Hi, I’m Angry, and I’m a recovering mapaholic. Maybe you’ve heard about that and what it means. But, since the rumors are swirling, I want to tell you what it DOESN’T mean. It doesn’t mean I gave up on pretty maps. For example, I was testing out some features and special effects in ProFantasy’s Campaign Cartographer 3+ recently and I decided to do a quick and dirty adaptation of the haunted house map from Ghosts of Saltmarsh. Here’s what I’ve got so far. It’s still in progress, though:

But, look, this isn’t about Campaign Cartographer 3+. I’m not really qualified to write about CC3+. Because, even though I absolutely LOVE the software, I have never properly learned how to use it. My practice with it – and with the previous versions, the first of which I acquired back in 1994 – has been haphazard and sporadic. Amateur. I keep intending to sit down and run through all the different tutorials and properly teach myself all the things it can do and how to make absolutely gorgeous maps, but who the hell has the time for that. So, I dabble. And keep dabbling. Because I love doing it.

Rather, this is about the fact that some people are misusing my teachings and I will not f$&%ing stand for it. I have seen people telling people – IN MY NAME AND USING MY WORDS – to give up on all maps behind the screen. I’ve seen people in my own Discord – MY OWN F$&%ING DISCORD – advocating for GMs to eschew every map that isn’t a flow chart. Those people are wrong. They are not members of the Angrican Church. And they are asking to be excommunicated. And struck by lightning if I can work out how.

The point I was making wasn’t never again having pretty maps to look at or learning to love and respect the amazing art of gamer cartography. It was about not relying on those maps to run your game for you. By all means, don’t stop drawing pretty maps. There’s actually a lot of good a pretty map can do behind the screen or in an adventure module. And it’s fun. Put in the work. Get good at it. And throw together a few pretty maps that you can share as handouts too. Players like pretty maps. Give them a map of the world or the kingdom or the town. Those are nice.

The point I was making was this: a good GM can run a good game with nothing but their voice. A bad GM can use all the pretty visual aids they want; they still won’t have a good game. Want to be a good GM? Make sure you can run a good game with nothing on the table and nothing but your voice. No handouts. No maps. No miniatures. No costumes. No props. No obnoxious music. No mood lighting. Just you and five people with a couple of pieces of paperwork, some dice, and a table in a basement. If you can’t do that s%$& and feel like you pulled off a good game – and occasionally a great one – well, you’ve got some work to do on yourself.

And the thing is, the more you rely on all that other crap – which are all just f$&%ing gimmicks, sorry – the less you rely on your GMing skills. And your GMing skills can and will atrophy. That was my point. It wasn’t give up on everything. It was just make sure you force yourself to get by on nothing at least some of the time so that you know you can still do it. And so you don’t let the gimmicks do your job for you.

It’s like George Lucas said just before he made the Star Wars prequel trilogy: special effects don’t mean anything if they’re not used to tell a good story about real people that people actually care about. And then he had a stroke. Apparently.

But this article isn’t about not giving up everything. I just wanted to make sure my teachings were utterly clear. My teachings are this: you should be able to run a good game with just your voice and no props or visual aids or special effects or anything. If that is something that you wouldn’t be comfortable doing right now at your very next game, well, do it right now at your very next game. Because you ain’t got what it takes and you can’t afford to take shortcuts until you have what it takes. That’s actually what I’ve started doing. I’ve started forcing myself to run games without relying too heavily on maps or visual aids for a bit. Because I USED TO be able to run games with just my voice, but my skills have withered.

What this article is actually about is how to run a combat with just your voice.

If You Can Run a Conversation, You Can Dodge a Wrench. Or Run a Combat. Whatever.

A few articles ago, I chastised GMs to learn how to run games without leaning heavily on maps or visual aids. I suggested GMs completely eschew exploration maps and that they run at least a few combats every session without a map, grid, tokens, or visual aids of any kind. But what I didn’t do was give you any advice about HOW to do that. HOW do you run a combat in D&D without a map, token, and a grid of five-foot-on-a-side squares?

