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Message: <blockquote data-quote="tzor" data-source="post: 3696803" data-attributes="member: 12826">I'd like to start off my remarks with the notion that what I experienced in the early 80's may not have been what you experienced in the early 80's and your mileage may vary and all other sorts of legal disclaimers.  Having written all that, why did we draw maps?  Remember this was AD&D, before the invention of the fancy video game (trust me we never based our game play on anything on the Atari) or massively multi-player dungeons (it would be years before the ASCII Island of Kesmai on Compuserve would be available on their dial up serivce) so why oh why did we map?Paper thin walls.  Hey I kid you not.  Look at all the drawings of dungeons in the early 80's.  The averge dungeon wall was a thick line of pencil.  God knew how those dungeons didn't collapse from the lack of any structural support but that's how we all drew them.  Given the lack of any real solid areas of black on the map, the significant portion of void space in the player's map indicated one thing.  A SECRET SPACE WHERE THE TREASURE LIES!Secret doors were a staple of dungeons, after all what else was the elf for if not for the "hey guys I found a SECRET DOOR."  Aside from an elf the only other way to find a secret door was to map like hell and search the perimiter of the void again and again.Then again I started gaming when in an engineeting college, where map paper flowed like water among the students.  Crib sheets were a high art form.  A good Dm map required colored pencils.  Life was graphical.</blockquote>

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