System with best Theater of Mind combat?

[TripleD]

I mostly play D&D and, while you can play a fun theatre of mind game with it, it always ends up feeling a bit “weightless” because it clearly isn’t built with that kind of play in mind (5ft can make the difference between life and death).

In your opinion, what are some rpgs that are built from the ground up for theatre of mind, but are still tactically satisfying?

[olskool]

I have heard that Modiphius' Conan 2D20 system is a good one for theater of the mind. I have used The Design Mechanism's Mythras for theater of the mind as well.

[Griswold]

I've really enjoyed combat in PbtA games (most of my experience is with Monster of the Week) and felt like the system made all of the players' choices very meaningful in combat. I'm not sure how strategic you'd call it, though, since it's designed to be cinematic.

Details of combat:

• There's no initiative order, so when you step in and how matters, especially if your character is bad in a straight-up fight.
• There's a lot of explicit choices about what you're trying to do with each action: hold the enemy back, disable them somehow, deal as much damage as possible, protect yourself or others.
• Monsters have a lot of variety in their abilities and what they can do, making every enemy feel very different. Figuring out monster abilities an important part of each session.
• Working together (in D&D this would be "Aiding") in combat is powerful, but actually dangerous if you fail.
• You can have a mixed combat/non-combat scene ("I'll hold this guy off while you try to finish the ritual"), with both parts having the same amount of detail and weight, as opposed to "combat is interesting, the ritual is a series of skill checks".

[Rakaydos]

I mostly play D&D and, while you can play a fun theatre of mind game with it, it always ends up feeling a bit “weightless” because it clearly isn’t built with that kind of play in mind (5ft can make the difference between life and death).

In your opinion, what are some rpgs that are built from the ground up for theatre of mind, but are still tactically satisfying?

The FFG star wars games (Edge of empire/Age of Rebelion/Force & Destiny) and their generic counterpart, Genesys, walks the balance between crunchy and theater of the mind well. Coming from the star wars mythos, they built unanticipated consequences (that should hold them, but I blasted the controls to the bridge) into the core dice mechanic. One of the biggest complaints I hear from new groups is a GM coming from D&D not knowing what to do with these consequences, and spamming stuff like "you drop your weapon" instead of excercising the slightest bit of creativity. But I've had enounters where a character is on top of a ship holding off stormtroopers while the pilot's trying to preflight the ship, the engineer is trying to get the reactor online, and the social character is trying to help where they can. When the pilot gets the repulsors online and lifts the ship, the character on top of the ship has to keep his balance. When the engineer finally gets the reactor going, someone has to unplug the ship from the hangar power. (while the ship is 3m in the air, because of what the pilot did)

[Grod_The_Giant]

Exalted 3e is crunchy and tactical as all hell, and is built from the ground up for theater of the mind-- movement and positioning is all about range bands. I personally wasn't a fan of that aspect, but you might dig it.

Fate walks a pretty good line with its Zones-- discreet areas of the fight like "the courtyard," "the battlements," and "the drawbridge." Where exactly you are in the Zone doesn't matter; you only have to pay attention when you're trying to get from one part of the fight to the next.

[Knaight]

Legends of the Wulin is really solid - it doesn't really do tactical positioning because that doesn't fit the genre well (there's way too much fluid movement), so instead you get fictional positioning in other ways based around abstracted current advantages and the development and breaking of a nasty attack held in reserve.

[Man_Over_Game]

Check out 13th Age.

It combines the crunchiness and straight-forwardness of 4e DnD combat, with more RP aspects and more DM control, to adapt the players and the battlefield to the scene at hand. In addition, the game is entirely ran by Theater of the Mind combat, using relative distances from one target to another.

Rather than using distances, like 5ft, 30ft, 60ft, it'll refer to things as Adjacent, Close, Far.

That way, when it gets to your turn, the DM can say "There are two adjacent goblins to you, one goblin archer nearby, and a goblin champion that's engaged with your party's wizard far away from you", and you know exactly what you're capable of doing without a battle map.

As an added bonus, it has the same flow and concepts as DnD. A 13th Age Barbarian, for instance, can Rage, which grants bonus damage to attacking creatures adjacent to him.

[Destin]

13th Age, Anima Beyond Fantasy, Numenera would be my top 3.