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<blockquote data-quote="haiiro" data-source="post: 1637437" data-attributes="member: 1891">With 3.x, I find battlemaps for combat to be essential -- what's lost in terms of the &quot;chaos of battle&quot; factor is more than made up for by the &quot;everyone has fun and gets to use their abilities intelligently&quot; factor. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> I draw my combat maps on big sheets of 1&quot; square graph paper, cut to size from the roll it comes in.Knowing this, my players rightly expect that if I pull out a map of an area, there's at least a very high likelihood that they're going to get into a combat there. To avoid this, I sometimes map areas where I don't expect them to get into a fight, and sometimes wait until the actual session to map ones where I do expect combat (which can slow things down -- I don't do this often).In every D&amp;D game I've run or played in, having the players map things out as they go -- while appropriate from the standpoint of versimilitude -- is a nightmare. IMO, it's always less fun overall than just having the DM do the mapping.With really large areas, I either map them in small chunks -- taping new areas on as needed -- or map them all at once and cover up the parts they haven't seen. Both work pretty well.As far as town and city maps go, I don't usually find them to be necessary. IMC, the party asked an NPC contact for a city map early on, so I drew one up to give them as an in-game prop. This city is also the current home base for the campaign, so it makes a lot of sense for them to have access to detailed info about it.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="haiiro, post: 1637437, member: 1891"] With 3.x, I find battlemaps for combat to be essential -- what's lost in terms of the "chaos of battle" factor is more than made up for by the "everyone has fun and gets to use their abilities intelligently" factor. ;) I draw my combat maps on big sheets of 1" square graph paper, cut to size from the roll it comes in. Knowing this, my players rightly expect that if I pull out a map of an area, there's at least a very high likelihood that they're going to get into a combat there. To avoid this, I sometimes map areas where I don't expect them to get into a fight, and sometimes wait until the actual session to map ones where I [i]do[/i] expect combat (which can slow things down -- I don't do this often). In every D&D game I've run or played in, having the players map things out as they go -- while appropriate from the standpoint of versimilitude -- is a nightmare. IMO, it's always less fun overall than just having the DM do the mapping. With really large areas, I either map them in small chunks -- taping new areas on as needed -- or map them all at once and cover up the parts they haven't seen. Both work pretty well. As far as town and city maps go, I don't usually find them to be necessary. IMC, the party asked an NPC contact for a city map early on, so I drew one up to give them as an in-game prop. This city is also the current home base for the campaign, so it makes a lot of sense for them to have access to detailed info about it. [/QUOTE]

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