Now, in that article, I did explain that D&D had grown increasingly grid-based and that the grid was baked into the core rules so thoroughly that it was basically inseparable from the combat system and that the use of the grid, maps, and tokens is kinda justified. Because it’s really hard to get by without them. And now, here I am saying you can – and should – get by without them. And you might that there’s a contradiction there. But there isn’t. The contradiction only arises if you assume you should never do anything that is hard to do. And for the love of f$&%, I hope I don’t have to explain why that’s actually the opposite of how you should live your life.

It is difficult to run combat in D&D without a gridded map and tokens. I’m not denying that. But it’s not AS DIFFICULT as you think it is. It definitely is not impossible. And it doesn’t ruin or diminish the game. It doesn’t take all the tactics out of the game. And it doesn’t only work for simple fights with one monster in an empty room. You can run ANY combat off the grid. Choose to run fights on or off the grid actually gives you another way to vary the level of tension, a feeling of scope and scale, and the overall pace of your game. Once you learn how to run combats without a grid and figures, those combats tend to run much faster. They take about half to two-thirds of the time that a gridded combat takes. And the ability to run without a grid improves your flexibility; it gives your ability to adjust the game or change it on the fly in response to what your players do because you can run a combat even if you weren’t prepared to run that combat.

Now, there’s a lot of advice on the Internet about running D&D combat without the grid. It’s something pretentious a$&hats call “theater of the mind” style combat. And they brag about being able to do it because it’s so much better for imagination and immersion and whatever. None of which is true. To distinguish myself from the pretentious a$&hats, I’m going to do two things. First, I’m going to call it “narrative combat.” Second, I’m going to give you actual good advice.

To be fair, the advice that’s out there isn’t actually bad. It’s mostly just lacking one key element. And that’s not really anyone’s fault. Because the key element that the advice is lacking is a way of adjusting the way you think about the game. If you can get that part down, the rest gets easier with practice. If you can’t get that part down, it’ll always be hard to run combat without a grid and none of the other advice anyone gives you will work for you. And that’s why you need me. Because I’m the one GM out there on the Internet who actually breaks things down to the level of “thought process.”

Before I launch into explaining anything in detail, though, I want to make a point. Take a minute to think about some of the non-combat scenes you’ve run without a grid recently. Think about the social interactions, the attempts to overcome obstacles, to disarm traps, to escape dangerous situations. And think about the actions the players took in those situations. Did any of them cast a spell? Move into a favorable position? Make an action that required them to be close to something else? Of course they did. The last time my players had to deal with a trap – a statue that fell on their formation – they moved into the “kill zone” and then the trap triggered with an audible click but they didn’t know what was happening and some of them dove forward and some backward and some stood their ground and got ready to receive an attack and then the statue fell on some of them and they had to make saving throws.

The thing is, by the rules, everything in that situation is very precise. The statue targets the PCs who are in a certain number of squares within so many feet of the statue and it triggers when the party reaches an exact point on the map and the players who move out of the danger squares and into the safe squares quickly enough could avoid damage. And yet, it never occurred to me – and it would occur to very few GMs – to draw that on a battlemat. In fact, drawing it out would tell the players that something bad was about to happen. Later, when the party encountered a dark, swirly portal to darkness and some approached and some held back and some watched the corner for danger, everything still needed to be very precise to determine who would be swallowed by the portal. But still, no map.

The point is, you can convince yourself that combat is somehow different from any other part of the game and requires exact precision and a perfect, clear understanding of exact positions and distances because the rules have exact positions and distances written in, but you ignore those exact positions and distances ALL THE TIME when you run a game. You ignore the precise ranges on spells or the exact position of trap kill zones.

Now, you can jump down to the combat section and explain precisely why combat is so different and why you can’t just ignore that s$&% when a fight breaks out if you want to. I mean, I’ll probably just delete it and call you a moron, but you can post it. And if you do, you’ll also never be able to get your combat off the grid. And then you’ll never run a good game because you can’t run a game with just your voice.

But that’s just priming the pump. Let’s talk about how to actually think off the grid.

