Griogre
August 30th, 2013, 00:03
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.
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.