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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sam Witt" data-source="post: 979872" data-attributes="member: 1449">Skip the Mega-Map of DoomWhile this is somewhat antithetical to the 'I map every stinkin' room and the tiny corridors in between and when I'm not mapping tiny corridors, I mark the wind currents in the dungeon' school of thought for DND, I'm just about to the point where I never want to see another 'dungeon map' in the classic style.Here's why:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They create boring filler space. Eventually, all maps become strings of skill checks made by the rogue between the cool parts of the dungeon. These skill checks are tedious for everyone else and generally don't add much to the game.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Architectural diagrams are boring. When you read a book, and the heroes venture into a deep cavern or structure, they aren't mapping where they're going.  They're using dead reckoning and their keen Direction Sense to find their way into and out of the dungeon. Having a big map just slows things down, when you could more easily say, "You journey through winding caverns for three hours . . ."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They encourage door bashing. Players see a door, they bash a door and spend a lot of time digging around in the room - even if it's an empty storeroom or otherwise ho-hum location. Dungeon maps tend to have a lot of rooms to add 'verisimilitude,' better known as, "There are six barracks here, and they have, um, some furniture and stuff, and ah, the monsters aren't here right now, 'cause you killed 'em all a while back."</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They make it harder to impose a sense of scale. "The dungeon of the fire lord is enormous - entire armies have been lost within its confines, swallowed up by the enormous corridors."  You want to map that?  I don't.  But I do want my players to adventure there, to sneak from room to room . . . but I'm getting ahead of myself.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">They eat up development time that is usually wasted. You make a cool dungeon with nifty rooms and hidden chambers. Your characters kick open a few doors, then bulldoze their way to the bottom without ever finding the secret doors that lead to your cunning secondary dungeon. Bleh. [/list=1] If I were going to design a mega dungeon, I sure wouldn't map it out.  I'd make some cool areas that players could find, and a general schematic of the dungeon as a whole (showing distances between spots, and that's about it). Throw in some killer natural challenges (cave-ins, waterfalls, odd pockets of gas) to block access to some areas, or at least make them more challenging to get to, and use these as landmarks. Then design the areas and describe them. Create general rules for each area, and a few cool battlemaps that can be used and re-used if an encounter occurs. The idea is to get the characters to the cool bits without making them slog unnecessarily through the crappy, boring bits which most dungeons are just full of. Hmm, this is getting longer than I thought - must be time to put out a book on mapless dungeon design. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Sam</li> </ol></blockquote>

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