What the Grid Does

To adjust your thinking about how to run D&D combat without the grid, the first thing you have to do is understand what the grid actually does for the game. Why is it there and what does it do when it is there? And how much of what it’s doing is actually necessary?

The basic idea is that a gridded map gives you a way to track the exact position of every creature and every feature of the battlefield and to quickly measure the distances between those things. And really, that’s all it does. It is, after all, just a to-scale map. And that’s helpful because pretty much everything in the game has some sort of exact distance baked into it. For example, a creature can only make a melee attack against another creature if the target is within five feet of the attacker. And a fireball spell affects all the creatures within 20 feet of an origin point that must, itself, be within 120 feet of the caster of the fireball.

The other thing the grid does – the only other thing, really – is to allow you to assess paths between two elements on the map. That might be so you can determine if an archer has a clear, unobstructed line to a target or to assess whether a creature’s movement passes through a hazard or gets too close to a melee combatant with an unused opportunity attack, a greatsword, and a grudge.

Now, those things might seem like big things, but they actually all come down to just answer a very simple set of questions at a glance. And all of those questions are about what things can interact with what other things. The grid just shows relationships between things and the state of the paths between those things. The grid is just a visual representation of the list of the distances between everything on the battlefield and every other thing and the state of the path between those things.

Okay, admittedly, that’s list can get very big very quickly. Imagine, for example, there’s a fight between five PCs and four goblins around a statue and a pit. There’s eleven different elements in that fight and if you tried to list all the relationships, you’d have over 50 distances and over fifty path states. It’d look like this:

• PC 1 to PC 2: 15 feet, clear
• PC 1 to PC 3: 5 feet, clear
• PC 1 to PC 4: 30 feet, obstructed by statue
• PC 1 to PC 5: 10 feet, clear
• PC 1 to Goblin 1: 35 feet, across pit
• …

Yes, it’s a long list. But with that list, you could answer ALMOST any question you need to answer. Can PC 1 move to PC 4 and cast a cure wounds? No. The path is 30 feet and PC 1 has a movement speed of 30 feet, but PC 1 has to move around the statue, which would require them to dash to get to PC 4. Can PC 1 target goblin 1 with sacred flame? Yes. It has a range of 60 feet and the pit doesn’t create a cover situation.

I mean, yes, if you want to get really precise, you’d need to provide the distances as vectors so that you get all the directional information as well if you want to be super, duper accurate and pedantic, but honestly, you could get by without that. Even for area spells. For example, if goblin 2 and goblin 3 are both within 10 feet of goblin 1, that’s all you need to know to hit all three with a fireball spell.

And besides, I’m just trying to make a point. The point is the grid is a way of providing a quick, visual summary of certain details about the relationships between various elements on the map. And it could, in theory, be presented as a list. It would just be a long list that would be hard to parse.

Except, here’s the thing: who gives a f$&%? Because the list of information that’s actually going to be necessary and useful is actually much smaller. For example, the fighter really only cares about a couple of things, “who’s within five feet of me and who can I get within five feet of with one move?” The rangers and warlocks only care about unobstructed lines of sight given the ranges on most missile weapons and spells are far bigger than the size of most D&D combat arenas anyway. The rogue only cares about who the fighter is already fighting and where the hiding places are. And so on.

And, beyond that, most D&D fights follow a fairly predictable pattern wherein all the movement tends to happen in the first few rounds, then some skirmishes are established, and then as skirmishes are resolved, movement mainly happens in the form of creatures moving into other established skirmishes. So, most of the data on the list is important only briefly and then fades in importance.

The reason I’m harping on this is that when a GM tries to run things off the grid for the first time, most immediately become concerned with having to remember all of the distances and positions that the grid shows without a grid. They think they still have to have a grid. They just have to keep it in their heads. And, consequently, many GMs end up keeping tiny little hand-drawn maps on scratch paper to help them manage the combat. And that’s bad because, again, it hurts their ability to use their brain by giving them a crutch to lean on.

