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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mengu" data-source="post: 5500416" data-attributes="member: 65726">I don't have corridors either.I have pretty much reduced all maps down to encounter areas. Okay so the encounter area could contain hallways, but these are not meant to "connect" areas, they are meant as part of the scenery/terrain for the encounter.I don't have maps of mansions, I don't have maps of cavern complexes, or cities, unless they themselves are the encounter area (encounter doesn't necessarily mean combat encounter in this context). If there is a skill challenge bouncing around a town gathering information, and uncovering some secret about the layout of the town, like cultist cells located in the shape of a pentagram, then sure, I'll have a map. But if it doesn't serve a purpose, I find that verbal descriptions not only suffice, but stimulate the player's imagination more than some squiggly lines on a paper. As a matter of fact, if you have the map of a massive dungeon, you can't exactly get lost or turn a wrong corner. Keeping things more nebulous in the mapping area, creates a lot more opportunities.So I'm certainly with the new school. I don't want to see empty rooms, or a room drawn on a map with 1 orc. I can just as easily describe the room, and the orc inhabitant. The PC's can choose whether they want to befriend the orc, intimidate the orc, or kill the orc. The new school approach doesn't remove the incident of "one room one orc" from our vocabulary. We just remove it from the set of combat encounters. Where necessary, it's still an encounter, just not one where we need a combat map or initiative to deal with the situation.I sometimes even skip over combat encounters with verbal descriptions, if there is nothing interesting going on. So they've fought every kind of minotaur and demon in the area. They run into a situation where they hear about a group of dwarves cornered by the minotaurs and demons. They rush to help. I run a mini skill challenge to determine if they pick the best way, if they can use stealth and terrain to their advantage. Then I tell them, you kill the demons, bully the minotaurs to surrender and rescue the dwarves. Mission accomplished. No initiative rolled. Since they had fought many similar encounters earlier, the important part was the rescue itself, and gaining the gratitude of the dwarves.I'm totally on board with, getting to the important and fun stuff. This doesn't necessarily mean "combat".</blockquote>

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