D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

[Thomas Shey]

What did you think of the Magic Square dungeon idea?* Doesn't that sound like fun?

* I'm making myself vulnerable here so be gentle.

I'm sorry, I think I either missed or forgot context for what you're talking about here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The OD&D variant Seven Voyages of Zylarthen suggests using dominoes to lay out a room ( removing them after the PCs have left), up to the PCs to map if they want. No idea how well it works in practice (current game is remote), but the tactile and aesthetic appeal is enormous. Best of both worlds as far as encouraging mapping while avoiding verbal back and forth about room dimensions. Maybe a really big room would be a pain.

Over and above any general feeling about maps, that seems to limit the kind of structures you can use there, and of course its of no use outside.

Whenever I've done simple mapping, it has improved the vividness of how I imagine the space (I guess continuing the negative correlation between map art vividness and imagination vividness), though I imagine this relationship breaks down if the verbal back and forth required becomes too much.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against having a map at all; I'm arguing whether its necessary to make players duplicate the map the GM has already made. Unless for some reason what the GM has done has is difficult to duplicate, you need to find a value in that process itself before it makes any sense, and the idea that's the default way to go hasn't been true for decades.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I will cop to that. I was assuming context based on the thread premise. I was not trying to say that all exploration focused games are map dependent.

Except I wasn't clear from your first post what the actual premise was. At first I was trying to figure out if you meant whether a GM should have a map themself.

I mean, we are really talking about a narrow gameplay style here. And it is totally okay that folks don't like that or want to do that. But the subject of the thread assumes that (general) you DO want to do that, and the so the question I was interested in is HOW do you do it.

Again, that was far from clear to me or I'd likely not gotten into the thread in the first place. Until post #109 I would not have thought it was a given for the thread. Now that you have, I will step out to avoid deliberate threadcrapping.