WoTC are you listening

I could see that this might be useful to some people, but I question whether that segment is large enough to even bother spending time on this.

mhensley said:

Their new adventures should be made mappable with their new dungeon tiles. Synergy people, think of the synergy!

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Yeah, I was thinking that when running Scourge of the Howling Horde. Though, it's not hard to map the basic floorplan (though that cavern was tricky).

Hussar said:

Why not just enlarge the map? It's not like you lose a whole lot of detail ramping it up. Then again, I've never bumped it quite that much.

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It's not about the loss of detail. It's about getting the exact same amout of detail, but ballooned up to ten times its original size. All we can really do is make jagged pixels big enough to clearly see. If we have an art program, we can use anti-alias to make the result a little less jagged and a lot more blurry. The result is not very attractive as a battlemap.

JustKim said:

I don't think folks from Wizards come by here much anymore. You might have better luck posting somewhere closer to home.

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They're here.

They don't always post, but they are always watching.

Making battlemats out of WotC maps can be fun. I count it in as part of my DM prep work.

I scan 8.5 x 11 chunks of a map at around 600 dpi. I copy and paste them into a Word or Publish program and grab a corner and enlarge it to 1 inch scale, then I print. That's it. It's really not that big a deal if you have 15-20 minutes, a printer, and a scanner. And they don't come out horriddly pixilated or anything. They're not art, but they sure serve a game purpose.

I brought up the idea of mini-sized maps to WotC at a GenCon seminar. They suggested instead (because of bandwidth again) that I submit an article to the WotC web site on "how to scan and enlarge maps for you game". I tried multiple times and never got a response back.

As for enlarging maps, they are obviously time savers and a good idea. Heck, the WotC employee I brought it up to in the discussion room asked if he could send me all the maps he's using in his game for enlargement purposes.

-DM Jeff

Corsair said:

I could see that this might be useful to some people, but I question whether that segment is large enough to even bother spending time on this.

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They already create the maps, we're just asking for them to be distributed at a higher resolution.

What's the point of spending all that time and effort creating nice looking tactical maps that (currently) only the DM gets to see? Especially when the new adventure format places such a huge emphasis on them.

To me, it's the next logical step of the "easy to run" philosophy behind the delve format.

If they don't want to do this, another nice thing WotC could do is officially sanction the distribution of user created maps, like Goodman Games does.

hexgrid said:

They already create the maps, we're just asking for them to be distributed at a higher resolution.

What's the point of spending all that time and effort creating nice looking tactical maps that (currently) only the DM gets to see? Especially when the new adventure format places such a huge emphasis on them.

To me, it's the next logical step of the "easy to run" philosophy behind the delve format.

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Battlemap packs with the necessary minis included for each adventure? Or by encounter?

Mark CMG said:

Battlemap packs with the necessary minis included for each adventure? Or by encounter?

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I spoke with Andy Collins about that about 18 months ago. Let's just say at the time the answer was, eh..."No". Minis production (molding process) was simply not set up to deal with this change in distribution method.

I'd say that there seems to be some demand for this idea. I too would pay for this

hexgrid said:

What's the point of spending all that time and effort creating nice looking tactical maps that (currently) only the DM gets to see?

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Exactly. Heck, I've used a number of the maps from Weapons of Legacy for incedental encounters after "blowing them up" to scale.

Now if I can find a way for the cartographers to keep the room #'s firmly in a single square, and avoid callout lines...

Edit: Actually, in an increasing number of WotC/Paizo products recently I have noticed a curiously large number of rooms that happen to be no larger than 8.5 x 11 squares. If this was a conscious decision or an accident, I am benefitting!

-DM Jeff

hexgrid said:

It's extra work, and they do look pretty bad enlarged that far.

And after enlarging you have to figure out how to print it broken up into tiles (assuming you have a normal sized printer.)

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Actually, Acrobat will tile them for you when printing if you ask it to, and 30 seconds in a photo program (even Microsoft Photo Editor) will enlarge them very easily.

Of course, that doesn't address the fact that they still look pretty bad enlarged that much. Just putting my voice in as another who would appreciate having large-scale, decent-DPI, downloadable maps....