Handling the drezen map

[Caius]

The group I'm dming is about to hit the fortress and the map is rather daunting. Anyone have any advice for handling it without stalling play to draw and redraw parts of it?

[Seannoss]

Did you have Aron draw them a map of the interior? That saved so much time and was a time saving idea.

[friluftshund]

I used some very unsexy excel sheet for key areas, and the rest I just described off-map.

[Skeld]

Get some 1" grid paper, draw the rooms in advance, and cut them out. You can place them on the table as you encounter them, link them together in real-time with pieces of scotch tape, etc.

It requires investing time in prep, but it will save you time at the table.

-Skeld

[Tangent101]

Use roll20.net and have the players use laptops or tablet computers to view it. Small note - you'll need Firefox or Chrome to view roll20.

Seriously, I'm using it for my tabletop (with one Skype player) group and it's done superbly.

Edit: Extra bonus, it gives extra room on the table for snacks. ;)

[captain yesterday]

i have it tattooed somewhere on my body, if they want to see it they can bring their own magnifying glass:) it does preclude the use of minis unfortunately:)

[Aremedis]

I pre-draw all maps which could lead to protracted encounters on gaming paper ahead of time.

I'll just cover parts which haven't been explored yet.

http://www.gamingpaper.com/

[Changing Man]

If I have time ti set it up beforehand, I build a 3d version of things on a board and leave it in another room until the players arrive inside (in the case of a fortress, all they get is the outer walls). Then, I build the walls quickly inside as they explore. (Fat Dragon Game's EZ-Dungeons really are EZ to plug-and-play). Many times I even get the players involved in placing walls; they like getting 'hands-on' with the adventure that way.

If I don't have much prep-time, I just grab my Beginner Box flip-map, use the blank side, and sketch away (or let the players sketch) with OH-markers as we go along. Usually in the time it takes me to say, "You see a 20 by 30 foot room, directions X & Y. Along the X wall are defiled tapestries..." the whole room's boundaries have already been drawn.

(Edit): Forgot to mention before- this doesn't slow down play in any significant way, as the players are actively involved in setting the stage of the encounter, instead of passively listening to my descriptions.

[Aldarionn]

Tangent101 wrote:

Use roll20.net and have the players use laptops or tablet computers to view it. Small note - you'll need Firefox or Chrome to view roll20.

Seriously, I'm using it for my tabletop (with one Skype player) group and it's done superbly.

Edit: Extra bonus, it gives extra room on the table for snacks. ;)

I REALLY need to start using this. Just watched the tutorial and I like it a lot. Do you know if the maps from the PDFs can drag/drop into roll20 or if I'll need to re-draw them/export them to a specific file type?

Seems to be a much easier way to go.

[Lochar]

Yes, they can easily be drag/dropped into there. The only thing you'll have to do is make the map a bit bigger once inside roll20.

You'll have to copy the maps to paint or something and save them as .jpg or other image type files.

[Aldarionn]

Well that's easy enough. Does the program automatically read grids existing on maps? In the tutorial video the guy dragged a map into the workspace and then moved his goblins which automatically snapped into place on the grid.

I'm going to have a lot more questions. I think I may need to spend some time searching tutorials on YouTube!

[Lochar]

There is a grid, yes. However it's set at 70 pixels a square so you'll need to make the map larger and then line up your grid lines. Not a hard thing to do.

There's actually an option called Align to Grid where you measure out a 3x3 box of grids and it'll resize the map for you.

[Tangent101]

Huh. You can drag PDF files into there? I had no idea! I've been copying the map into GIMP (screenshot) and editing out a bit of it to work from there. That should make some things easier... (though I still have to make or find maps for the first half of The Shackled Hut...)

[Lochar]

No, you can't drag PDFs in there Tangent, sorry if I misspoke. But don't screenshot into GIMP, it flattens the layers. Open it with Adobe Reader, select the image, and ctrl c to copy it out. That'll copy out the map without the GM layer stuff.

[Tangent101]

I unselect everything I don't want the players to see and then do Control-Print Screen. That way flattened layers doesn't hurt things.

[Lochar]

You actually use the interactive PDFs? I'm sorry.

[Tangent101]

I use both. I use the interactive PDFs so I can turn off details I don't want the players to see and screenshot those. When there's no details I'm concerned about I'll snag it from the book. But to be honest, the interactive map is convenient in some ways because all the maps are in one area. If they'd undo the interactive bit and just offer two sets of maps (one for players, one for GMs) I'd be quite happy. But for a short copy-paste run, the interactives don't piss me off enough not to use them for that one purpose.