I usually have a sheet of paper on the table to track where the PCs have already explored.
However, to speed up the process of bothing updating that map and drawing up the whole location for myself, I don't draw up every single room and door in detail. Instead, I just make a bunch of circles that represent all the relevant places in that location, and connect them with lines to show which of these places are connected to each other.
Since I don't use grid combat either, it's completely sufficient to make a circle called "prison". If the PCs should get into a fight there, we'll usually just need to know that they are fighting in a 3 meter wide corridor that has cells on either side. No real need to draw up every single cell, store room, guard room, toilet, and so on.
In a movie or a book, you never get to see the complete castle or spaceship either, only the places where something happens. And you can do that in an RPG as well without problems.
Using grid combat:
I draw the map on an erasable battle mat. I only draw bits in that the PCs can see.
I don't worry too much about precisely representing pre-drawn maps - usually it doesn't really matter if the room is five squares wide or six. Pacing takes priority.
An alternative would be to draw the whole map in advance and cover it up with blank sheets of paper, then remove them a bit at a time to reveal new terrain.
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It depends on what the map is of. I find that most of the time showing too much at once takes away from the game as the players try and "fill it in". But if I let them only see what they need to see, well then their focus is on the area or encounter of the moment.
When setting up for a combat, I draw what they can see.
The rest I describe, sketching only if the players can't visualize something.
If they want a map of the dungeon, they need to make it, not me.
I usually use an erasable battle mat and draw rooms/areas as the PCs enter them and can see. I don't undraw the map sections once they've seen them unless I need to make more space for a new area. Same approach when I use tiles. Now I have on rare occasion had the PCs have a full map they are working from that I've predrawn given time, but it's possible that their map isn't entirely accurate which they'll discover if they go to the right places.
I don't use a battle mat at all, unless there's insanely complicated terrain with lots of combatants and chokepoints and stuff. Usually I just describe the area, and the PCs describe what they're doing, and we play like that. Naturally, I have a map for my own reference, and the party is welcome to try and create their own as they go, but I don't draw it for them.
So it looks like someone board-crawler script necroed this thread, Liz deleted the post that necroed it, but then the convo gets revived. Interesting. Actually looks like a good conversation that got buried last time.
So...
Well, if I have a map of an area created beforehand, I won't necessarily show the party the whole map... i.e., I don't draw it along as they progress through the area (the players are of course welcome to if they choose). The players usually don't need to see the exact map unless they're in combat, which is when anything gets drawn on the battlemap (or the closest resembling flip map gets pulled out).
Now, I keep any area maps _I_ draw in a Campaign Cartographer file on my laptop, with all my DM symbols (secret doors, etc.) on its own layer. So if my description fails to be adequate (something I try to avoid, but can't be perfect about), I just hide the GM layer, zoom in on the area that they need to look at, and then show it to them straight from the laptop.
If I'm in my group with my blind players and my description is failing to get through to them, then I use the tiles I keep at my battleboard and try to quickly build a rough resemblance of the room, where they can feel the tiles representing the walls and furniture.
There have been a couple of threads on drawing maps in the past year or so. It's not a subject that gets discussed a lot, which is sort of surprising considering how important maps are to the game.
Here's my take on "maps". (I put "maps" in quotes because I utilize terrain elements so some of my "maps" are actually physical objects like buildings, tunnels, hills, ruins, etc...)
First, I tend not to draw out detailed maps for my encounters. I used to. I have an entire notebook filled with highly detailed maps of an underground dwarven city. I have a four foot by eight foot map of a goblin lair. (Yes, it's that big.) I have a map about half that size for a kobold lair. I learned in playing through those campaigns that I must have spent literal days mapping out in fine detail areas of the world that the PCs never ended up even walking through. So I started looking for ways to avoid wasting that much effort.
Second, I like to provide my players with maps of the general area. The idea is that they will find maps in libraries or there might be hand-drawn maps of supposed treasure locations, etc. These are not battle-grid maps, they are like Rand-McNally road maps, but with very little detail, or else they are crudely scribbled "maps" that might have nothing but a few scrawls indicating local landmarks. These are great for atmosphere but I deliberately make some of them somewhat inaccurate.
For actual battle grid gameplay I have several techniques that I use, sometimes I combine techniques. Here is a short list of my techniques, more or less in order of frequency of use:
1. I have a large battle mat that almost covers our gaming table. I use dry erase markers to draw rough outlines of roads, buildings, etc. For casual map use, such as arranging marching order, giving an idea of the local terrain, size of the road, creeks or rivers, etc. I just hand-draw them in as the party moves through an area.
2. For significant areas I will pull terrain elements from my GM bag and place them on the battle mat where they belong. This usually includes buildings, trees, hills, etc. A fairly typical situation might be having the battle mat with rough drawings of a road and a river with a wizards tower on a hill, a bridge over the river and a bunch of trees or rock outcroppings placed randomly around the area.
3. For the really important boss fights I might have extensive terrain built so that much of the table is covered in 3D elements including furniture, stairs, lamps, etc.
On occasion I will still use my digital gaming table and display maps I've drawn on my computer.
Here is what both Lamontia and I do
(many thanks to Katie and Joanna from SD for allowing us to steal- erm, learn this from them)
1. For a map from a scenario, module or AP chapter, I copy it into Photoshop/Gimp, blow it up with math and science, then chop up the large image with Posterazor into a printable multi-paged PDF file for color laser printing
2. Lamontia and I assemble the map using double-sided tape or glue sticks
3. We place the map on the table under a sheet of clear colorless plexiglass, which serves to both flatten out the map and keep it from sliding, ripping or being spilled on. also, you can write directly on plexiglass with eraseable marker without marking up your map
4. we place 'fog of war' all over the map, made up of dozens and dozens of squares of black construction paper weighted with coins/washers. As the PCs venture further into the map, the squares are slowly brushed away as their vision allows them to see further into rooms, halls, etc.
Lamontius, that sounds remarkably similar to what I used to do. Except instead of the plexiglas I used clear shelving paper to cover the map which made it waterproof and sturdy. Then I rolled it up and carried it in a cardboard tube.
That was a lot of work though. So I built my digital gaming table and then I started using programs like "MapTools", some of which provide "fog of war" as a feature.
But then I got the 3D terrain bug. That caused a re-thinking of my whole mapping technique.
I'm still trying to figure out how to work the digital table in with the 3D terrain...
I have done Terraclips over printed illustrated grid maps, resulting in some very nice setups for 3D terrain, especially in urban or dungeon settings
for example, I ran the Beginner Box module awhile back for some folks who had never played before. I built out the depth/height/walls of the flip mat catacombs included with the Beginner Box out of Terraclips dungeon sets, so certain rooms were higher than others, stairs led down to others, etc.
one of the biggest limitations of terraclips, however, is the five-foot-wide hallway...or lack thereof