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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Stumblewyk" data-source="post: 6009766" data-attributes="member: 67606">When we started playing in the days of AD&D 2e, we used literally nothing.  No pawns, no paper, nothing.  Mostly because we were poor high school kids who barely had enough money to share books, much less own minis.  We just played "theatre-of-the-mind" style, and it was good enough for us.Then we added 2 guys who had only played 3.x.  They talked us into trying 3.5, and made it pretty clear we'd need to use minis to track movement and positioning.  Fortunately, one of the guys had enough minis and a battlemat.  I took over DMing again, converted my game to 3.5, and started collecting and painting minis since I wasn't a poor high school kid anymore.Nowadays, I have fair amount of miniatures (more on the way, thanks to Reaper's Kickstarter), my own ginormous battlemat, a few spare rolls of Gaming Paper, and a large 1" square-gridded pad of paper.  I predraw a lot of buildings and dungeons, and we use minis for everything.Occasionally, I wax nostalgic for the days of playing without a mat and minis, but I don't think my game suffers for having adapted to their use either.  Even when we play games like Dresden Files RPG that is VERY "theatre of the mind" with only roughly defined areas for combat, we still end up drawing something, and using pawns to denote who is in what zone when a fight breaks out.I'd like to upgrade to a projector set-up some day, but it's still out of my price range, and I'm way too lazy to learn how to use GIMP or Photoshop to do Fog of War type stuff. =/</blockquote>

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