Wizards and Dungeon Maps: Gridline madness

[wedgeski]

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree with you here Merric. Yes, the corridors in the top right of the first map don't line up with the grid... but they're still blatantly five feet wide and about 30/15 feet long respectively.

If I was of a mind to blow that map up to floorplan size and use it as a battlemat, I agree it would be irritating. I'm not sure how many DM's do that though - I certainly don't. Map grids for me are more about proportionate scale than anything, since when it comes to a combat, I'll sketch the relevant area on my gridded whiteboard and my own sense of artistic inadequacy will ensure that I can make the walls line up with the grid just fine.

I find the map that you don't like to be the style I prefer: here's a piece of architecture, oh and by the way here's what happens if you overlay a grid on it. This as opposed to: here's a 5 foot grid, let's see what walls we can slap down, which is the general feeling I get from most maps that overlay on the grid perfectly. But then, I like my maps to be exquisitely drawn and be of value in and of themselves, as well as essential tools for play. YMMV.

 

[francisca]

Add another voice to Merric's opinion. Unlike a lot of my fondness for old Basic and 1E adventures, this opinion is not motivated by nostalgia or an attempt to recapture my youth. The old maps are simply way more usable. I guess it's part of the reason I like Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics (I recommend #2, by Mike Mearls.)

 

[Bagpuss]

Here is one of the Map-a-week from Wizards websites. The gridlines are nicely sized here (thankfully). Unfortunately, they don't always have much relationship to the walls.

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mapofweek/05dwarvenfortdng_72dpi_233dhs.jpg

Look at the top right-hand room, and the passage leading south from it. What is going on here? Why are the gridlines in the middle of the corridor?

It doesn't add to playability, that's for sure.

Doesn't seem to take anything away from the playability either. You still have "A roughly 20' square room with two corridors leading off it one to the south and the other to the west."

Where is the problem?

 

[Goobermunch]

There's no problem in my mind unless the party is bringing survey equipment with them into the dungeon (something I think my players are getting ready to do).

I give them rough dimensions and let them draw their own map . . . . I look forward to the times when they go "No, this corridor can't be here. If it were, we'd be in the room with the orcs!"

It keeps them on their toes.

--G

 

[Kalendraf]

One of the hardest to use that I have found was the map in the Standing Stone module of the 3e adventure path.

Would that be the circular maze you're referring to? When I ran that adventure, I looked at it in advance, and I decided to completely redraw it, making it much more rectangular. I kept the flavor by using the same kind of traps and other encounters, but got rid of all othe bizarre problems that a circular map would have caused in actual play.

I've encountered other maps that I've needed to redraw for similar reasons. One pet-peave I have is that I think maps should be designed to try to fit on a large battle mat. A sprawling dungeon is ok, but it just becomes a headache when it winds up being a mere 15 feet too long or too wide to fit on the battlemap. We wind up having to erase and redraw things which is frustrating. I've found graph paper that is the same size as my battlemap (in terms of # of squares for height and width), so when I draw maps on that, I know it will fit on my battlemap. I know not everyone uses battlemaps, but several groups do, so I think this is a fair request.

 

[Arnwyn]

One pet-peave I have is that I think maps should be designed to try to fit on a large battle mat.

While I agree with MerricB, I think the suggestion above is absolutely horrific. "Wow, look! Yet another dungeon that fits perfectly on our battle mat. Looks like, yet again, we know the size of the dungeon. Go figure!" The lack of variety that would result from that suggestion would kill any desire I have for pre-made maps... and my players would catch on to that trick pretty darn fast.

MerricB, I'm with you. I value a reasonable amount of functionality. I believe (and certainly IME) you can have locations that fit well on the grids and not give up much in terms of "realism". My group, for one, only cares so far about how "realistic" a location is, and fitting on a grid sure as heck isn't much of a problem for them - they have a good feeling for "value-added" (and, conversely, non-value-added).

 

[TheAuldGrump]

Personally, I prefer nice looking maps. Since I am the one who ends up drawing the sucker on the battle mat/Easel board paper/what have you, it doesn't matter how easily described the map is. And if I fudge here or ther, so what? The only time players make their own maps are for labarynths, and if they get the dimensions off, well.. it's a maze.

Mind you, I also used to produce maps a 5' to the inch, fully furnished then photo copied onto 3'x2' sheets to remove the grid lines... I still have some hanging on my walls. (They make great posters!)

The Auld Grump

 

[adriayna]

I dabble in mapmaking, and I've found that it depends on how you create your maps to how accurate you can be.

For example, if you do your maps on a digital pad in photoshop, you can apply the grid in a new layer and work to produce a more accurate map. If you start by drawing it by hand, it is more difficult to use a grid with the map while drawing. If you have an old-fashioned drawing board with a light you can put the grid sheet under the regular sheet, but I don't think many people use these anymore.

