Old School Mapping

[Griogre]

I started running a "Halls of Undermountain" game a bit ago and realized I was going to have a problems with the maps. The first problem was the standard problem VTT GM's have: the only map is a GM version - and the GM version is full of info the players shouldn't have. There was a second non standard problem as well: some portions of Undermountain (like other old dungeons) are not really mappable by the party as anything more than approximations. My solution to the problems was to go "old school" and make the players map the dungeon themselves with me describing the areas of the dungeon audibly and letting them make their own map - the way I use to from behind a screen when dungeons were all mapped out out graph paper.

To help with this I modified some old prototype "block" tokens I had into wall tokens that could be dropped on a drawing in various lengths to help things go faster. I made vertical and horizontal versions of wall sections 5', 10', 20', 30' and 40' long scaled to the same size as my player and monster tokens. Here's a screen shot of a small part of the dungeon during an encounter:

https://i105.photobucket.com/albums/m222/Griogre/DrawingScreenshot_zps251a9dc3.png

The jury is still out on whether I'll do this in again in another campaign, but its been interesting so far.

[damned]

what i would do here is make a half dozen room or corridor maps for when you need a tactical encounter and for the rest of the time describe the environment old school like as you are doing and let them map it out. let them make a few mistakes here and there :)

[bennis1980]

Oh the memories of epic and badly scaled player maps :) hee hee hee

How wrong they were

[Griogre]

@damned: I did do that with a "chessboard room" but usually I've found it easier to run the encounters on the drawing map. The real downside to not doing individual maps is you can't place monsters ahead of time. :( I do have a "party counter" I use when they are just exploring, which reminds me of a bug I've been meaning to report.

@bennis1980: Thus far they have been pretty good with their Undermountain map. I did a first pass of player mapping in a 5E playtest and that map was pretty off. However honestly I had them do that in that dungeon just because its a old style dungeon I pulled out for the test that is pretty much impossible to map accurately - but they hadn't even gotten to that part.

I learned in the 5E playtest that just drawing lines was pretty slow. So in the Undermountain game, I found the "wall" tokens made things faster because they could just drop down them down in various 10 foot lengths, though they still do draw the lines behind the tokens.

[dulux-oz]

@Griogre: I don't suppose I could get a copy of those wall tokens, could I (please). I'd like to try some old-school mapping with my layers, too see how it goes.

Thanks in advance

[Griogre]

I can send you the tokens, but I use 32 pixels for medium sized creatures and they are scaled that way. However the tokens are so simple they should probably scale up OK if you use a larger scale. I sent you a PM.