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I'm curious as how you handle game maps that are BIG? (see my Scarwall map thread for an example.)
Do you keep washing and erasing a battlemap? Print it out? What?
I'd like to know how this is handled by y'all.
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When I wasn't sure where combat was going to take place, I would just print a large map with blanked out secret areas, and draw out combat on mats. When I needed a large area combat map, I use Gaming Paper. When I wanted to lay the map out room by room and combat could come at any moment, I used the Gaming Paper single sheets.
I've got large sheets of paper with squares that I draw the larger maps onto with markers. It can take a long time and be a major pain but once you've drawn something you can use it over and over again.
I'm curious as how you handle game maps that are BIG? (see my Scarwall map thread for an example.)
Do you keep washing and erasing a battlemap? Print it out? What?
I'd like to know how this is handled by y'all.
At this point, I'd be using an online map tool, but that's because I'm 300 miles away from my group...
Actually, those work REALLY well for big maps. We played a Star Wars game where the weapon fire actually made it out of point-blank range! Imagine that! Longbows that actually have range-increment penalties!
Before Maptools, I took advantage of the fact that I live alone and built some rather elaborate and interesting maps using various tools and toys. Since the party saw the map by web-cam, I was able to actually create a fun 3D world, hide miniatures behind obstacles, etc. One of my favorites was a battle in a reactor chamber where I built bridges and drop-offs and then used a working fluorescent light tube as the horizontal reactor core. It created a really vivid scene on the webcam.
(As an aside, the webcam could be used to create vfx as well, I would play with the saturation and hue to create a night scene, etc.)
Ahem. As for D&D/PF there are some interesting options that folks can try, the first is to alter the scale. i.e. make a 5'square count as a 10' square, or even a 20' square.
But for a traditional dungeon, unless there is a large number of combatants or a need to have a running battle through various rooms, I would draw it piece by piece. If I thought the group was going to need to backtrack (and do so with accuracy), I might draw it on several map sheets, but usually a draw/erase approach worked fine, if annoying at times.
As for a large battle planned out ahead of time, I find a special treat is to create the entire map for the party. I've used this for skirmish/mass combat scenes or desperate final battles. One of my favorite was when the bad-guys tracked the PCs back to the stronghold they were using (the moat-house in ToEE) and did a last-ditch effort to wipe out the village of Hommlet and its defenders. I built the entire moathouse in two 3D set-ups, and let the party position the militia and other defenders. Then invaded. It was a blast, though I dominated my poor Mom's living room for two days setting up. She got a kick out of it, though, I think.
If, however, the party will need to go through several rooms several times (there's an old AD&D adventure, The Lost Island of Castanamir, or some such, which uses portals and rooms with odd connections), I would draw or print out the maps to save time in the drawing.
Truthfully, though, I'm sort of hooked on MapTools at this point. The light and visibility tools are far too priceless (even if it took my group a while to get used to them). The fact that I'm a graphic artist and can tweak pre-made maps to make some great environments helps as well. Heck, I've even built small panoramas and taken photos of them to use, or screen captured a scene on Google Maps satellite (for a beach image). It's really a fantastic resource. I've even considered going grid-less, since you can track distance very easily.
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Well, I was somewhat battling with the same problem recently using DungeonADay.com instead of scarwall. I ended up caving a bit though. Even the individual floors were too big for me to go too crazy on for my in person group when some of the single rooms are too big for a 3x3 foot battle mat and there is something like 50 rooms on the first floor.
What I ended up doing was getting a huge sheet of graph paper and have been sketching out the rooms as they go on that, using tiny dice as tokens to keep track of marching order and where they are located. When combat breaks out we pull the graph paper away to show the battle mat below and use that for the fight.
I drew all of scarwall.
I have it in a poster tube behind me. Every room but the courtyard.
I like to think my players found it refreshing to just be able to explore in any direction they wanted because I had the entire map ready. And it really helped to give a scale to just how large Scarwall was.
Plus, random encounters and such and such. Fun stuff.
Would never do it again! :P But I have a mantra that no dungeon is too big, just awaiting some purposeful cuts and smashing together of rooms.
I saw an upcoming series of maps for Serpents Skull were something like... 700x450, 400x380, and 380 by 320 or some nonsense. Entire rooms in this megadungeon as large as my 47x32 chessex map.
Now that is too big.
my group used to use a gigantic chessex mat and dry erase. since i started running huge dungeons it has become obsolete. During the last big story arc I got the idea to create a mini game where the party had to defend a bridge, I used a chess board. The pcs got to fight across the bridge and fend off a army ( 300 anyone ?)
Since then the smaller tiles and lay outs work fine for us when we have a puzzle or combat situation.
Doing up a whole town siege battle in 25mm should be fun.