Dungeon Maps in your game

[Nebulous]

Yes, Arkham Horror is very cool as well. I own a lot of Fantasy Flight Games products. And I mean a *lot* I need a bigger house to store all my games.

I have been playing Battlestar Galactica lately and that game is pure evil fun. It's so funny to play a game where everyone seems to be working towards a common goal, but some are actually traitors.

Fantasy Flight is amazing. I have Game of Thrones but haven't even played it yet. I can't actually afford to buy all the great games they have, much less find time or people to play them, unless i went to game conventions on a weekly basis!

[Nebulous]

FF also made the Midnight d20 game setting, which is still one of my favorites from the 3e era. Just a gorgeous, gorgeous book, and fun to read.

[Morkhdull]

Well... All of these paper walls remember me that I build a mix between Dwarven Forge and 2D maps... Talk you about that soon ... Just let me say "matchboxes are about one inch"

[jfrazierjr]

I don't like the computer calculating all the damage, adjusting stuff for me etc. Might as well let a bunch of laptops play the game and go off and do something else.

I can understand that for the most part, but for me, it's a matter of time. I will be starting a new 4E campaign with my FtF group I play with in March. I plan to use Maptool and some people will be using their computer and others will not, so I will plug up to an external monitor to show them the board and have one of the players with computers to do the moving for those that don't.

As for calculating stuff, I just just want to save time. In the other campaign I play in (3.5 using Elements of Magic ruleset around 8th level average), we typically spend 2+ hours on combat lasting roughly 5-8 rounds on average, and since we only play for 5 hours once month(if that), we hardly get anything done. 4E helps to simplify this to some degree, but we have a few players who are not really "fast" with making up their minds on what they are going to do, so I plan to implement a round timer, just like in Chess... I am thinking 30 seconds per player, plus another 15 seconds if you spend an action point to do something else, and thats total time including all dice rolls. Granted, there will be a few special situations where information needs to be clarified that I will have to rule on a case by case basis, but for the most part, if you can't complete your action in 30 seconds, you character is indesicive and loses out.

On a side note when 4E came first came out, we had another of our players take a turn a GMing our session for a 4E one shot. I had used another of rptools utilities for dice rolling that allows for setting up named buttons with saved formulas for my most used actions. I paid VERY close attention to the time it took me compared to others and while everyone had various different average times, my use of a computer tool undercut everyone elses time drastically.

I move here.
I attack foo and bar with Twin Strike<click>
I rolled "x" on foo and "y" on bar and if hit, foo takes "a" damage and bar takes "b" damage.
I am done.

my average time to complete my entire turn was 10 seconds. Everyone else averaged 30+ seconds, with many players taking 1+ minutes to complete some actions (yes, everyone was new to 4E and may not have been as well prepared as me in terms of knowing their character, but in 3.5 at least, that did not seem to make much of a difference). Also, on a side note, we are all pretty smart, but no math wiz's here.... Using Elements of magic rules, we typically roll 6d6, 7d6, 8d6 and once in a while 9d6 for a few characters who are the highest level close to every players turn. I kind of have to do the math to add up each die and that takes a few seconds, so having a dice tool do the rolling and totalling for me can shave drastic combat time off when aggregated over a session. With that said, I will allow the people who don't use a computer to roll dice manually, but they will still be limited to 30 seconds for their round and as GM, I plan to have all the monster's rolls calculated as well as copies of the players character sheet to do the comparisons to the defense and have damage calculated, but I won't apply the damage to the players token property since there are things that a player can do (Halflings luck, certain item powers) that may negate the damage or require another attack roll....

[jfrazierjr]

some cool stuff......

some incredible stuff!!!!

Thanks for sharing. I loved seeing both. Morkhdull, that is an incredible way to play and I would love to play with a GM who did stuff like that, but for me as GM, it's to time intensive just to do the set up stuff, not to mention the prep work involved. Would be great for something like a Con though where people don't have as strict time commitments.

[Lwaxana]

I don't need to worry about godmode issues so I usually show the maps parts which are on the same piece of paper.

[Sagenlicht]

I was curious to see how you guys n gals handle dungeon maps at your roleplaying sessions.

Do you show maps to your players?
Just for encounters?
For the entire dungeon?
If there are more rooms than they can see (secret rooms, rooms behind doors) do you trust your players not to metagame or do you cover the invisible areas somehow?

For me, I've used full dungeon maps only as a reference for myself, and battle/encounter maps I usually scribble on paper on the spot if players want to know where everything is (we kind of wing combat at our table).
But now that I'm getting into DD3 I'm making some maps that could actually be of use to my players, plus they aren't crappy enough for me to want to hide them.

Obviously if you game over the internet this is not really an issue, since FantasyGrounds can mask whatever area of the map you want, and I'm sure similar applications have a similar feature. For actual physical tabletop gaming though, I'm at a loss. The only solutions I can come up with involve a) a truckload of Post-Its and/or b) a lot of duct tape.

So how do you handle this?

Actually Rahva I am having the same issues as you have. I usually prepare battle plans for encounters (if outside) and floor plans for the dungeons. I usually do this in DIN A2 to cover one complete dungeon floor, which means I need some paper sheets to hide not entered dungeon parts. Imo this is an atmosphere killer but I havent found a better solution yet. I am considering to switch to an VTT and a beamer but I am not sure about this yet...

[ravells]

Ah do it the old fashion way! Describe in words and get the players to map it!

[Sagenlicht]

Hehe ravs we used to do it that way... once I started with the maps they didnt want to go back to that old school style

[Kihmbar]

In response to the OP, my group typically plays on the maps (like a board game) but we don't usually see maps until there is a need for the players/characters to have spatial awareness. At first we used a dry-erase board and just drew the maps, by hand, on the board whenever it was needed. Then we got some Star Wars minis (we play Star Wars RPG) and we used the minis for figures on the dry-erase board. We found someone who made transparent dry-erase sheets with a 1" hexgrid and got one of those to have a sense of scale. [I'll have to look up where I got it if someone is interested, it was 5-6 years ago. When the WotC SW minis came out, we picked some of those up (and the maps that came with them). We put the dry-erase grid on top of the SW minis map and the GM could then modify the SW minis map (e.g. "there is a wall here instead of a door") so that each map is a little different. The dry-erase grid would also protect the SW minis map, similar to the use for plexiglass that Morkhdull mentioned. Now we use maps with the dry-erase grid on top of it. There is a "blank" SW minis map if the GM does want to draw their own map like we did at first.