playing adventure paths

[decipher]

so please help me out here, im knew to the pathfinder universe and got the beginner box that comes with a 2 sided map to play it's really great but i bought the abomination vaults adventure path and there is no map only in the book the size of the page. My question is when you guys play the adventure paths you are supossed the draw the map right? i bought a bigger blank flip mat to draw on it i just want to know if this is the correct way to play the game i really like it and want to understand please help.

[Jacob Jett]

Generally having graph paper is going to be helpful for the players' sakes. But you could also totally rely on description and imagination and take a theater of mind approach. This is my preferred approach when playing online because it takes me way longer to build a map in a VTT system than it does to sketch them out off the cuff as I go when we're all sitting around a table (although if you have a good camera setup, you can totally make that work). You only need something bigger than graph paper if you want to use miniatures or you want to be kind to folks' eyes. If you want to go the bigger rout, a dry-erase mat (Chessex and other companies make these) might be helpful.

EDIT: Which is to say, there isn't a "correct" or "incorrect" approach to maps.

[Phaedre]

I like buying the big 3ft x 2ft or so pads of one square inch grid paper to draw the maps for adventures on. Makes it proper size for minis on a table, but lets us still be creative and visualizing.

[Mathmuse]

The mapping tradition of tabletop roleplaying games has varied over the decades.

When I began playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1979, the miniatures where laid out on a bare tabletop and the DM gave a verbal description of the room that the party had entered. Sometimes we put pencils down on the table to mark the walls. If a player was mapping the dungeon, the DM would describe the exact dimensions of the room with respect to the doorway so that the mapper could draw it accurately. This led to a lot of perfectly rectangular rooms.

The dry-erase playmat became the standard in the 21st century, with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition describing optional rules based on the 5-foot (or 1.5-meter) square grid. I would typically draw a minimal schematic of the room on my 22-inch by 22-inch grid-marked playmat and show my players the detail map in the module itself.

A friend gave me grid paper as a gift. For some elaborate taverns or keeps I would draw the map in more detail on the grid paper in advance of the game.

If I had a PDF file of the module, I would on rare occasions copy the digital map off the PDF, scale it up so that each 5-foot-square was one inch wide, and print it on several sections of regular letter-sized paper. Then I would cut the margins off the sheets and assemble the map from them.

Some tech-savvy GMs with much more money than me own video-display tables that can display the map on the table surface.

In March 2020 due to the pandemic, my gaming group stopped meeting in person and switched to the Roll20 virtual table top. Roll20, Foundry, and perhaps other companies license the modules from Paizo and sell a map pachage to users for those modules. I am cheap and I simply copy the digital maps out of the PDFs and upload them into Roll20. I heard that a few players do that at home, playing via virtual tabletop on a big-screen television while sitting together and talking in person.

The modules sometimes skip the simpler maps, such as a road in the forest where giant spiders ambush the party. Sketching that on a playmat is easy; however, in Roll20 I search Google maps for a good picture of a forest with a dirt road and upload that.

[Jacob Jett]

Mathmuse wrote:

The dry-erase playmat became the standard in the 21st century, with Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition describing optional rules based on the 5-foot (or 1.5-meter) square grid. I would typically draw a minimal schematic of the room on my 22-inch by 22-inch grid-marked playmat and show my players the detail map in the module itself.

OTish: Weird. I got one in about '98 after playing in a game with one of my college buddies where he used a Chessex one. So I would have said, it was a late '90s innovation.

[Doug Hahn]

Jacob Jett wrote:

"correct" or "incorrect"

There is no "correct" or "incorrect" in your Pathfinder games!

The question is… how do YOU like to do maps?

APs are a framework for you to hang your creativity on, and you can tailor as much or as little as you like.

I've played PF in theater of the mind, on a map without a grid, spent hours crafting beautiful 1:1 maps complete with terrain, bought official flip maps, sketched sloppy approximations on dirty old chessex mats… heck, some people LARP Pathfidner. Do what you love.

[Dancing Wind]

Jacob Jett wrote:

OTish: Weird. I got one in about '98 after playing in a game with one of my college buddies where he used a Chessex one. So I would have said, it was a late '90s innovation.

1980s. For sure by the end of the decade, but I think Chessex was putting them out by the early 80s.

Edit:
Chessex was founded in 1987. When I have some time, I'll try to find my old vinyl mat and see if it has a copyright/publishing date on it. For sure it was before 1990

[Jacob Jett]

Dancing Wind wrote:

Jacob Jett wrote:

OTish: Weird. I got one in about '98 after playing in a game with one of my college buddies where he used a Chessex one. So I would have said, it was a late '90s innovation.

1980s. For sure by the end of the decade, but I think Chessex was putting them out by the early 80s.

Edit:
Chessex was founded in 1987. When I have some time, I'll try to find my old vinyl mat and see if it has a copyright/publishing date on it. For sure it was before 1990

This would not surprise me. I didn't start playing (A)D&D until '91 when 2nd was already out. (Although I had played once with a buddy of mine and a kid we new on a school bus traveling to/from a field trip site back in '86. All the way back in '88 I was set to get into it but then my parents "caught" me with the (A)D&D1 monster manual I'd borrowed from someone and SATANIC PANIC(TM). The next year I encountered Wizardry on the Apple IIc and being an enterprising tween by that summer I had reverse engineered into a playable TTRPG. We got to play it twice (playtest more like) before my on-again-off-again GF was SATANIC PANIC(TM). I didn't get to start DMing until I was off to college in the early 90s. As you can tell, I have some lingering trauma from the satanic panic of the 80s. So true story, I've been designing/writing/house ruling TTRPGs longer than I've been DMing them and more or less longer than I've been playing them unless you want to count one session on a bus in '86 and the old Wizardry computer game.

Apologies for the off topicness here.