Regardless, what it boils down to is how the mapmakers are creating their maps. If they are all digital, they have no excuse. But if they are mostly hand-drawn with few touch-ups, then perhaps we could be more forgiving. There is really no way of telling on many of these maps what the method is, btw.

 

[jerichothebard]

Hmm, I'm not sure I agree with you here Merric. Yes, the corridors in the top right of the first map don't line up with the grid... but they're still blatantly five feet wide and about 30/15 feet long respectively.

If I was of a mind to blow that map up to floorplan size and use it as a battlemat, I agree it would be irritating. I'm not sure how many DM's do that though - I certainly don't. Map grids for me are more about proportionate scale than anything, since when it comes to a combat, I'll sketch the relevant area on my gridded whiteboard and my own sense of artistic inadequacy will ensure that I can make the walls line up with the grid just fine.

I find the map that you don't like to be the style I prefer: here's a piece of architecture, oh and by the way here's what happens if you overlay a grid on it. This as opposed to: here's a 5 foot grid, let's see what walls we can slap down, which is the general feeling I get from most maps that overlay on the grid perfectly. But then, I like my maps to be exquisitely drawn and be of value in and of themselves, as well as essential tools for play. YMMV.

I agree with a lot of what you are saying here, but for different reasons. I prefer using a hex map for combat - diagonal movement is so much more intuitive, and blast radius spells now make sense and map easily.

However, a map printed to 5' squares just makes it more difficult. I prefer to have a map with NO grid, well drawn with environmental details, and a scale marker in the corner. Of course, I also have a college level degree in reading and drawing blueprints, so I realize that my comfort level with such a style is probably in the minority.

 

[Orius]

If there's one trait of recent Dungeon and Wizards of the Coast maps that I think should be stamped out utterly it is this: the lack of consideration for how useful the grid is for DMs.

I've never been very impressed with some examples of WotC maps. They seem to like to make the maps look "pretty" but a game map is more than just a piece of art; the DM has to be able to use the map to judge distances fairly accurately. A player map doesn't need to be completely to scale or accurate, though.

There are three problems that occur.

1) The Use of 5 foot grids
2) The use of 'accurate' walls measuring 2-4 foot in scale
3) Walls not running along grid lines.

When printed, 5' grids often end up at about 2 or 3 mm on the page, and the walls have no relation to them at all. It makes determining the room size and describing it to the players for their mapping extremely difficult.

When you add this to the tendency to size walls correctly at 2-4 feet thick, it makes the description of those maps almost impossible.

The 5' grids are proably a result of the fixation on minis. I don't have a huge problems with it, because I don't really use Map-of-the-Week (been meaning to archive the maps for some time now, though), and because I usually map my dungeons at 5' squares anyway. Besides, if you're using minis, a map drawn on a 5' grid is easier to use as is than one on a 10' grid, because with the 10' grid, you have to double the size of everything.
Really, I don't think the actual scale of the map itself matter, I think it's how big they make they grid.

To be readable in D&D terms, I need a map to have clear grid markings, walls that run along the gridlines, and a grid of squares that is about 4-5 mm, normally representing 10' squares. (4-5 mm representing 5' squares doesn't bother me).

I agree. The map should be fairly clear, since the DM needs to use the map to set up encounters, especially if he's using minis. Maps that '"snap to grids" make this easier. I mean really, the grid is an artificial feature in the dungeon, the dungeon itself isn't going to be marked with 5' squares, the squares are there so the DM can judge distances. Having the dungeon snapped to the grid isn't going to make it less realistic.

And like I said above, it's the size, not the scale of the grid that counts. The squares on the grid need to be large enough to be counted easily.

Here is one of the Map-a-week from Wizards websites. The gridlines are nicely sized here (thankfully). Unfortunately, they don't always have much relationship to the walls.

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mapofweek/05dwarvenfortdng_72dpi_233dhs.jpg

Look at the top right-hand room, and the passage leading south from it. What is going on here? Why are the gridlines in the middle of the corridor?

It doesn't add to playability, that's for sure.

Not a bad map. Yeah, the alignment stinks, but I'd just redraw it for my own use anyway.

And I've seen "small grid madness" during the TSR days too. The "Nemesis" adventure from Dungeon # 60 is a pretty bad example. On page 48, there's a map of a yuan-ti lair that's gots all sorts of twisting and looping passages with a grid that's about 2mm to the square at the standard 1 square = 5 feet scale. The grid is "broken" in places too.

Just as bad is another map for the same adventure on p. 54. The grid is just as small, but is even more difficult to read, and is at a scale of 1 square = 10 feet!