But if you recognize that it’s not positions and distances you’re concerned about, but relationships between elements, and that most of the data the grid shows are completely useless, then you can stop thinking visually about combat and start thinking narratively.

Now, as you keep reading, I want you to keep that imaginary list in your head. The list above with all the distances between all the PCs and all the goblins and the state of the path between them. Imagine that list sitting on the table in front of you. Keep it in your head. Because that list is actually what you want to have in your head when you’re running combat narratively.

Zooooooooooom!

Imagine this situation: the PCs walk into a big cave. In the middle of the cave is a small pond. At the far end of the cave, across the pond, is a group of four goblins. Can you picture that scene in your head? You damned well better be able to, honestly. If you can’t visualize something as simple as that, you can’t run a game. You have to have some f$&%ing imagination in there. And if not, you need to do some visualization exercises and get your imagination back in working order.

Now, imagine you’re looking down on that situation from very high up. High enough that it’s hard to see individual characters. You can see the group of PCs and the group of goblins and you can see the pond and you can see the walls of the cave. That’s about it. Now, think about that list. Assuming you have a blank list right now, how much can you fill in?

Well, you really can’t fill in too much, can you? The PCs and the goblins are all clumped up with each other. You can’t tell how far apart the members of each group are from each other. But you can tell that the goblins and the PCs are about, say, 60 feet apart. And you can see the pond is directly between them and is about 20 feet across, right? And you can see the size of the room, but it’s probably irrelevant because it’s big enough to contain 60 feet of distance between the two parties.

The point is, it’s pretty easy to keep that level of detail in your head, right? You’ve got two clumps of creatures 60 feet apart with a 20-foot pond in the center of the battlefield between them. But you can also adjudicate just about any action any member of either group might take. Can the ranger fire his longbow at the goblin formation? Easily. Can the fighter charge the goblin formation and attack? Nope. Assuming the pond is shallow enough to wade and slows movement and the fighter has the standard speed of 30 feet, the pond will slow him down and bring him up short of the goblins. And that’s assuming he takes a Dash action. He certainly can’t attack after that. But could he jump the pond? Well, maybe. Assuming he doesn’t have a Strength score of 20, he could make a Strength (Athletics) check to “jump an unusually long distance” to clear the pond. That would keep him from being slowed down and then he’d manage to close in with the goblins with a Dash action.

With a little bit of logic and reasoning, you can even answer some questions that require an extra level of detail. For example, what happens if the goblin archers try to shoot the party’s warlock? Well, the party’s warlock is usually in the middle of the formation. While the party formation is definitely within range, you can assume the warlock has half cover against any ranged attack from any direction. Likewise, if the ranger tries to shoot the goblin shaman at the back of the goblin formation, you can assume the same thing. Likely, the goblins will focus their fire on the fighter at the front of the PC formation. And if the wizard throws a fireball into the goblin formation, can he hit them all? Well, if there are four goblins and they are standing in a close marching order like the PCs then, yes, absolutely. They are likely all clumped up just like the PCs.

In short, you can resolve the entire first round of combat with a one-sentence description of the battlefield. Which means you’ve got 20% to 25% of the combat handled. Although most of the list of relationships between battlefield elements is still blank, you’re probably a quarter of the way through the fight.

The basic idea of narrative combat is this: always watch the combat from the highest altitude you can. Zoom way, waaaay out and don’t zoom in until you absolutely need to. That way, the number of details you actually have to keep track of is never more than the number of details you need.

When you stay zoomed out, you tend to see things as clumps of activity. That’s how the battle really plays out anyway. For example, say the fighter dashes around the pond and gets to the other side. He’s partway to the goblins. Two goblins run forward and engage with him. And the rogue comes up to fight alongside the fighter and get some sweet sneak attacks in. From a zoomed-out perspective, you’ve got three of the PCs still hanging back by the door, two PCs fighting two goblins on the shore of the pond, and two goblins on the other side of the cave. You also know the skirmish is on the opposite side of the pond from the PCs, so it takes a Dash action for any PCs to get there, but the goblins can just move up to it. And that’s it. Again, you can keep that in your head. And that will cover the second round. Maybe even the third depending on what happens.

