![]() If maps were originally drawn in a more abstract fashion, would that have drastically changed gamer culture? Would that have also contributed to us questioning whether encumbrance mattered? How about rations, water, ammunition? Would modern games bother listing weights for vehicles? I mean, sure, drawing a scale map of the dungeon is neat, but so is drawing a picture of my character or drawing a picture of the monsters in each encounter, and I never felt obligated to do that. So, basically, I'm wondering why I used to be so obsessed with drawing dungeons on graph paper, and why I didn't realize much earlier that it was unnecessary. But in actual play, they might as well just be a bunch of little balloons, or a bunch of single-entrance rooms in a straight line. I think most old-school dungeon maps are beautiful to look at, and they immediately give me the urge to start stocking them and run them. ![]() In 3e and 4e adventures, the maps are almost never relevant except during fights. What about wilderness maps? Instead of hex maps, you could probably do the same thing with little balloons, or you could just use a list of important locations, and it wouldn't make a difference in all but the oldest-school campaigns. With 99% of the encounters in Undermountain, you could move them to another part of the map and the combat wouldn't run any differently at all, unless you moved them to one of the 1% of weird rooms. ![]() Undermountain, World's Largest Dungeon, and Expedition to Barrier Peaks are all just collections of huge rectangular rooms with no cover or obstacles in most of them. Not only that, but most of the maps are simplistic enough that there's no real tactical meaning. And the little nitpicky maze stuff in many adventures never had any relevance, since lots of those rooms were empty dead-ends that would never be important in a tactical fight. So why were the dungeons drawn on graph paper with a scale using exact distances, rather than drawn in an abstract format?Īfter all, you could easily draw a bunch of word balloons ("Entry," "Kitchen," etc) with lines between them and duplicate most dungeons. One of my favorite features is the ability to layer music on top of each other, so you can mix an atmospheric track with an actual musical track.Exact movement and positioning wasn't a big deal throughout most of the AD&D era, and I'm not even sure how big of a deal it was during the OD&D era. ![]() You can easily import maps that you create as JPEGs and it’ll layer a usable grid over the top so players can move their characters around during combat or judge the time of travel over long distances. ![]() It’s a super customizable web-based software that gives you access to almost everything you need to create and run a TTRPG game. There are also plenty of virtual tabletop software apps that we didn’t get to mention on this list, like Tableplop and Let’s Role, which are also viable options.įoundry Virtual Tabletop is currently my go-to virtual tabletop for my own home game. It can get pricier than the rest of the entries on this list, so keep that in mind. Those who like old-school TTRPG can try out Fantasy Grounds, a highly customizable albeit somewhat hard-to-use software. However, for something similar to Foundry but for free (to an extent), then go with Astral, which is a great virtual tabletop software that gives you access to a ridiculous number of rule sets. Thanks to its 3-dimensional nature, it feels more engaging than your average 2D software. If you’re looking for something more unconventional and don’t mind spending a bit of money, Tabletop Simulator is a great software to host your TTRPG games. ![]()
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