protip: don't cross them off, write who they are on the list (eg "Rivermeadow blacksmith") so you can remember when the players come back to them a million sessions later
I think as a teenager I played a lot of Bards because being likeable and everyone doing what you say is kind of nice when you're an awkward disempowered kid, but nowadays I mix it up. Mostly just because playing the same character repeatedly would get kind of boring for me, and I want to explore different territory, even if it's on the level of "original the hedgehog donut steal"
I’ve always just treated it as a natural 3D extension of the 2D grid rules
I believe that's how it's handled in D&D too, or at least how my table has always done it. I meant more as a practical matter, you're very unlikely to have a vertical wall grid and some kind of stand of the correct height for your minis, so you can't just count squares like you would for horizontal movement. That's when the Pythagorean Theorem comes up in my experience.
Dan Savage at least has repeatedly apologized and cut that shit out a long time ago.