Dungeon Master Musings: Building a good map

The first map that I made for Dungeons and Dragons was the Grove level of the Sunless Citadel.

The grove level of the Sunless Citadel

It was a lovely little place with a lot of interesting spaces.  But, because of my newbishness, there were a lot of things I did poorly, and wound up taking 20 hours doing intricate detail work that nobody would ever notice.  On the other hand, reviewing the maps with my players gave me lots of ideas on how to improve them, and how to focus on spending my time doing things of value to them.

First of all, one of the things that went almost completely unnoticed was a lot of the airbrush work that I put into the piece.  If you look at the full size version of the map, you'll see what I'm talking about if you look very closely.  I airbrushed in pathways, trails, and other details to make it look like certain spots were more well trodden than others.  And nobody noticed.  But hooboy, people noticed when a simple table was missing from the Bugbear Hunter's room!

I thought the walls for my first map were boring, so for my second map, I put WAY too much detail into the walls

The Mountain Door to the Forge of Fury

Which is silly, because no one is going to look at the walls.  It's al covered by the in-game MapTool Fog of War stuff.  At most, the players will see 10 pixels into the wall.  And that's it.

What really matters to the players is interesting set pieces.  They want to know the shape of the room and what's in it.  They don't care as much about the shading or the detail work.  They just want a grid, a room, and *STUFF.*  What blew my mind was that the thing that people liked the most about my second map was the rope bridge.  I literally traced over the rope bridge in the DM map in brown, and that's the thing everyone liked the best.  Check it out on the higher resolution version.

It just goes to show that design is complicated.  What people want is usually not what the designer or creator thinks people want.  Things like these need to be *usable* not beautiful or whatever.

For a WXGA (1280x800) projector, the 50 pixels per square size works quite reasonably.  200 pixels per square would give a lot more space to play with, but 50 is pretty easy to work with, easily fits within available memory and performance constraints, and looks good enough.  Most of the time, the players play with the map zoomed out anyways, only zooming in for figuring out tactics for combat.

Ooh.  Another thing I learned.  So the doors on the two maps above aren't really obvious.  I was trying for more realistic doors, and frankly, they're hard to do and just don't look very good.  It's hard to figure out where to put the dividing line for the vision blocking when setting up the rooms, and it just doesn't feel right.  In later maps, I decided to go back to the more abstract/stylized version of doors:

This map is unfinished as yet.

As you can see, it's a lot easier, now to see where doors are at, and it makes it easy to divide them in half for doors.

I'll share more mapmaking tips, as well as a description of the tools and process I use for making them, later on!