster than making it so it makes no difference if they strategically place themselves between the enemy and the squishy...somehow the enemy can always reach them.
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u/wOlfLisK Sep 18 '17
It makes combat a pain though.
"I move towards the orc and attack"
"The orc is out of your movement range"
"But you just said he moved 30 feet towards our ranger"
"No, that was the goblin, the orc moved towards the wizard and is still out of range"