Photoshop: H3 Pyramid of Shadows Tactical Maps

[Robbo]

I mildly disagree with you, Robbo. My experience is that players will be happy with just about any map - most player just wanna play! I even think a case can be made that simple line maps can be more immersive since they cause the player to use his imagination more.

It does put a lot of pressure on the DM if you feel compelled to do production quality maps. My feelings are quite a bit different on the medium, for a non commercial module I don't worry about the appearance, I'm more interested in file size. I feel the absolute most important thing is the map be a fast and easy transfer. Nothing kills a session faster than someone *not* being able to get the map.

I hadn't even thought of file size! That's another consideration for the map maker*.

You and drahkar make a good point that I am putting a lot of pressure on myself to provide good quality maps to my players when they might be happy with far less. In my regular table top games I rarely do more than miniatures on my chessex battle map (a more wrinkled and curling beast you have never seen). It might be a bias I have towards games on the computer needing to reach a certain graphical standard, just because that's what I've been playing the last 20 years, and computer games get better looking every year.

Recently I've been teaching my brother and I how to play Savage Worlds on Fantasy Grounds, and after each session (which has been short and frustrating for various reasons), we fire up World of Warcraft to do a little quick leveling. I find myself admiring the beautiful vistas of Don Murogh for a few seconds before we start actually playing, and then I realize that I'm just hitting tab, pressing '1' and then '3', and then hitting tab for the next target, until I've killed all 10 woozles before piloting my way back to the question mark. And then I realize how much I love and appreciate Fantasy Grounds, and wonder why the heck more people and companies aren't interested in real roleplaying online.

Now I'm not saying I want Blizzard quality maps (ok, sure, I would love it), but I'd love to have a regular supply of maps that were half as good as Doctor Zeuss's beautiful creations to use with our living, breathing games. In the meantime I'll keep searching for a decent solution.



*And it reminded me of another factor: split levels. I remember the first encounter in the War of the Burning Sky takes place in a tavern, in which EugeneZ (a hero of mine) had helpfully included a map for both the first and second floor. Of course my players rushed to the second floor immediately when combat commenced (don't ask me why), but as soon as I moved a token from one map to the other, the session went into crash mode. I believe this is something that was fixed in a later version, but I've never had the guts to check.

[Doc_Waldo]

I sit on Robbo's sit on this topic of nice maps and I agree it is a person thing. I work very hard to create nice maps, I make them high resolution and I use higher resolution tokens. I like to zoom in and see the details on the tokens, and I like to see nice detail on the maps. Yes it does take longer and one of the frustrating things about FGII is that each person does not have the ability to zoom in on the map, so I as the DM must accommodate all the different size screens (although after I do my initial set up I can then zoom until my hear is content until I share again). But the detail I suspect is more for me than the players.

I recently played with a group where the map was fine, nothing special, but token detail wasn't the focus and being a player I couldn't control the zoom in so I had to stand from afar most of the time looking at my token (like an ant on the ground). To the DM it wasn't a large priority to get the detail of the tokens or map--I didn't nor do I think the other players worry to much about it because the game was wonderful-- I learned that I might be worrying way to much about getting a perfect map and perfect tokens.

In the end I have decided to try and play a happy medium. The fact is, I really enjoy trying to make a perfect map and looking for the perfect token and images to create tokens from, but if I am rushed for time, I just have to convince myself that take screen shots of the maps from different mods, i.e. a dungeon mag pdf, increasing the size and doing a little cloning to remove stuff must do, and most likely I will be the only one who cares that the maps are not perfect.

I have photoshop, GIMP, CC3/DD3, and am always looking for a way to make a better map, I suspect that will never change....that's really part of the fun for me, but at least I now understand that I may be an exception to the rule and not the norm.

[Zeus]

I agree with a lot of the views posted here suffice to say, mapping is a very subjective component of modern day rpgs. I remember when I first started gaming that most published modules came with a simple plain blue/black on white set of gridded maps. As we would progress through a dungeon the DM would begin every encounter area with descriptions like "You stand before a 15' x 20' room, on the north wall is a single door ... ".

There is more emphasis on mapping today, with modules including hand drawn, textured and very detailed maps. For 4E the emphasis on the use of minis and battlemaps for handling movement and combat further drives a compulsion for better maps. As a consequence the flavour descriptions for encounters has been watered down to be less mechanical and more colourful. Mainly because, as they say, a picture paints a thousand words.

I'd say it should be a choice for the DM and subject to how much time and effort he/she wants to invest in their game. There is nothing wrong with using simple line drawings but as an art enthusiast I much prefer to use pretty maps in my games, my players also appreciate it as they can better visualise the environments than through text descriptions alone. I should also say that I only apply effort to re-drawing Wizards published module maps for those maps that are so poor in quality or resolution that to use them in FGII would be a pain in the wotsits.

Again, its a matter of circumstance and opinion but I would rather use a 2-3 large sized maps in a game than using smaller encounter based tactical maps and having to constantly move tokens from one to another. The HQ versions of the Level 1 and 2 maps above are approx 4.5 and 3MB respectively. Transfer time to my players averaged at about a minute per player. I guess your pipe to the interweb (especially your upload bandwidth) is the limiting factor for consideration. I'm lucky and have fat bandwidth to most of my players (50Mb down/6Mb up) so transfer time is rarely a problem.

For those of you who want to make fairly good battlemaps in quick time, you might be interested to check out PyMapper over at the D&D Dungeon Tile yahoo group. Its a community developed evolution of Rai's older Tile Mapper utility and is available for Windows/Mac and Linux.

[devinnight]

just sat down and read this post and looked at the maps.
Nice job, they look great and it's awesome that you shared all of it with the community.
Is there anything you can't do?
-D

[Zeus]

Thats very kind of you to say so devin, coming from a such a talented artist as your good self I'm very flattered.

I really enjoy D&D, FGII and the great community here so its a pleasure to help out. My only regret is not having more time to do more.

[ddavison]

I just wanted to comment that you guys only see the public things that DrZeuss does for FG. He consistently contributes and shares new ideas, graphical support and more directly with MoonWizard and me.

[Tokuriku]

DrZeuss

What you need to record on a Mac is definitely:
ScreenFlow
The Demo version works like the original but with a watermark... who cares!

[Zeus]

DrZeuss

What you need to record on a Mac is definitely:
ScreenFlow
The Demo version works like the original but with a watermark... who cares!

Thanks Kenshin, I'll take a look.

[Zeus]

Here's Level 3 ...

[Blue Haven]

Will you work on more maps and maybe some random encounters maps...? that would be awesome!!