Gaming setup - to sprawl or not to sprawl

A follow on from the 'tools of the trade' post - here is what my cafe gaming set up looks like. Pretty tight in but it works. Spares breaking my shoulder which would be pointless anyway because there is not room for more stuff.

It did put me in mind of how much space do I use when space is no object - what is my home table set up? This partly came from a conversation around 'what do have in a D&D room if you could have one' and myself and my home campaign were racking our brains. The screen here was a gift from my crafty players.

From their side, they see the screen and we run off dry-erase maps on the drawing card with meeple pieces or some handout maps they posess.

From my side I have three stacks of paper - left to right these are world reference, campaign log and current session sheet using my 1-Page session notes process. The reference tables I ended up tacking up on the inside of the DM screen were the family tree for their noble house (left), a generator for the various species of the kingdom for random NPCs (centre), and cards with the players own ACs and stats. These were handy laminated minis that came with the screen - also dry erase writeable.

All told I am not using a lot - paper, pencil, dice.

In practice how do we end up playing? Snacks and notes. The sorcerer is top right with laptop, the bard is lower right with notebooks and the cleric is lower left with notepad. The bard is the annalist for the campaign.

In college I used to play off a writing pad on my knees as I sat on a table and the players sat on a couch - what you see above is a pretty maximalist set up from my point of view. The key problem I am attacking with all the paper is inconsistency - I can world-build all day long but once you've got a long running campaign with history, that stuff needs to be consistent and players need to be rewarded for dwelling in the world and calling back to 'things that really happened' - hence the logs and notes.

The other major factor here is that I am a strongly theatre-of-the-mind GM, as ever I have been. I greatly admire the stacks of minis people, particularly the good terrain and minis folk but that cannot be me - I like my randomness too much and I am running a non standard world so even trying to find minis would be a pain - hence sketches and meeples. The meeples are in fact and advancement for me, I was not even using those for the first decades.

A final point, which I do not think will shock anyone, what you make the centre of the table will influence what the game is - giant battlemap? Guess we're here for a fight. Pile of snacks? We're here to roleplay.