I am running Dungeon of the Mad Mage and my players frequently get confused about where theyve been and where they are going. One of the players has been trying to make a map. His character has the Keen Mind feat and proficiency in cartographers tools, so his character should be able to make a pretty reliable map as he travels through. Problem is though that due to miscommunications or my poor descriptions, his map is sometimes wrong. So I am looking for tools to basically make it easier to track their progress.
One thing I tried at my last session was to use a standard battlemap grid (Chessex battle mat in my case) and lay down pre-drawn acetate sheets with rooms on them as and when the players enter them. This has some advantages, mainly that I can keep the map limited to the room they're in and maybe some surrounding areas and also that I can effectively reuse my small (25 x 22) grid to display a larger map (by only showing certain sections at one time) without having to keep wiping / re-drawing as we go.
The MAJOR downside is that it takes a long time in prep to draw out the map as individual rooms. It's also quite fiddly to lay sheets down on top of a grid, as the players have a habit of knocking them by accident. But, it did mean that the players were free to copy what was laid down on the grid to make their own "map" if they wanted to.
I've been using MapTool (http://rptools.net) displaying on a TV for my in person home game, and it's working quite nicely. Sometimes for battle maps, sometimes for illustrative/travel maps, sometimes just images and things that might otherwise have been handouts. You could use any VTT (roll20, etc), but I like MapTool because it's self contained and I don't have to rely on outside network connectivity or servers.
I'm using Fantasy Grounds for my VTT. The players use real mini's on the TV screen. They see the map and I use fog of war via Fantasy Grounds. That way they don't have to draw anything. I infer they are tracking where they have been, and when they want to look back, I zoom out to show them. It's been a HUGE time saver.
One thing to remember, and this is very meta about Undermountain is that Halaster could easily have created methods to thwart easy mapping in his masterstroke dungeon.
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I am running Dungeon of the Mad Mage and my players frequently get confused about where theyve been and where they are going. One of the players has been trying to make a map. His character has the Keen Mind feat and proficiency in cartographers tools, so his character should be able to make a pretty reliable map as he travels through. Problem is though that due to miscommunications or my poor descriptions, his map is sometimes wrong. So I am looking for tools to basically make it easier to track their progress.
Do you guys have any suggestions?
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One thing I tried at my last session was to use a standard battlemap grid (Chessex battle mat in my case) and lay down pre-drawn acetate sheets with rooms on them as and when the players enter them. This has some advantages, mainly that I can keep the map limited to the room they're in and maybe some surrounding areas and also that I can effectively reuse my small (25 x 22) grid to display a larger map (by only showing certain sections at one time) without having to keep wiping / re-drawing as we go.
The MAJOR downside is that it takes a long time in prep to draw out the map as individual rooms. It's also quite fiddly to lay sheets down on top of a grid, as the players have a habit of knocking them by accident. But, it did mean that the players were free to copy what was laid down on the grid to make their own "map" if they wanted to.
I've been using MapTool (http://rptools.net) displaying on a TV for my in person home game, and it's working quite nicely. Sometimes for battle maps, sometimes for illustrative/travel maps, sometimes just images and things that might otherwise have been handouts. You could use any VTT (roll20, etc), but I like MapTool because it's self contained and I don't have to rely on outside network connectivity or servers.
I'm using Fantasy Grounds for my VTT. The players use real mini's on the TV screen. They see the map and I use fog of war via Fantasy Grounds. That way they don't have to draw anything. I infer they are tracking where they have been, and when they want to look back, I zoom out to show them. It's been a HUGE time saver.
One thing to remember, and this is very meta about Undermountain is that Halaster could easily have created methods to thwart easy mapping in his masterstroke dungeon.