Say you have a mini focused game you wanted to play here.
What is the best way to allow everyone to move there minis / game pieces?

Is it even practical here?
If not then what should be used instead for games where play is asynchronous?

I know there are things like Roll20 but they don't support people making moves on their own time like playing here does.
This message was last edited by the user at 22:10, Fri 27 Mar 2020.

I have found this thread (particularly the links) useful.

If you wanted to use tables and grids to replicate a board of some sort, I would give this thread a once over.  Tons of good stuff there.

Description of the encounter is what I think is the most important part to eliminate a board, graph or anything less than the imagination of the player.

The more details, the better planned and written down, well the better chance not need the board.

Also make sure the players asks questions before they take actions. Player will sometimes assume and take an action, then become upset they did not know. In my games if you did not ask that means you did not care or ignored it (like many do in RL).

Best of luck

In reply to Ski-Bird (msg # 2):

Certainly a good way to do it.
Not so easy for the players to move things but should work from the GM side.

You'd have to have a private thread for each play to post the map altered with their move and the GM then consolidate it?
Basically "Hidden Movement" style play?

In reply to Lord Caladin (msg # 3):

Another approach is to give players benefit of the doubt. This, I find, avoids games delayed by a) tons of questions and b) players upset because their understanding was wrong. His approach does lead to challenges sometimes being more easily overcome than the GM may have expected, but the avoidance of complaints and questions means that the game can move on to the next challenge, giving the GM another opportunity to find ways to describe things. I find it helps to involve the players in creating the scene in the first place, as we remember and respect most those thinga we ourselves create.

I was recently part of a game where the GM had the map saved to Google Docs and was editable by the whole group.  Each PC had their own pic as an icon, and were able to move it on the map to demonstrate locations during battle scenes.

When I've run combat I just use MapTools (a square-or-hex-grid-based map-making program) to draw out the map and put everyone's icons on it, then crop and save the image and upload it as a "Map" image in my game. Once people tell me what they want to do, I'll move the icons around and re-save the new image. When we started I did the same thing but via crappy Paintbrush drawings (wherein I actually had to draw out the grid and stuff), but that was before I got hold of MapTools :D.

In reply to Ameena (msg # 7):

I'm thinking that something like Maptools would be good.
Wish there was something like that here where a player could move an icon of themselves.