Requiring Players To Draw The Dungeon Map!

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Back in the day, drawing the dungeon map was a requirement. I've noticed that over the years, in many campaigns I have played in or read or heard about, this custom has been largely discarded as too time consuming, and irrelevant.

I still like to use it in my campaigns though. Especially when the party goes into a dungeon. It seems to add some extra...*oomph* or something to the game. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, but the players seem to not only take a very keen interest in where everything is, but it somehow seems to help them immerse themselves into the "dungeon" environment...if that makes any sense?

What do you think?

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I run it both ways.

Some campaigns, I let the players slide on mapping. Other times, if they don't map & get lost, its their own doggone fault.

The key is letting them know ahead of time- don't tell them halfway through a minotaur's maze in the 9th adventure of the campaign that they'll get lost if they haven't been mapping.

While I agree that it can add a bit of verisimilitude, it can also turn some players away from the game. Better know your players if you want them to map.

 

[Milagroso]

I don't require it, but some of them do it out of common sense. My players know that if they get lost in a dungeon, they will have to rely on their skill roles to get out. If they fail they get lost.

Sometimes I award experience points for doing it too. Not much, but a little bonus for the foresight.

 

[Sound of Azure]

My old group mostly got the DM to draw the map, since he was so awful at describing the rooms.

 

[Driddle]

At any particular moment during the game, it largely depends on whether the players are emulating their characters' mapmaking ability or whether the DM is trying to convey a scene clearly. For example, "No, the room is octagonal with three pillars near the middle, like *this*," versus "The hall you're being chased down is about 10 foot wide and runs generally south for 150 feet or so."

 

[exile]

There was recently an article about needing bigger rooms now that D&D combat is so dependent upon miniatures. Has this had any effect on anyone's mapping?

Chad

 

[Doug McCrae]

"You enter an off centre T-shaped room. The north-south section is 60 feet by 30 feet. There is an east-west section 20 by 30 feet which connects with the north-south section on its eastern wall, 10 feet from the south end and 30 feet from the north end. There are five doors. Two on the western wall, one 15 feet from the south and one 15 feet from the north. One is on the northern wall of the smaller eastern section, 5 feet from the east. One is on the eastern wall of the eastern section, in the centre. The last is on the southern wall of the north-south section, also in the centre. This is the door by which you entered."

What does this add to the game? It's much more of a challenge for the players, to convert the spoken word to a visual representation, than it would be for the characters, who can easily see the room layout.

 

[Castellan]

I used to give my players graph paper and go to painstaking efforts to help them reproduce the maps I was using. But it's time-consuming, and can dominate the game. I also believe that unless a character has ranks in Profession (Cartographer) most maps will be more like scribblings on parchment than accurate surveys on graph paper.

I now try to convey simple concepts to players who want to map: "the corridor is wide enough for you to stand two-abreast. It's about 50 paces in length." I try to use visual concepts when describing exits from a room: "there are two other exits from this chamber: one is immediately to your left, (I usually point in the direction, using myself as a 'reference pont') and the other is across the room, near the corner (pointing again)."

If someone asks "how large is this room?" I try to convey that with things the PCs have experienced: "it's almost exactly the same size as the Gregor Family warehouse you were in the other day, except that the ceiling isn't as high." Or, "this circular room looks just large enough that Twiggy could cast entangle in the center, and there'd be a small clear path around the outside."

I still draw encounter areas on our battle-mat, and that is usally where I take many referencial concepts from. The players know they could cross the room in one round based on my descriptions.

One fun thing about this is that you can introduce maps from NPCs that are useful only to that NPC. What if the PCs didn't know that the map they're using was drawn by a halfling? "It says 'go 150 paces and then look for the arming pin for the trap in the third stone...'" If humans travel 150 paces, they're going to set off the trap without knowing they had reached it since a standard human pace is probably 50% greater than a halfling pace (hence the 30' versus 20' movement rate).

If a concept is really hard to convey, I draw a quick sketch on the battle-mat, but not in a "1 sqare is x feet" way. Rooms are squares, rectangles, circles, and corridors are lines between them. I ignore the lines on the mat completely during these moments. Once the players have the concept, I erase my map.

If a player took ranks in mapping, I would allow them to make more detailed maps, but I have yet to see someone who wants to do that.

 

[FATDRAGONGAMES]

We've done this pretty much non-stop since our group got together in the early 80s. I agree with the above statement that it helps to immerse the players in the dungeon environment.

 

[TessarrianDM]

Semper Fi!

I draw out the rooms on the tabletop, and erase each area as they pass through. If they want to map it, fine; if not, I only draw the area they can see. Considering we only play a maximum of once per month and they tend to have short memories, they rarely fail to map...