Yeah! I can’t live without my grid paper notepads. Not just for D&D, I use them for everything lol. But yeah they’re great for sketching maps, especially.

I like to make cards too. Like cards that describe the various things my character can do like cast certain spells or use certain features and I can activate them like it’s yugioh lol

I always shied away from gaming with strangers or even making friends at the game shop until a few years ago when I was looking for a table for FFG’s Edge of the Empire (this was well before Genesys). There was one near me and I played there every week for years. However, there was one session where a player made a min-max melee build that was able to go toe to toe with one of the DM’s scary NPCs and he went off on a huge tangent about how he would never allow such a build, etc. It made me really uncomfortable so I stopped going after that. Then COVID hit shortly after and I haven’t played a game at a shop since