One of the frequent complaints I hear about 3rd Edition (and 3.5) D&D is that you have to play it with miniatures. “It was designed to sell them,” a friend of mine bemoans, pointing to Attacks of Opportunity as the most damning evidence. I’ll admit that I did consider AoO to be so difficult without some sort of physical tactical gameplay aid that I’d generally not used them — they are an optional rule, after all, being labeled with such words as “can” and “may” in the Player’s Handbook. But I decided to see if there were other options.

Some quick Googling led me to one other person’s opinion, and that person happened to be Monte Cook. You may have come across his name before, in the front cover of your Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide since he was part of the core 3rd Edition team and is an all-around awesome RPG developer. Check out what he says — his advice is sound, and I think that’s how I’m going to try to play the upcoming D&D 3.5e game I’ll be running before considering and investing in other solutions.

If that turns out to not work well, and the group decides not to revert to my previous behavior of simply ignoring AoO, I might give some of Fiery Dragon’s counter sets a go. Cheaper than miniatures by a long shot, they still accomplish the goal of allowing everyone to see the tactical layout of the encounter.