Making My Own Maps - Which Ones Do I Make??

[Dachimotsu]

I prefer to make my own maps using Dungeon Painter or Paint.Net, (we play digitally due to distance) but in the past, I've tended to... overdo it. I made maps for places the heroes never went, or in which combats ended up not taking place. This time around, I want to try to only make maps that will get used, but I don't know which ones those are.

I've already got that dungeons will need maps. Towns typically don't need maps since I know how to picture them abstractly by dividing them into zones. But my campaign is less dungeon-heavy and more can-go-anywhere-on-the-continent-heavy. It's not a sandbox campaign, since they will at least be railroaded onto the main quest, but they may achieve their goals by going in any direction they please. This makes map-making a hassle, since I have no idea where a combat may end up taking place. If it's a skirmish, I prefer not to use a map, but even big combats can "get away" from their intended maps.

GM: Out on the streets, the band of bounty hunters spots you.
Player: I use my ring to teleport onto the nearby rooftops.
GM: ... Okay, you're on the roof now, but the bounty hunters still intend to chase you up there. Although... I don't have a map for the rooftops. Let me, uh... just draw one real quick...

Alternately:

GM: The green dragon is willing to avoid confrontation... IF you become his minions.
Player: Screw that! I draw my battleaxe and rally my 6-person party to charge the dragon AND his 17 adds!
GM: FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF


In both situations, it seems like the simplest solution is to just draw a map (or add to it), possibly using the in-program drawing tools (like Roll20 or MapTool have). However, as an artist, this does feel rather cheap to me, and it disappoints the players whose core engagements include sensation (they like to see pretty maps).

So, I basically have two options: Make the bare minimum for maps and improvise when needed, or make too many maps with the possibility of them never getting used. Which option would you recommend, or would do yourself?

[Yora]

Make maps that can be used for many different situation. You don't need a map for every home in a village. Having two or three such maps is enough. In the rare situations that the players want to go into such a house and there's a fight starting there, you can just take out one of these maps. Every fight will be different even when you use the same map multiple times, since there will be different opponents placed in different spots every time. You can also make the maps with multiple entrances so that the players might enter from different direction, again making the tactics for a fight different each time. You could also make the maps in a way that lets you connect them to each other by lining up their entrances.

[arch-fiend]

a helpful option i often take is making some general purpose maps which i can use for any situation where the exact location isn't important or significant enough that the players could tell that the map they are fighting on isn't where they are in the story. typically for these generic maps what ill do is make like a random environment with some feature the players wont think is out of the ordinary and every time i use it ill move things around a little (or just rotate it all 90 degrees if that wont look weird). i also tend to over-map myself but i typically run a sandbox in the beginnings of my campaigns anyway. after a while i think with more focus players tend to end up where you want them to be more often. ultimately its a spectrum, the more freedom you give your players the more useless maps you'll end up needing to make as you try to predict where they end up going and ultimately will still have to cobble together some maps on the fly as they go where you could never have predicted.

[Dachimotsu]

Yeah, that's/those are probably my best option(s).
I'll just make some all-purpose maps for emergencies.

[Martin Greywolf]

Depends on what you define as a map. There's two basic forms of them: proper maps and battle grids.

Proper maps look like our real world maps - you have cities, rivers, that kind of thing. For these, one map of the local continent (countries and major cities, rivers, mountain ranges), one map of the country PCs are in and one map of adventure area are enough. You'll have to draw approx one map per adventure, perhaps less, and once in a while map out another country. Nice and easy.

Battle grids are a bit more fiddly. For many systems, you don't need precise square or hex grid, and can therefore just draw the map of climatic fights and improvise the rest without any maps at all.

If you do need a proper hex grid, well, you still need to map out the climatic encounters, but you have a very good alternative to mapping every damn house or making general maps that will perhaps never see actual play: legos. Or wooden blocks, if you have those. Really, anything that can be stacked on top of each other. Print out a blank hex sheet, and lay those out in the shape of walls or what have you. This has added bonus of being 3D, and should therefore appeal to your sensation-seeking players for that alone.

Now, playing digitally makes this a little more difficult, but! You have options to still pull it off. First one that comes to mind is using a camera to just stream what the map looks like to your players. It's a surprisingly good solution if your internets can handle it - you can move the camera around easily to give different angles and it has that "playing with legos" feel that appeals to our inner 12-year-old.

If that is not your cup of tea and want something a bit more digital, or fancier, well, go for the obvious digital legos: minecraft. You probably won't have time to build proper houses, but making wall outlines on the ground is enough in this case, I'd say, and can be done quickly, especially if you use some mods enabling you to place multi-block lines/rectangles.

Chief thing to remember is that players usually don't mind giving you 10-minute break to create a map every now and then, so any tool that can do so will do.

[Corsair14]

Hi, welcome to the world of micro-managing dungeon masters who design the whole world and are disappointed when the PCs don't go there. I have spent weeks designing an entire campaign world events, major cities and NPCs, complex and fast paced encounters, etc etc, and the group decided it wanted to do something else.

Dungeons for the most part should be mapped out. Town fights you can generally do theater of the mind and not micromanage the maps. We all know what flat roof tops look like so don't over think it. Unless its something massively important. 5e is especially easy to do it on the go. PF is too to a lesser degree. Major characters need to be thought out a bit more. 5e there's nothing really to think out but then you shouldn't have been doing the big named guys on the fly anyway.

I know both in my campaign and the other DM's campaign that's generally how we do things, sometimes if the dungeon type encounter is small enough we do that theater of the mind too.

[ArgentumRegio]

One of the things I like to do is make generic maps. Things that get used A LOT.

Campsites

roadway environs

trails

wide open natural places like desert or forest or fields

a cottage

a street corner


some rooftops (as you noted)

a barn

an inn


a tavern


when you have a folder full of such maps, you can pull what you need quite often from the stack.