Is mapping a lost art with adventurers?

[Quasqueton]

Those of you who adventure in “dungeons”, do you map your progress?

I’m finding that my group doesn’t map their way through a dungeon, and this is a change from the way I’m used to adventurers playing.

If mapping is declining, I wonder, is it because DMs/Publishers don’t make deviously complicated dungeon maps anymore? There was a time when DM/Publishers actually made dungeon maps difficult to map (twisting passage, tricks to confuse, shifting walls, etc.) specifically to foil delvers mapping.

Quasqueton

 

[Goblyn]

I've never even tried to map dungeons, even when others suggested it. It always seemed to be too much of a bother to stop the game so that one guy could make a wrong map of a dungeon we would end up getting lost in anyway, due to the map being wrong.

 

[Henry]

We don't "map" anymore, for two reasons:

1) None of the players enjoy it. Not only is it very confusing at least half of the time, it takes away time from roleplaying, cool descriptions while exploring, and combat time, which are things they all enjoy to one degree or another.

2) Battlemats and Mapping programs make mapping obscenely easier to do, not to mention that the DM is more eager these days to show off impressive scenery, tact-tiles, dundjinni maps, dwarven forge set-pieces, etc.

When you think about it, there are very few true labyrinths in the real world, meaning that the characters for verisimilitude should only run into those "mammoth unmappable dungeons" occasionally. maybe as a once-per-campaign undertaking. But our biggest reasons are the two above.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Henry makes the points I would make. I remember obssessing over the mapping details ("Is that thirty feet from the inside corner, or the outside corner?") and don't miss that at all.

The combination of battlemats and smaller, more "sensible" dungeons makes mapping less important.

 

[hong]

Mapping is boring.

 

[painandgreed]

I think it is a core issue with the 3.x rules. With only 13.3 encounters per level, there simply aren't enough encounters in a adventure any more to warrent a map complicated enough to be mapped. IIRC, your typical 1E module would contain enough encounters to push a (current day) party up two or three levels. Furthermore, there is less emphasis on dungeon crawl and more on some sort of RP, so dungeons are split up into several much smaller dungeons and indpendent encounters. If the Xp requirements weren't so shallow in 3.x, I suspect you'd see much larger dungeons and more mapping.

However, even 'back in the day', mapping was dieing out. The DM typically just did the mapping or drew everything on a battle mat. This spared much confusion and saved much time over traditional describe and have the party mapper map.

 

[saucercrab]

2) Battlemats and Mapping programs make mapping obscenely easier to do, not to mention that the DM is more eager these days to show off impressive scenery, tact-tiles, dundjinni maps, dwarven forge set-pieces, etc.

Yup, this is it for our group. We have a battle map, & we have (dry-erase) markers. Our DM likes to come up with his own maps lots of times, & likes to draw them (either he or one of the PCs does it). And when combat starts, we already have the field ready.

 

[irdeggman]

When players spend most of their real time time trying to figure out the exact dimensions of areas so that they could make an accurate map that is when it becomes detrimental to the actual game.

The game is not about cartography it is about adventuring.

 

[derelictjay]

Yes and No. If the players believe the dungeon's going to be complicated they/we might do a simple line drawing showing overall layout, with a box for a room, a line for a hallway, just to keep our bearings, with a couple of labels to keep tabs on whats what.

The biggest problem with mapping is people don't really like doing the mapping, its boring, time consuming and annoying.

 

[kenobi65]

I remember obssessing over the mapping details ("Is that thirty feet from the inside corner, or the outside corner?") and don't miss that at all.

QFT.