In all my years of GMing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, I have never once used a map. I've barely ever even rolled any dice. So, suffice it to say that I know nothing of mapping in this game.
What I'm curious to know is how many maps you guys who do use them usually have, and how big are they? Do they take forever to draw? What do you do when the PCs try to leave the map area?
In all my years of GMing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, I have never once used a map. I've barely ever even rolled any dice. So, suffice it to say that I know nothing of mapping in this game.
What I'm curious to know is how many maps you guys who do use them usually have, and how big are they? Do they take forever to draw? What do you do when the PCs try to leave the map area?
I prefer the big battlemats, and it normally takes me no more than 1 minutes to draw a map. It is normally not in the PC's favor to leave the map so I have never seen it happen. If they leave then the bad guys shore up, escape, or give chase if it were to happen.
I would also have a second map if I thought my players would leave.
RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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I've barely ever even rolled any dice.
How do you manage that? Do you not present your players with challenges against which they might not succeed? They never have to gather information with a diplomacy check? They never need a knowledge check? No combat? No environmental hazards to avoid (or fail to avoid)?
I'm rather curious about your games.
What I'm curious to know is how many maps you guys who do use them usually have, and how big are they? Do they take forever to draw? What do you do when the PCs try to leave the map area?
In my experience, dry-erase grids are popular. Walls are drawn onto them and you move minis around. But you really only even use maps if you're in combat or some other situation where positioning matters.
When the PCs leave the map area, you abandon the map. Usually, a map is used when you enter a room and discover bad guys who want to fight. The walls of the room serve as borders, the desire to move onward prevents leaving the way you came in (unless you really need to retreat), and the ire of the monsters prevents you from leaving via other exits until you deal with them (or sneak past).
As for size and the time required to draw, it really depends on the map. A simple cave room is like, two curvy lines and you're done. The main auditorium of an opera house is kind of a bigger deal, with seating and the stage and curtains and an orchestra pit and blech and blah and poo.
I've barely ever even rolled any dice.How do you manage that? Do you not present your players with challenges against which they might not succeed? They never have to gather information with a diplomacy check? They never need a knowledge check? No combat? No environmental hazards to avoid (or fail to avoid)?
I'm rather curious about your games.
Back in high school I usually played D&D while walking home or to the library or wherever with my friends, so we had no table for maps or dice. So, what we'd do instead is tell whoever was GMing what we wanted to do, and the GM would decide if it worked, and if not what happened. No dice would enter the equation. It was basically "what the GM says, goes". Now, since we were all RPers and were more focused on advancing the story than on always winning, screwing with the PCs, or making the GM play fair, this worked for us. However, I've since moved to another state, and now I'm interested in playing the traditional way (with dice). I get dice just fine, but I've never used a map, so I could use some help on how they are created.
My group uses dry-erase grids, the time it takes to draw a map depends on the size of the map (obviously) and the experience of the one drawing it (for example i am still kinda slow on the drawing but one other player in the group with years of map drawing experience draws them at half time)
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RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32, RPG Superstar 2012 Top 32
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Back in high school I usually played D&D while walking home or to the library or wherever with my friends, so we had no table for maps or dice. So, what we'd do instead is tell whoever was GMing what we wanted to do, and the GM would decide if it worked, and if not what happened. No dice would enter the equation. It was basically "what the GM says, goes". Now, since we were all RPers and were more focused on advancing the story than on always winning, screwing with the PCs, or making the GM play fair, this worked for us. However, I've since moved to another state, and now I'm interested in playing the traditional way (with dice). I get dice just fine, but I've never used a map, so I could use some help on how they are created.
How interesting! I never thought of having a "while you walk" campaign...
Back in high school I usually played D&D while walking home or to the library or wherever with my friends, so we had no table for maps or dice. So, what we'd do instead is tell whoever was GMing what we wanted to do, and the GM would decide if it worked, and if not what happened. No dice would enter the equation. It was basically "what the GM says, goes". Now, since we were all RPers and were more focused on advancing the story than on always winning, screwing with the PCs, or making the GM play fair, this worked for us. However, I've since moved to another state, and now I'm interested in playing the traditional way (with dice). I get dice just fine, but I've never used a map, so I could use some help on how they are created.How interesting! I never thought of having a "while you walk" campaign...
The best part is that as GMs, we actually didn't do much preparation. We came up with a general idea for the plot, then we just made the smaller stuff up on the fly. That was so much fun, because it meant that if the PCs did something unexpected the GM could easily roll with it, leading to a campaign that ended up far different than what was originally intended.
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I suggest you watch one of our game sessions. Reading a precis of a gaming style is no substitute for just observing how all of this is done.
You can watch our session tonight here Our live Kingmaker game will start on that channel 9:00 and 9:30 p.m. est tonight, too. (About one hour and a half from now).
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Are these sessions audio or video?
And can you watch them at a later date? I'm in the wrong timezone to sit up and watch you live.
They are usually saved for six days or so. We didn't play last week (or weekend) due to Neoncon so the usual saved vids are not there.
