When I ran an office game of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3E, we played in a conference room that had a big whiteboard. We used that to illustrate the battlefield and sketch out where everyone was, to show distances and what not. I came to really like that. It was so much easier than using a battle grid.

In fact, the only reason I'm inclined to use miniatures with EotE is because I already own them, and they look like Star Wars characters (because that's exactly what they are). It's kind of cool to say, "You see two squads of stormtroopers approaching" and then actually put down little stormtroopers on the table. I still don't use a battle grid with them, I just stick them down and them place the PCs and tell everyone how far apart the characters are. The stormtroopers cost me ten cents each, which I think is a bargain given that they're painted.

It's just a matter of personal preference, really. One of the nice things about this game is that there are many ways to go about handling encounters visually. Pick the one that works for you, and get rolling the dice :)

I may go the way you are Venthrac. Thanks for the post.

When playing Warhammer I used over-sized location cards and placed the standups upon them. It worked pretty good except when having to place down several location cards when the party got split up.

I already have a large dry-erase board with magnetic back and I can field an entire platoon of Stormtroopers. I don't want to have to draw out detailed huge maps like I used to with 1" graph paper. That took too long between and during games. A rough sketch board with no scale would be easier. I can imagine moving the figures around and adding notes with markers:

You jump out of your landspeeder by a large tree (quickly draws a speeder and a large tree, figures placed around the speeder). Stormtroopers open fire from a nearby ledge (place Stormtroopers, draw a wavy line to represent the edge of the ledge, make a note they are at Medium range). Etc.

If your Galaxy Master has the time and resources to prep beforehand, something I've found really useful is to have small color printouts of what the major NPCs in an adventure/heist look like. I generally do this by putting 6 portraits on an landscaped 81/2x11 sheet of paper, cut and fold to make tents thatcan stand up on their own. Or just go whole hog on the printer ink and print out one page per portrait.

In my experience, this has been especially useful to the players who are NOT diehard Star Wars fans. One thing that I've seen and heard consistently about all versions of Star Wars RPGs is these types of players' frustration when a very knowledgeable Star Wars fanatic is playing, usually GMing, and they get overwhelmed by the humongous volume of EU material that the GM mistakenly assumes everyone else is familiar with.

For example, your GM might describe a character as an elderly Cerean. For a lot of us reading these forums, I'm sure we can all draw up a mental image right away as to what that probably looks like. But for the majority of gamers, they have no idea what a Cerean is, even though they probably would recognize a picture of one as being "from Star Wars".

A little picture goes a long way.

CStevenRoss said:

The basic set has "Character Tokens", and "Vehicle Tokens". These appear to be cardboard circular tokens you lay flat, or "pogs", to some of us. Looks like a cheaper version of the standups used in FFG's Warhammer. I can imagine getting sheets of these in future EotE products. Luckily for us, D20 related software can be used to easily make custom pogs without any talent needed. Download TokenTool for free, buy some cardstock, print some sheets and cut.

I tried my own instructions above and was able to make some great tokens (haven't printed them yet) in seconds using "borrowed" graphics from the internets.

EDIT: I would be concerned about how easily they are to pick up off the table when done in cardstock. Perhaps buy something thicker to glue them to?

One of the reasons I got the Beta was to check how token and card free it was.
I was nicely surprised to see that they are not the be all and end all of the game.

Hopefully this will be a sign of things to come for a WHFRP 4th Edition. Sorry FFG but most of them just got in the way and confused my group. It played too much like board game for their liking. too many tokens to track for stance, wounds, fatigue, action recharge, party progress, etc. etc..

Some were useful at first - like action cards that said what you could do. But devolved into hassle as you then had to track stance and activation etc. too much bookkeeping and confusing for some in my group taht just wanted to get on with the game not analyse cards.
The problem being that they were integral and essential, not optional play aids to help if needed. They also got bulky in the end. So many action cardd and creature cards and bags full of tokens that you needed a huge case to contain them all. A bit overkill in the end.

Edge returns to a widget free system. You can use stand ups etc. if you want to, but are not forced to use them. Much better.