Requiring Players To Draw The Dungeon Map!

[Malk]

I agree with you.

I also prefer the chance of getting lost to be tied to the skills and actions of the characters, not whether or not the players spent time scratching out squares on paper.

Further, I can not imagine a more boring activity than trying to draw a map by oral dictation, If required, I think I would bow out of such a game. If I wanted to feel like a confused idiot with poor direction sense, I wouldnt have to roleplay heh.

 

[Lanefan]

They can map if they like, and I'll take the time to describe things so they can. If they choose not to, fine; but they'll get no sympathy from me when they get confused about where they are.

The hardest ones to map are the natural cavern systems with lots of intersecting little irregular passages and rooms. We had this come up last week; we'd found such a system and explored by always going left until we got beat up and had to retreat. Next day, we returned and explored by always going right until we again got clobbered. Third day we went up the middle, and our mapping had been so awful that what was in the middle area simply wouldn't fit between the left and right branches as we'd mapped them. What a mess!

Lanefan

 

[starwed]

Further, I can not imagine a more boring activity than trying to draw a map by oral dictation, If required, I think I would bow out of such a game. If I wanted to feel like a confused idiot with poor direction sense, I wouldnt have to roleplay heh.

The "oral dication" thing is dead on. If the DM is somehow showing the dungeon to you visually, it wouldn't be too bad to map it, and probably would help with the immersion.

But the DM describing every last detail of the maze? Not interesting.

 

[Drakmar]

I have found that having a large laminated grid on the table, and drawing on it with whiteboard markers works well. If they want to map it so be it.. if not so be it. I prefer to let the game flow. If I have decided to be a bastard, at the beginning of the dungeon I will pipe up with "this place seems a little confusing", somebody roll wisdom.. success.. you feel that getting lost here could be easy....

And then they can choose their own adventure.. mwa hahahahaah... I mean. um.. yeah...

 

[grodog]

Obviously mapping isn't required for a game, and I certainly wouldn't force it upon players who had no interest in mapping. IMO It's more like miniatures rather than dice: you don't need minis to play the game (even in 3.x), but many people find it a more enjoyable experience playing with minis, and painting them flexes some fun creative muscles; dice OTOH, are more of a hard-requirement to enjoy the game---you can certainly play D&D without dice via chits or spinners or a random number generator on a PC, but using dice enhances the experience of playing D&D.

That said, as various folks have aptly raised, mapping in the game is likely one of those generational things in D&D: if you grew up mapping and liked it (plenty of folks didn't, even back in the day), it's a fun part of the experience of being a player in a D&D game. I.e., it's not about whether or not the PCs have any proper mapping materials, or whether the PCs have a 24 intelligence, or direction sense, or whatever: its something that adds (or subtracts) to the play experience of the player, and that is why, IMO, so many people hate mapping so vehemently: it's not because it's not logical for a PC to map well or not based on his stats, it's because the player simply doesn't enjoy it.*

* I also think that DM skills at providing easy mapping descriptions are something that takes practice to do well, and DMs who can't describe the game so that players can map it easily would make the mapping experience pretty horrific.

 

[green slime]

Nope. Tried it, abandoned it, for reasons already stated above by PC and others.

 

[Driddle]

I remember several games when I was younger in which we would painstakingly map every length and turn specifically because we knew the DM was likely to cram a secret corridor or extra room in the spaces between. (What we might now call a "Tetris dungeon" -- it was long before that game hit the market.) In that case, tedium paid off.

 

[blargney the second]

I usually make up the battlemats ahead of time and just plunk them down on the table. If there's a pressing need to prevent the players from seeing what comes ahead, I'll cover it up with sheets of paper.

I run an Eberron game, so I strive to get on with the action because that's when the cool stuff happens.
-blarg

 

[Zendragon]

There was recently an article about needing bigger rooms now that D&D combat is so dependent upon miniatures. Has this had any effect on anyone's mapping?

Chad

Yes it has. In the current adventure, I could reason that the hallways were 20'wide and had larger rooms because we were in a pyramid (south america style, not egyptian). Part was sealed off and part was still used as a temple. Hallways needed to be large so material could be moved and rooms had to be large for storage. After this one, I am not sure what I will do. Think of the house were you are now, the largest room probably isn't any bigger than 20x20 and hallways are no where near 5 foot wide. For aa better scale, I am thinking about changing each square to 2 1/2 ft sq.

 

[Gentlegamer]

"You enter an off centre T-shaped room. The north-south section is 60 feet by 30 feet. There is an east-west section 20 by 30 feet which connects with the north-south section on its eastern wall, 10 feet from the south end and 30 feet from the north end. There are five doors. Two on the western wall, one 15 feet from the south and one 15 feet from the north. One is on the northern wall of the smaller eastern section, 5 feet from the east. One is on the eastern wall of the eastern section, in the centre. The last is on the southern wall of the north-south section, also in the centre. This is the door by which you entered."

The players won't get this kind of precise description unless they spend time examining the room, possibly with surveying tools.

It's much more of a challenge for the players, to convert the spoken word to a visual representation, than it would be for the characters, who can easily see the room layout.

The purpose of the game is to challenge the players.

In regard to mapping, it is interesting to note that many of the DM mapping "tricks" (teleporters, shifting walls, etc.) suggested in the original D&D rules were developed by Gary Gygax to challenge Rob Kuntz, whose near photographic memory allowed him to regularly adventure without manual mapping.