How prominent is the use of visual aids in combat?

[Lambusy]

Hi,
I recently looked at the 5e starter set and was surprised to see it didn't contain any board/grid to aid the players in combat. In the official video of the starter adventure i saw it also looked like only the gm had a map of the area the players were in but everything was always communicated verbally to the players.
Of course i wouldn't expect the gm to use detailed maps for every place which might have encounters, but as a beginner i was led to believe that combat in d&d is relativley percise and requires some visual aid. After all, movement is calculated in ft. and abilities/weapons usually have ranges associated with them.
So, from your experience, how much are visual aids used in casual play? And how comfortable is it to play without them?
Thanks

[DeTess]

In 5e, it's a lot less prominent than in previous editions. We've used them occasionally, but only when a fight provided a challenge involving position (bottling a bunch of zombies up in a narrow hallway to more easily beat them is one example). Otherwise, it's generally not worth the extra time and effort.

[Kadesh]

You can do DnD with Pen and Paper. A visual aid for the map, where you are fighting, and where enemies positions are is all very helpful.

Most significant battles in adventure modules have maps you can scan and enlarge with grids on if you wish.

There are numerous websites and apps where you can create your own, and lots of third party developers/DM's sharing content on things like reddit and imgur.

Plus, making individualised models of the party and/or significant NPC's is a lot of the fun. I am currently making an adventure path for the party, and creating the NPC's is brilliant fun and helps bring it to life.

[Afrodactyl]

My group uses the map grids and cardstock minis from pathfinder.

When everyone starts rolling initiatives, I whip out one of the maps that I drew out with a marker before the session. Jot down everyone's initiatives whilst explaining what all the things on the board are, set the minis down, and away we go.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I use visual aids extensively.

We either have a battlemap or a whiteboard on which the DM sketches important things (not always to scale). I have a collection of painted (or pre-painted) 3D plastic minis for PCs and important enemies and a bunch of the cardstock Pathfinder ones for other stuff.

Battle locations (or others where precise distances are important are drawn roughly to scale by measurement (not grids).

But you can use coins or dice or buttons or anything as tokens and just use it for relative positioning. I find having a shared map of the local area helps a lot in keeping combat flowing. Yeah, it slows down the beginning sometimes, but not always tremendously (unless you're being super precise). But it speeds up the decision-making process because you know where everything you can see.

[PhantomSoul]

We normally have Roll20 going for combats, though now and then we'll do a "Theatre of Mind" battle for something that won't have been planned ahead of time and where we don't have a suitable background already ready for it. (2 groups, 1 not yet having theatreofminded.)

In a friend's group they use a combination of proper-minis-&-props and (for cases where there's no nice setting) a checkerboarded dry-erase board. Works out great -- I know they had one more "chase-like" combat where that wasn't used, though, for practicality.