Why Minis on a Mat > Theater of the Mind

I got off track a bit in this rant and decided real examples were necessary.  Yeah it was almost two years ago, things tend to cyclically come up in my head. 

This is a battlemap scenario.  I have placed all the potential enemies, kobolds are the pennies, giant rats are the red and blue dice, the party is made up of two warriors (quarters), a thief (red dime) and a cleric (other dime).  What has happened in the fiction of the world is the party entered this cave, the thief scouted ahead and noted the kobolds in area 1 and the rats in area 2.  On his way back to the party he fell into a pit trap.  He has survived at the bottom with a few HP.  This action alerts everyone in area 1 and 2.  The brackets around the pennies outside the cave entrance are surprise kobolds that will come out of nowhere and cut the PCs off (they're hiding at the tops of trees and have been stealthfully descending while the party has been scouting the area), locking the party inside in a veritable deathtrap.  That's D&D for you.

That's 14 kobolds to keep track of (in 2 squads) and 18 giant rats, along with the positions of the 4 PCs and their movements. 

This is an image of the next round, the ambush kobolds have moved in, the rats ran down the hallways, the kobold guards moved in to engage, one jumping down to run the thief through and missing, killing itself.  Dead coins are turned to tails (I failed to do this when setting up the initial pic, fixed for this one).  Our fighter and cleric have had a good first round, each killing an ambush kobold from the front and living through the first barrage of attacks.  We're now down to 11 kobolds and still 18 rats.

This last image is the end of the next round, the party finally succombs to numbers, the fighter and cleric are downed, and another kamikaze goblin takes out the thief at the bottom of the pit.  Two of the MANY giant rats jump down to gnaw on the thief's bones.  The surviving fighter will most assuredly die on the next round, if nothing else by being bombarded with disease saves from all the giant rat bites.

Now, only a complete idiot thinks that TotM would be anywhere near as expressive and tactical as these three images show a battlemat with even a completely limited budget can be.  And I'm only using snapshots, imagine seeing things actually move in real time!  I was able to easily follow the rules for movement and everything else, and anyone can plainly see there's a corpse of the thief, a dead kobold, a living kobold, and two giant rats in the pit.  We see exactly how many are on the "west" side of the pit, exactly how many are in the "south", exactly where they stand to the "east" side.  If a Magic User were to happen near the cave entrance and see what was happening he'd know exactly where to aim his sleep spell and loose it to cause the most damage.  Every element of tactics in the game such as this dies with TotM.  

And with the objects given here, a minimal placement of walls and position of enemies, none of which indicating what enemies are what other than strictly differences in said objects, theater of the mind is still in full effect and use.  The battlemat is an added benefit, not a hindrance.  It isn't two George Washingtons and two FDRs going up against a squad of Lincolns and two teams of dice.  You still have to imagine the scene, it's just easier to share that imagination with objective gamespace.  So many fewer questions come up. 

"Are these the kobolds to the north or south of us?"
"You said we hear skittering to the west hall, did you mean east?"
"There are HOW MANY rats coming?"
"Where did the kobold jumping on me come from?"
"You said you attack the kobold... which kobold?"

This is why I say those who use TotM solely don't really game.  They spend the entire goddamns session fielding questions a battlemat could answer in so much less time.  Anyone who's actually run the game on a battlemat realizes they exist for VERY GOOD reason and don't play without them. 

Now I could hear you say "but there isn't always this many enemies to keep track of!"  Well guess where I pulled this encounter from?  It's the first cave, the Kobold cave, in the Caves of Chaos which are in turn the main dungeon area from the one and only B2 Keep on the Borderlands, the archetypal and legendary starter module.  That's right, this game used to start you in a killbox full of death.  If anything it only gets more complicated from here.  I remember entering the watchtower of the Temple of Elemental Evil and being absolutely swarmed with enemies of several types.  I wouldn't even know to run away without the battlemat showing empirically how screwed we were.

And that's why "TotM Only" elitist prick "GMs" can suck hairy monkey balls.  I frankly don't think they even game, bro.