It's Justin TV. Video + audio. The vid feed is of our battlemap and that is the same vid feed we use for the battlemap in our game for remote players. You don't get to see our Skype feed with all faces, however.
Note: it's an adult session, intended for adults. This is the Kingmaker campaign we talk about on the podcast.
In all my years of GMing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, I have never once used a map. I've barely ever even rolled any dice. So, suffice it to say that I know nothing of mapping in this game.
What I'm curious to know is how many maps you guys who do use them usually have, and how big are they? Do they take forever to draw? What do you do when the PCs try to leave the map area?
I'm willing to bet that most players and DMs around here use maps in some ways or others, be it as simple as 'X's on a blackboard to represent who's where, to precise grid-and-mini action on a carefully drawn map and accessories. There's also the whole world of modeling that acts as a map.
But maps are mainly used to 'make it work' altogether as a group. If you managed to make it work without, I'm not convinced you'd get much of an enhanced experience by using a map. But who knows, you might discover something that works better for you.
To answer your second question, maps take the time you are willing to invest in them; from 5 sec to many hours. Personally, I find that in order to get a real enhanced gaming experience out of maps, you need to spend a minimum of time on them; a few minutes in my case. I also like to draw maps on a larger scale (village, ruins, fief of the local baron etc), something not used for combat but to grasp the lay of the land. I can easily invest an hour on those, oftentimes more.
Then there are the printed flip-mats. They're a bit more circumstantial but beautiful and ready to use. Such a shame most don't come in hexes...
'findel
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What I'm curious to know is how many maps you guys who do use them usually have, and how big are they? Do they take forever to draw? What do you do when the PCs try to leave the map area?
Depending on the size of the area, I have anywhere from three to five maps ready to go. I pre-draw on flip-mats and battle mats, as well as gaming paper.
I'll usually have one or two of my flip-mats blank for times I need to draw a quick map, and for really small areas I use single sheets of gaming paper. Those single sheets are also useful if I need to make additions to a map due to PCs running off the edge, and can also be prepped before the game to be laid down as the PCs explore, one room per sheet.
When I have a really huge dungeon, such as Shackled City's Jzadirune, I've taken the image and blown it up digitally and printed out a larger size for the players to track their movement on, with individual areas being drawn when combat occurs in them. A little Photoshopping is needed to hide secret areas, which I reveal with pasted on cutouts when the PCs find them. This does take a little trust in the players, since they can see the whole dungeon minus secrets, but still works since they don't know what is in the rooms until they explore them. (The fact that the party is given a map with the room outlines helps this a bit, but not every campaign will be like that.)
try this for mapping: gaming paper .
Typical combat squares are 5' per square; larger terrain is up to you. A decent buy for cheap. Downsides are the paper is thin- I find that lightly sketching in pencil followed by marker finish outlines well; crayons,markers and colored pencils all work well on the sepia-tinted paper. The paper rolls well and is pretty durable. Buy 4 rolls for optimum economy. Beyond that, it's your imagination!
Our host has a tabletop grid made from pegboard with a plastic top; this serves well for quick maps. I use the game paper for important places I want done ahead of time (I'm a terrible on-the-spot cartographer, ask my players.)
Maps give our games the physicality of the rules- spells, feats, movement, etc. I love your walking-home games! For maps, gaming paper is cheap and portable.
A easy convenient solution I've come up with as a GM is to use a large post-it like pad of 1" squared paper, you can pick up a pad of about 100 sheets for 12-15 bucks at Staples or Walmart & the sheets are about 3 feet by 2 feet, so plenty for a simple combat's map and if you stick 4 or 6 together you can create a truly epic battleground. That and moving from area to area is easy, "Done killing the troll army? Okay, tear off the top sheet, that's the Colosseum."
For battles I've almost always used a battlemat or large graph paper. In my current campaign the GM drew a world map (which is currently only one continent) as well as town maps. All of them were photocopied for us, though we only get town maps for places we've been in character so the people who have been in the group longer have more maps than me. Though I'd also be interested to try a game without dice or visuals. Could be fun.
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When I was very young, before I got into D+D or the sort of games worth "nerd cred", I played board games. Chess, checkers, parcheesi, you name it-- anything I could get my dad or the neighbor kids to play with me, I'd play. So for me, the minis and the map are some of the most fun of the game-- they make Pathfinder feel like a board game. Now that I'm DMing, I love raking time before the game sessions to dream up different types of terrains and drawing maps, trying to make each combat a memorable one not just through what the players are fighting, but where they're fighting and how they (or I) can use the terrain advantageously.
If you and your friends like board games, you'll like playing with the dice and map. It's a different experience than the "all vocal" games you're used to, but
As for paper, I just used MSPaint to draw out a grid. I saved the grid as its own file, and then I can print off more whenever I need them, and draw whatever I want on them. I've also had good experiences with graph paper as well as dry erase boards with pre-printed grids (though in those cases I like to take notes beforehand).
I love playing with maps. A bit of advice is to make sure you have an established party line up. This will help if you catch your party flatfooted with AOE spells. This is more as a pre combat/map thing. I myself have a large hex map and Tact-Tiles. Tact-Tiles are no longer made but there are some great articles on how to make them.