D&D 5E Dungeon Using a Large Mat.

[not-so-newguy]

When my group played through the World's Largest Dungeon, we used the maps provided but bought a piece of lexan, or plexiglass to cover them, and then used a dry erase to black it all out, and erased as we explored.

A 3'x3' section at Lowes or Homedepot was like 15$ at the time.

Mostly humans in the party, so light will play a big part exploration. This seems to allow for that. I think this is the way I'll go. Thanks!

Eta: crayola ultra washable pens! I knew there was something better than what I had.

 

[Herr der Qual]

In the group I play in we actually did away with mats, instead we use Maptool by RPTools (http://rptools.net/), so now, I have a large monitor on the coffee table, the DM takes the captains chair, the players sit on the couches we each have a laptop and a LAN set up, he uploads the maps with cool features like light settings and we can move our characters around, we roll actual dice on the coffee table and have enough room to write things down and all that good stuff. The large monitor displays the map, my Laptop is hooked up the monitor, so I can have my character and all my good stuff open on my screen and I can move my guy around and the main map, so can the DM. I wasn't sure how much I was going to like it, but it allows for so much more mystery than mats and it's a helluva lot of fun.

 

[Kinak]

My spouse and I both GM. She will usually draw entire levels out in advance and cut up an old black T-shirt to get pieces to cover everything (one piece to a room). You can see some examples on my tumblr.

If I draw things out in advance, it's usually encounter-by-encounter on gaming paper. The smaller encounters use their single sheets. The big ones I'll grab the rolls.

Cheers!
Kinak

 

[transtemporal]

When my group played through the World's Largest Dungeon, we used the maps provided but bought a piece of lexan, or plexiglass to cover them, and then used a dry erase to black it all out, and erased as we explored.

A 3'x3' section at Lowes or Homedepot was like 15$ at the time.

Thats an excellent idea. *steals*

 

[Blackbrrd]

For the last dungeon I ran, I used a pre-drawn map of the dungeon with a black layer on top. I used the pen as an eraser for the black layer, revealing the relevant parts of the map as they explored. It worked really well.

The software I used was GIMP and the hardware was my Surface 3 pro.

 

[darjr]

I saw a video that suggested couch covers. Dry erase worked on them and the laid them over inch graph paper.

 

[Authweight]

To me it's always been easier to just let them see it and trust them not to metagame too bad. If I really want to keep a surprise I'll draw it as I go. My dungeons usually aren't super large though, I often draw the whole thing to combat scale in advance.