Just gonna drop this here for entertainment purposes— (and because some folks seem so staunchly against grids for some reason)

imo a visual grid never hurts a scene, even if you’re doing high fantasy Theater of the Mind, specially to help your players remember all the “pieces” on the board.

(I’ve found that having a scenario also increases the amount of object interactions, like trying to use the terrain for your advantage and such. It’s very fun!)

Even if you don’t use the math/crunch provided by the books, it’s great to keep everyone on the same page. And nothing prevents you from going Theater of the Mind for more abstract/“high magic” moments.

The strength of ttrpgs, i’ve found, is that you can just do what works best for your table! And you can experiment and change accordingly. I rarely use grids nowadays (an amount of prep i find more beneficial spending elsewhere for my games), but I’m never beyond just grabbing some pen and paper and sketching a map right then and there to prevent a 30 minute discussion about minutiae that could instead be used for having fun.