Now, you might also have some odd movements. For example, the ranger might keep his distance but circle around so he can fire past the skirmish in the middle of the cave to the goblins in the rear. After all, that skirmish should provide cover against any ranged attacks that go through the middle of the room. But that brings me to my next piece of brilliant advice.

Everything Is Blurry Until It Isn’t Until It Is Again

At this point, you’re probably thinking that all that stuff about staying zoomed out and thinking in terms of clumps and groupings only works until the PCs or the monsters or the terrain decides not to clump up. Once the PCs who aren’t in a melee skirmish start spreading themselves out, for example, or if the monsters start off coming at the heroes from every direction, then how the hell do you keep track of exact positions?

The answer is easy: you don’t.

See, not only do you always want to look at the battle from as high up as possible so that unimportant details are impossible to resolve and you can only see broad clumps of foes, but you also want to assume you’re looking at the whole scene through frosted glass smeared with petroleum jelly. Or through a gelatinous cube. Whatever.

The point is that you should assume that anything you haven’t pinned down to an exact location or distance could be anywhere or any distance away. And you want to pin down only what is absolutely necessary.

For example, at my last session, the players entered a room that was full of corpses. And a half-dozen of those corpses were of the walking, moaning, biting variety. As the party stepped across the threshold, the corpses all around the room stood up and started advancing on them. You can picture a semi-circle of zombies closing in on the party who is clumped up just inside the door. I also indicated the nearest zombies were 30 feet away.

And that’s as far as I described. That was as far as I knew. The party held back, forcing the zombies to come to them. They used ranged attacks to thin the ranks of the zombies and the zombies – being slow-moving – had to use the Dash action to start closing with the party. And then, eventually, there came a question of whether multiple zombies could be caught in the area of a single spell.

Yes, I said. The two off to the right and closing in were close enough together. How did I know that? How did I know those two zombies were close together and they were on the right and not the left or whatever? Well, I didn’t. But, I had a semi-circular line of zombies closing in and two had been eliminated. Four were left. One was fighting the party in melee. Which left three. So, at that moment, I decided two of the remaining zombies were closing from the right. And given the fact that the room could accommodate zombies being 30 to 50 feet away from the party and the zombies were closing, it just makes sense that if two zombies were coming from the same direction, they were close enough together to blast with one spell.

Once I had decided that, by the way, I had established a fact about the scene. Two zombies were to the right of the party. Which meant the other zombie was probably closing from the left or else the whole semi-circle of closing zombies thing wouldn’t actually be a thing. And one of the other players did start shooting at “the zombie coming from the left” after that.

The point is that you don’t have to pin down any detail until you have to pin it down. But once you pin down a detail, you can’t contradict it. But it can get invalidated. For example, say it wasn’t zombies. Say it was hobgoblins with some tactical acumen. After they get blasted by an area spell, they might decide to spread out. On their turns, they move away from each other, keeping their distance from the party, and pepper the spellcaster with arrows. Where are they now? Well, apart from knowing they are not close enough together to hit with a spell, they could be anywhere now. Within reason of course.

Just because something has been pinned down to an exact location doesn’t mean it has to stay in an exact location. It can get blurred out again. The problem is many GMs keep updating exact details with more exact details. Me? I think in terms of actions that can turn the details fuzzy again until I’m forced to make them precise again. When the archers in the party spread out to get clear shots, it doesn’t really matter where they are precisely. They are wherever they need to be to get a clear shot. That’s all you have to know.

But the corollary to that is that if a detail is vague and fuzzy then anyone can assume it’s anything and the first person to assume something about it is right. For example, say the hobgoblins are somewhere over there, not near each other, but also keeping their distance from the party. That could mean a lot of things. So, suppose the rogue wants to take cover from both archers behind the pillar. Is there a spot behind the pillar where he’d have cover from both archers? Well, obviously there is. Because he took cover there. But that doesn’t mean one of the hobgoblins can’t move to get a clear shot either.

