D&D 5E Volo's absurdly tiny maps

Has anyone else noticed how absurdly tiny WotC maps are? I was looking at the maps for a hobgoblin warcamp, for example, and I noticed that the whole camp is only 200' in diameter, barely longer than a small apartment building, one-quarter the area of a baseball field. On the one hand, I suppose I could buy the idea that hobgoblins might like to have a compact central area--but there should at least be pickets and sentries placed further out, and surely they deserve to be drawn on the map!

Hobgoblins become much more powerful when they utilize their long bows effectively, so if there's one race that should be planning its camps carefully it should be the hobgoblins. Ideally hobgoblins should have cleared firing lines out to at least a hundred yards (300' past the main fort's walls), dotted with pillboxes (with a glacis) fifty yards out that can provide cover to hobgoblins facing outwards towards the enemy, but aren't usable as cover against the hobgoblins in the main fort. When the enemy gets close enough (past the earthworks), the hobgoblins pickets drop their bows and pick up their shields and close with the enemy, Dodging all the while, to activate the main fort hobgoblins' Martial Advantage extra damage.

Instead we get these tiny maps that encourage players and DMs to imagine a whole adventure taking place in an area half the size of a parking lot. (Literally. My local target's parking lot, seen here, is about 200' x 400'.) Feh.

Hemlock said:

Has anyone else noticed how absurdly tiny WotC maps are? I was looking at the maps for a hobgoblin warcamp, for example, and I noticed that the whole camp is only 200' in diameter, barely longer than a small apartment building, one-quarter the area of a baseball field. On the one hand, I suppose I could buy the idea that hobgoblins might like to have a compact central area--but there should at least be pickets and sentries placed further out, and surely they deserve to be drawn on the map!

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Would having a map at least 2.5 times bigger be worth it though, just to show basically empty area? Since the areas on the left and right would go out so far, it wouldn't even fit on a single page then! Either we sacrifice two full pages to the map, or drastically reduce the scale so the finer details of the camp itself wouldn't be able to be clearly shown.

And, anyway, there's nothing on the map that indicates that it isn't the way you describe.

Demetrios1453 said:

Would having a map at least 2.5 times bigger be worth it though, just to show basically empty area? Since the areas on the left and right would go out so far, it wouldn't even fit on a single page then! Either we sacrifice two full pages to the map, or drastically reduce the scale so the finer details of the camp itself wouldn't be able to be clearly shown.

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One solution: you could have two maps at different scales and levels of detail.

Another solution: you could elide distance on the map. It winds up looking something like this sketch:



In a drawing (vs. a sketch) you'd show the elided distance with visual breaks in the background instead of wavy lines. Anything to say "there's no interesting features here for 450' (a twelfth of a mile)".

This has come up before. The whole reason is that a battle map has to fit on a standard table with room for character sheets etc around the edge of the table, then if you take that available space and scale it to 1 real inch = 5 feet of play, you end up with maps the size you are talking about.

Products are still designed to be used at the table. Until people either move to smaller mini's or a virtual map, we will be stuck with this issue. Remember all the dragon lair maps? How crazy were those?

Use a digital/VTT at your table with tokens and make your own maps, then you can scale the display to whatever you need, zoom around, all that and then your maps can be sized whatever you want.

The assumption in fifth edition is that you're playing without miniatures, not with them (see the PHB and DMG), so I don't think that explanation holds water.

Even running published content, the DM still has to think critically. Mistakes like these occur in published products all the time. Kudos to the OP for spotting this and pointing it out to those of us that aren't paying such close attention.

That is why that on grand scales I use Theater of the mind and in small scales, I use tactical map. Until the players get near. I would use the former. Once they get into the camps (or near the walls) I would switch to tactical map.

I really like what Hemlock did. Pretty much what I would've done.

LexStarwalker said:

The assumption in fifth edition is that you're playing without miniatures, not with them (see the PHB and DMG), so I don't think that explanation holds water.

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Even when I'm not using a battle mat, I sketch out a combat (on a whiteboard, a piece of paper, some electronic tool, whatever). If the relevant parts of the encounter span 450', it's really hard to reflect the 5' distances between allies or combatants or a character's 20-40' move and keep it anything but vague. So I'm sympathetic to trying to keep the overall area reasonably tight.

On the other hand, if the Hobgoblins posted guards 150' out, I might have one sketch for the PCs attempting to clear out the guards, then if they're obvious about it do a couple rounds of closing without much reference to a map, and then back to a map once they're at the encampment. Doable, I guess, but less so if there's really meaningful detail spread across the entire parking lot.

All that said, I completely agree that Hobgoblins SHOULD have clearings and firing ranges around their camps.

Hemlock said:

(Literally. My local target's parking lot, seen here, is about 200' x 400'.)

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And now all those hobgoblins know where you live and where to set up their forward establishment base

Counting the squares it looks to be a couple hundred feet wide.
Throwing that into google maps and comparing that to a stretch of New York.



Looks pretty big. Or rather non-small.

I suppose it might seem strange if you look at the maps on their own and without context, but as presented they make sense. The actual size of the camp seems about right though, both from a "real world" viewpoint and in relation to the fiction provided. Sentries are mentioned and implied throughout the hobgoblin/goblinoid section, not very useful to put them on a map like that IMO.