Drawing the Map as You Go vs Pre-drawn Map

[setzer9999]

I find drawing the map as the PCs move about to be extremely tedious and slows down the game tremendously, especially in really complex "maze-like" areas and the like. I mean, for when I GM personally, this is one thing that almost ruins the experience for me, having to reach and crane my neck and count out squares and fiddle around on a frequent basis.

Of course, the flip side of that, pardon the pun, is that a pre-drawn seems to have a high degree of potential to tempt even the best of players to metagame their journey through a dungeon.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

[blackbloodtroll]

Dungeon tiles.

[Wolfsnap]

As Doc Brown would say:

"Please forgive the fact that this map is not exactly to scale"

When the party is exploring a dungeon, i just sketch out the rooms very roughly, sometimes with only boxes for rooms and lines for the corridors. for caves I'm even more loosey goosey, and if I'm in a hurry, I use circles and squiggly lines. I only ever draw out the area in detail when it becomes tactically relevant or there's something that the party needs to interact with.

[FallofCamelot]

I'm assuming you mean copying maps from modules and scenarios?

It doesn't bother me that much. Mrs Camelot has a habit of pre drawing a map and makes it look very nice with different colours and styles. It's a work of art really.

I on the other hand, scrawl it as I go. It's part of the game and I don't give it a second thought.

One thing that I have found when drawing caverns is not to sweat the exact dimensions, just draw it to approximate proportions and make it look similar to the one in the module.

What does bother me though is copying maps with 10 foot squares. That's really irritating...

[realityburn]

I have used all 3 methods listed here (Tiles, Battle Mat and pre-drawn on both chart grid paper and Gaming Paper rolls).

Here is an example map I made from "Hollow's Last Hope" and "Curse of the Kobold King"

Map Example

What I ended up doing for this, is I made "covers" for the interior rooms and did not reveal them until the PCs opened the door or looked in. It seemed to work very well. One thing that I have changed, is that I no longer draw in the doors, I found some Door stand-ups on-line that I printed out and use (3/4 bulldog clip as a base).

How I map Legacy of Fire as a DM:

For me it depends on what the party is doing. For instance we are going through the first module of the Legacy of Fire adventure path. For the first combat area I drew out the Monastery on Gaming Paper as it is an area I can see re-using possibly. For when the characters started to recon the ruins of Kelmarane I switched over to the battlemat as it is a very dynamic area and the module does not have any details about all of the possible locations.

I also sometimes DM a AD&D 2ed game, in that I let the plays do the mapping (no battlemap combat at all in that game) so we designate one player to be the mapper. I find that the 2ed game is a bit more "fun" and real, but that depends on your own style.