If something could be anywhere, anyone can decide where it is. And that’s one of the keys to using terrain in narrative combat. When I run narrative combat in the wilderness, I tend to say that there’s trees or underbrush scattered around the battlefield. Or that the walls are lined with pillars, buttresses, and alcoves. Or that the battlefield is split by a chasm or pit. Can you take cover in the trees or hide in the underbrush? Sure. It’s all around. Can you hide in an alcove? Are you near the wall? Then yes. Can you get to the archers on the other side of the battlefield? You need to fly or jump over that chasm.

In narrative combat, precision is your enemy. Everything you’re precise about is a thing you have to remember precisely. Vagaries are better. And it’s best to think of everything as blurry and out of focus and smeared out until someone forces them to pick a spot. And when there’s a precise detail on the battlefield, it’s best to find a way to blur it out again than to move it from precise point to precise point. Or at least to get it to clump up with other things.

Which leads me to my final point about narrative combat:

Good Intentions and Fair Bargains

Now, you might have noticed if you’ve been reading carefully that running a narrative combat my way isn’t about moving pieces on a chessboard. And if you haven’t been reading carefully, PAY ATTENTION!

See, for me, running a narrative combat is about bringing things into and out of focus. Zooming in, zooming out, blurring, and focusing. Everything that isn’t explicit is blurry. And that lends itself to a certain style of action declaration that’s different from moving a miniature on the mat and saying “I attack.” And based on two sessions of playing with this – which, you know, is definitely a valid sample size and proves everything I’ve said – it seems like players do intuitively grasp the difference if you give them a lead to follow. They become much clearer about stating their intentions than about describing their actions. And partly that’s because that’s how my I declare monster actions.

For example, remember those hobgoblins? They got blasted by a spell and decided to spread out and keep their distance, right? Well, I could have described that based on their actual movements. “The first hobgoblin moves sideways 30 feet, circling the party, and fires his bow. Then the second one moves sideways, circling in the other direction, and fires his bow.” But, instead, I said, “rattled by the spell, the two hobgoblins spread out while maintaining their distance from the party, and then pepper the party with arrows.” It’s subtly different, but that second one makes it clear that whatever action the hobgoblins actually take, their intention is to avoid getting another area spell in their respective faces and that they also don’t intend to be charged by a melee combatant. That way, the players understand that closing with the hobgoblins requires more than a move and that they can’t catch them together with any more area spells.

Instead of talking about where you’re moving and what you’re doing, you talk about why you’re doing it. You’re not moving next to the statue; you’re taking cover from the archers. You’re not moving off to the left, you’re getting a clear shot with your crossbow. And then it doesn’t matter how you picture the situation in your head and how it differs from anyone else’s. All that matters is you don’t have to take a cover penalty to your next attack. Because that’s what you’re actually after.

And that’s actually why the grid is more removable than it seems. Even though there’s dozens of squares anyone might occupy, no one moves to a square for no reason. No one moves adjacent to something for no reason. You close with a foe so you can attack them. You spread out to avoid the dragon’s breath. You withdraw so you can use your bow.

The dirty little secret here is that if you run combat narratively some of the time, you will also train your players to declare their actions more clearly and more unambiguously with a complete approach and intention all of the time. Especially if you also show them how it’s done.

Apart from thinking in terms of intentions and proper action declarations and being explicit in the whys rather than the whats, the other important thing is to think of actions in terms of bargains and prices. See, you may have noticed that most of the distances I used above are given in multiples of 30 feet. And that’s because, on a turn, most characters – and you should just assume all player characters during narrative combats, but not all monsters – most characters get a free 30 feet of movement before, between, or after their actions. And I call it free movement because it’s assumed that, as long as the character isn’t stuck in a melee and the terrain isn’t being a b%&$, it’s expected that every character can move 30 feet on every round of combat. That’s just a thing characters can do. Just like on any round of combat, a character should be able to attack one target. Or cast one spell.

