MartyW
Explorer
Most of your questions come down to personal taste, but I'll attempt to offer some advice.
1) Some players are funny/superstitious about "their dice" and have an OCD thing about other people using them. If you have a group of mostly new players, you won't need to worry about that because they won't have been exposed to this before and won't have any preconceived notions about dice sharing. A set of dice for the GM and a set of dice for the players to share is a good start. If there are veteran players, better to let them hoard their own dice. Eventually, even your novice players may want their own set.
2) There are two very different philosophies on this one. There are times when information needs to be hidden from the players, and a DM screen does this well. However, it does create a kind of wall (not just physical, but psychological) between the GM and the players. I prefer to not have a GM screen in front of me, but I often have a small TV tray table to my left or right (which is often lower than a typical dining table we're playing on) so I can still have a small private area for notes, minis and hidden rolls, without putting a barrier between me and my players. If I don't have a TV table available, I will keep a box nearby (such as the cardboard starter set box) and put up the lid in an upright position only when absolutely necessary. To me, the game feels less adversarial when there is no barrier... but again, that is a personal choice.
3) This is another interesting one to answer.
When a party enters a dungeon, old school GMs will make someone in the party draw maps on graph paper by description only (although sometimes they will prompt corrections due to the person not being able to "see" what is there). For some, this adds to immersion because if they don't keep an accurate map, they can actually get lost. Modern dungeon design isn't quite as sprawling as the old school maps though, so in a modern game, this is less of an issue. There are far fewer wrong turns and dead-end passages, so most GMs will hand wave the need for a dungeon map and only draw a room if there needs to be an illustration of the position of objects or foes in the room.
If you are interested in using minis for a 1 inch = 5 feet representation of the battle, there are several products that allow you to quickly sketch a room. Paizo has its flip mats (both blank ones and ones with pre-drawn features) and other companies like Chessex have mats in various sizes that allow wet erase markers.
There is also Gaming Paper (gamingpaper.com) which has wrapping paper-like rolls of 1 inch grids. These are pretty cool because you can roll out and cut a swatch to size as needed. The rolls are relatively inexpensive, but shipping is a bit much if you are not buying in bulk. If you are not using minis at all, any pad of graph paper would be useful for quickly drawing rough sketches.
Don't worry about your drawing skills. Any sketches can just be rough approximation of details and positions. If you are going to copy any maps out of the book (that aren't already numbered), I'd leave off numbering details if possible. You want the players to pick their own direction and not be lead by a "Hey look... there's a number over there in the woods. We should check that out." You want to limit them from using meta-game knowledge to guide their PCs actions.
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