DDN Blog: Goblins Only Care About Your Axe

As I said in a previous blog post, sometimes a fight is just not worth the effort of stopping the game to draw out a tactical map. I cannot imagine the amount of time I have spend drawing maps and juggling Dungeon Tiles, whether it was for a hunting party of kobolds in the forest south of Winterhaven, a handful of undead lurking within the catacombs under Shadowfell Keep, or for the final confrontation against Kalarel, his undead guardians, and a life-sapping portal.

Out of those, the only time a map really made things cooler was the showdown with Kalarel, and given my experiences running A Sundered World—fighting clockwork horrors in Shom, fleeing from a gith-mounted red dragon and bladeling raiding party, and taking on a possessed Autocthon while riding an ancient blue dragon—I am fairly certain it would have still been really awesome without it.

I am not sure how I buy into the player mentality of "its on the map, kill it". When running Age of Worms in 3rd Edition, this was not a problem, even though I would draw the map as they explored the dungeon. Really if there was a map, I used it, and they never complained. Maybe it is because there were not a lot of things to interact with, and the fights were over a lot quicker? Most of what I recall from the first was just walls and maybe some furniture. Occasionally there was difficult terrain or something that they did not want to step in, like brown mold.

The point is that drawing maps "back in the day" seemed to have been a lot easier than it is now, and given that they never really went off the map it probably did not feel like an investment that they were passing up. I keep mentioning to them that I would like to run the through Age of Worms using 3rd Edition, just to see what they like and do not like. I would be curious to see how they handle exploration-based mapping.

Anyway I have hundreds of minis and a lot of Dungeon Tiles, and given that my issues were more centered around the expenditure of time (how much have I wasted drawing maps and pondering terrain features and effects for trivial things?), I am glad that they are considering methods to reduce the time shifting between both "modes", as well as defining abilities to work with either.