D&D 5E Does anyone still do mapping?

Zardnaar said:

RAW it doesn't AFAIK. It did in AD&D, 5E IDK. It takes 1 round to use a skill check and unless you have a dex based party or a party not in heavy armor creeping usually doesn't work.

I mean you can believe what yo like but RAW a small dungeon seems to be a 5-10 minute job of game time (unless you take a short rest).

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mrpopstar said:

I'm using an example sourced directly from the Basic Rules (page 63): "In a dungeon environment, the adventurers' movement happens on a scale of minutes. It takes about a minute to creep down a long hallway, another minute to check for traps on the door at the end of the hall, and a good ten minutes to search the chamber beyond for anything interesting or valuable."

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iserith said:

A slow pace in the dungeon (which is what you want to be at if you want to stealth around or try to find traps) has characters moving 200 feet in 1 minute. There is no rule for how long it takes to check for traps or disable them so far as I know, except that a thief can disarm a trap as a bonus action. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

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Sacrosanct said:

Back in the day, we had a mapper. One of the players would have graph paper and do their best to map out the dungeons. I don't see that so much anymore. Not even with my own group. There is some speculation around that. For example, it takes A LOT of time for the DM to describe the room in detail, and then map it out, and now as adults with jobs and kids and families, our gaming time is limited so we don't want to spend it on mapping. The other thought is that also back in the day, you had to map when you played video games. Due to graphics and non-smooth movement, every tile looked like every other tile and if you didn't map, you'd get lost. Is it a coincidence that our desire to map in D&D stopped at around the same time video games started doing the mapping for you?

So how to you handle it? Many times, I'll print out the actual map with all the details blank, and just let the players use that as a reference. It just speeds things way up. But I feel like it's almost like cheating that way, and the players are missing out.

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mrpopstar said:

I'm using an example sourced directly from the Basic Rules (page 63): "In a dungeon environment, the adventurers' movement happens on a scale of minutes. It takes about a minute to creep down a long hallway, another minute to check for traps on the door at the end of the hall, and a good ten minutes to search the chamber beyond for anything interesting or valuable."

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iserith said:

I'm also using the rules in Xanathar's for tool and skill use. Someone proficient with cartographer's tools can Draw a Map and perform some other activity at the same time which usually means the character is also Keeping Watch and has a chance to avoid surprise.

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Zardnaar said:

Is that reprinted in the PHB? I was using the 1 round thing from the skills section. Either way Rogue can do it in a bonus action since its a specific rule yes? I'll have a look tomorrow myself its late here.

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Eltab said:

I just got to read through Xanathar myself, and this section was one of the highlights to me.

I figure the map you make while keeping watch at the same time isn't high-quality; it has a lot of scribbled notes on it. Real angle of turn in the road, distance travelled (or time to travel between benchmarks), line of hills indicated with "X-----X" instead of drawing hills, river indicated with wavy line, &c. I would call it a draft rather than A Map.

The character can get another sheet of paper and turn his draft into a Map, when he is concentrating on the task at hand.

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Zardnaar said:

Is that reprinted in the PHB? I was using the 1 round thing from the skills section. Either way Rogue can do it in a bonus action since its a specific rule yes? I'll have a look tomorrow myself its late here.

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