Hey, I'm looking to run a game via a skype/discord voice channel. Even in my home games running dungeons has been a bit of my Achilles heel. Not the encounters or the creation of the dungeon, but getting the players the map of the dungeon in a time sensitive way (without having to walk from my seat behind the screen around to write on my board every time they move to a room). I've tried giving them a fully printed player's map, without any of the traps listed, but I still want some mystery involved. I thought about describing each room and having a player be designated to draw the map themselves, but many of the maps I use are not filled with completely square rooms all the time.
Hoping folks can provide some insight - how do y'all describe/draw your dungeons in real time?
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If you are doing it on Skype it could be easy enough to draw the map in paint. If you use something with layers (photoshop, corel) you can just delete the layers covering rooms as the PCs discover it.
I finally... FINALLY... got my players to start drawing their own maps. I have a map for myself and have only described things in cardinal directions (north, east, etc...). With a sufficiently complex dungeon that they were sick to death of trying to figure out where they were, and after me straight up telling them a few times to "draw a map then", they finally did it. Now they're actually eager to expand the map :)
Dungeonographer has a free version of their software, if you want a map they can all look at that isn't super detailed or hyperrealistic.
They also have hexographer if you want to build hexmaps (like for overland travel and the like) and cityographer if you want to draw out your settlements.
I use roll20 and make use of the dynamic lighting/line of sight to block player's vision of things that their characters aren't able to see. If they want to keep track of the entire dungeon instead of relying on memory (especially useful if I'm bouncing them between pages or for especially twisty passages), they're going to need to draw their own map.
For physical maps, I pre-draw the entire thing but cover up the bits the players can't see with paper so they can't see the room layout in those places. When the players get to that spot, they remove the paper, thus revealing that portion of the map.
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Hey, I'm looking to run a game via a skype/discord voice channel. Even in my home games running dungeons has been a bit of my Achilles heel. Not the encounters or the creation of the dungeon, but getting the players the map of the dungeon in a time sensitive way (without having to walk from my seat behind the screen around to write on my board every time they move to a room). I've tried giving them a fully printed player's map, without any of the traps listed, but I still want some mystery involved. I thought about describing each room and having a player be designated to draw the map themselves, but many of the maps I use are not filled with completely square rooms all the time.
Hoping folks can provide some insight - how do y'all describe/draw your dungeons in real time?
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If you are doing it on Skype it could be easy enough to draw the map in paint. If you use something with layers (photoshop, corel) you can just delete the layers covering rooms as the PCs discover it.
I finally... FINALLY... got my players to start drawing their own maps. I have a map for myself and have only described things in cardinal directions (north, east, etc...). With a sufficiently complex dungeon that they were sick to death of trying to figure out where they were, and after me straight up telling them a few times to "draw a map then", they finally did it. Now they're actually eager to expand the map :)
Dungeonographer has a free version of their software, if you want a map they can all look at that isn't super detailed or hyperrealistic.
They also have hexographer if you want to build hexmaps (like for overland travel and the like) and cityographer if you want to draw out your settlements.
I use roll20 and make use of the dynamic lighting/line of sight to block player's vision of things that their characters aren't able to see. If they want to keep track of the entire dungeon instead of relying on memory (especially useful if I'm bouncing them between pages or for especially twisty passages), they're going to need to draw their own map.
For physical maps, I pre-draw the entire thing but cover up the bits the players can't see with paper so they can't see the room layout in those places. When the players get to that spot, they remove the paper, thus revealing that portion of the map.