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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6665799" data-attributes="member: 4937">I totally dig that and I wish I had half your skill in map production, but the problem I have with a pure mapping approach for non-dungeon environments is that it does not serve the encounter well.   There are two basic problems, and they are both problems of scale.Tactically important terrain shows up at the scale of meters, and it's not even suggested by a map until you are at a scale where features as small as 100m are showing up.  Unless you have mapping at the scale of a standard USGS Topographical map, you can just forget about it inspiring or informing an encounter area in your mind.  And the there is the problem that you can't map a fantasy world at the USGS Topographical map level.  It's just too much work.   You could do a sheet or three or twenty maybe, but if your campaign is occurring at a larger scale than a city state and well confined to it, your just out of luck.  And those tactically useful maps even if you could create them, would be no good for you at the level of travel.  You'd need too many.  Your players would walk right off your beautifully detailed map in a few game hours.  So you could create a small tactically useful map for a small well defined tactical area, but it wouldn't inform the world map, and you could create a large world map for defining travel but it can't inform combat.   And that's exactly where we are now.  We make dungeon maps and we make world maps, but they don't inform the other one.So that's the first problem, but the second problem for me is almost as bad.  And that problem isn't merely that my word pictures are easier to create than maps.The second problem I have is that wilderness encounters don't occur in rooms.  In the old days, a 20' x 30' room was perfectly functional.  Then came the 5' step, and people tended to move to 30' x 40' and larger rooms.   These days a big room with lots of room to dash around and have terrain features needs to be on the order of 120' on a side - 24 x 24 grid.  But that's nothing compared to the scale of outdoor encounters, where you can have initial encounter distances in 100's of yards or even miles.  Exchanges of missile fire can often begin 60 or more squares away.  With outdoor encounters, you have to be able to improvise a map, because any sort of prepared map risks having the fight simply run off of it.  Or you could have a situation where the enemy forces are dispersed over a huge area to avoid AoE.  The best map for outdoor encounters I've found is those desk tablets with 1"x1" grids and a set of markers, because you can just tear on off and keep going and going if you need to.  Those 72 x 72 prepared maps you mention sound awesome, but that's 6 feet by 6 feet.  That's an expensive map to prepare and I'd guess to purchase.   And I'd need like 30 of those large scale encounter maps for a reasonably long and complex hex crawl, and that's even with repurposing them by rotating them around and changing starting positions.For me the hard part isn't so much translating some rough delineations on to paper of what I see in my mind's eye to sketch out the parameters of where the battle is taking place.  The hard part is imagining something interesting in my mind's eye in the first place.</blockquote>

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