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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Keldryn" data-source="post: 5050166" data-attributes="member: 11999">I agree completely.  The exquisitely-drawn maps in modern published adventures are really no more useful to me then the spartan black & white dungeon maps from 30 years ago.  I've made hasty arrangements of tiles and/or lines drawn on a dry erase met, looked at it, and told my players "well, it looks absolutely stunning in MY book.  Sorry."All of WoTC's published adventures (whether retail or from Dungeon) should do either have their maps constructed from Dungeon Tiles that are still readily available at the time of publication and/or provide ready-made battle grids for the entire adventure, not just 2 to 4 set-piece battles.For the maps which are constructed from Dungeon Tiles, the adventure should also provide a quick summary of which sets were used (and if more than one copy of a set is needed).There are a few possible ways of including battle grids for the entire adventure:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> include full-color poster maps for the entire adventure, although this could easily be prohibitively expensive</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> continue to provide the full-color poster maps for the set-piece battles, and include lower-quality black & white battle maps on 8.5" x 11" or 11" x 17" loose pages for the rest of the adventure</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul"> continue to provide the full-color poster maps for the set-pieces, and make the battle maps for the rest of the adventure available in print-friendly versions through D&D Insider.  The DM can decide whether to print in color or black & white.</li> </ul>The last option is probably the most viable; judging by the level of detail on most of the maps included with WOTC's published adventures, they most likely drawn at a larger scale anyway.  Rather than just have a gigantic dungeon map print across multiple sheets of paper, have these print-friendly maps be arranged as "chunks" that the DM can add them to the table without revealing parts of the map that are not accessible but happened to be printed on that sheet of paper.Including full battle maps for the entire adventure becomes more viable if the locations within the adventure are trimmed down in size; I feel that most of WoTC's published dungeons are too big already.  Smaller dungeons would allow for high-quality battle maps for the entire adventure, and I would be very happy with that.As much as I like using dungeon tiles (and I have downloaded some of the WorldWorks and EZ Dungeons 3D cardstock dungeons, but haven't assembled any yet), most modules have maps that can't be easily created with reusable tiles.  I've re-drawn the dungeon maps, in their entirety, from The Sunless Citadel and B7 Rahasia in Dungeon Designer 2 (this was a few years ago) and printed them out in black & white at a 1" = 5' scale.  This worked extremely well, and my players absolutely loved it (rather than complaining about how long it took me to build rooms with tiles or Lego blocks).  Unfortunately, this also added an extra 6 to 8 hours of prep time per module (if I actually use DD often enough I can get more efficient with it).  That's too much prep time for a published adventure.</blockquote>

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