Why do I say it like that? Well, I say it like that because all of the rules in D&D are designed to make sure combats play out in a fairly predictable way and they are based on several assumptions about how things could work. And when you take away things like the grid and exact positions and exact ranges, you can f$&% things up immensely if you aren’t aware of what should be possible. For example, area spells – on average – are assumed to hit two targets. Less than that is useless. More than that is a special situation. And probably one the character should work for.

For example, in that zombie fight I was talking about above, the warlock wanted to cast an area spell and asked if he could hit two of the zombies at once with his spell. A reasonable question. And because I know area spells should always be able to hit two creatures unless they can’t because that would contradict the reality that has already been established and because I had three zombies who were vaguely positioned “somewhere,” I confirmed he could indeed hit the two on the right.

He wanted to squeeze a little more out of his spell. He wanted to get three. He decided to ready his action and wait until three zombies clumped up. Because there was one zombie engaged with the party already and the other two zombies were approaching, this was definitely something that might happen in the next round. Once the two zombies got a little closer to the party he could clip the one that was fighting the party and the other two. Fair enough. BUT… that other zombie was currently in melee with the party’s paladin and the party’s rogue. There was a decent chance they’d finish the zombie off before the other two got to move.

I didn’t reach that decision because I was tracking the position of every creature on the battlefield and figuring out how everything was moving. I reached that decision because whenever possible, an area spell should be able to hit two creatures. And if a player is willing to work for it or take a chance, an area spell should be able to hit three creatures. Again: if possible.

In this case, the risk of the readied action was that if the three zombies never clumped up the way he hoped, he’d lose an action and the zombies would also end up closing with the party with impunity. And the player decided it was worth the risk to blast three zombies with a spell. And, sure enough, the paladin and the rogue cut down the zombie and the spell never went off.

Instead of thinking in terms of distances and positions and stuff, it’s good to think in terms of costs. When you set up the battlefield as 60 feet across with a pond in the middle, for example, you’ve decided that the melee combatants are going to need a full round of maneuvering before they can mix it up with the enemy. Which is something you do when you want to give the ranged combatants a chance to shine or when you want to impose the challenge of forcing the party to approach ranged combatants for a round before they can engage. So, when the player asks if they can jump over the pond to close to melee with a move and a Dash action, they are trying to squeeze a little extra edge out of the situation. This is why it’s appropriate to ask for a Strength (Athletics) check with the risk of ending up prone in the water and then having to continue the move from there after standing up.

Generally speaking, I make it pretty easy to move to get a clear shot at most targets unless a target is purposely covered. Like the shaman at the back of the party. And I also make it pretty easy to move to gain cover. To me cover and circumventing cover are inexpensive. The assumption of the game is that the ranged attackers can usually freely attack most of the combatants on the battlefield, but because creatures provide cover according to the rules, it’s also very easy to protect your allies with cover. Thus, cover is also freely available. I don’t make people pay much for cover or for getting around cover most of the time. Give me your move and we’ll call it even.

Even though I will talk in terms of feet and directions, I am always thinking in terms of actions and bargains. When I say, “the enemies are 50 feet away,” what I’m really saying is, “melee starts in round two, sorry.” If there’s a hazard in the middle of the battlefield, what I’m saying is “pay the toll to move across the battlefield in a single move or trade your action for a Dash to circle around and you can fight next turn.” Which, to be fair, is also how I design my battlefields and combat encounters.

The point is if you want to run a narrative combat, you have to stop thinking in terms of position and direction and range and start thinking in terms of the way you run literally every other part of the game. Stay zoomed out, don’t define details until you have to, stay open, stay flexible, speak in terms of intentions and adjudicate actions the same way, and be open to bargaining but make sure that bargains involve risks and costs. And now you’ve got your brain aligned with the basic way of thinking about narrative combat.

That said, I know a bunch of you f$&%ers are disappointed. I know you really wanted me to give you straightforward instructions about how to narrate to set the scene, how to properly use repetition, how to drive action, and that sort of s$&%. And maybe even some really solid examples and quotes and s$&%. Not this vague bulls$&% about how to think. Well, if you’re really, really nice and don’t piss me off in the comments, maybe Santa will bring you a practical article to go with this theory crap.