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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5689619" data-attributes="member: 82106">Yeah, it began in Men and Magic! lol. Every edition from 1974 on has ASSUMED you kept track of exactly where the PCs and monsters were, and it was generally assumed that was done with minis on some form of 'battle map'. 1e DMG shows pictures of which squares and hexes an attacker would be attacking from a flank (and thus bypass your shield). 1e and earlier never ever actually explicitly mention a grid or even really assume one, but they certainly are based on the assumption that the players are well aware of such things.Anyway, I would think that Cook et al. simply continued with the assumptions of 2e AD&D, which were pretty much identical to those of 1e in that respect, Combat & Tactics excepted perhaps (never read it myself). 3e really doesn't IME make a lot of really new play style assumptions. It just codifies things more accurately and explains things that were never explained at all before (movement during combat was a VERY murky area in the AD&D rules, depending on how you read them once you engage an enemy you really can't move at all). The end result was that the long-existing requirement of having some sort of map of what was going on in combat simply became a lot more apparent, and then 3.5 further cleared things up and a grid/minis became virtually mandatory.</blockquote>