Maps, tiles, or theater of the minds eye?

[garhkal]

So, for when you game, do you prefer using map packs (or chessex like battle mats)? Dungeon tiles (whether those 2d cardstock sets, or 3d dungeon forge like stuff), or do you just run "Theater of the minds eye?

[Meph]

I mix it up quite a lot in my games. I use Theater of Mind occasionally for small encounters but I tend to do a very visual presentation for my games. I have four 3D printers so I never lack for a terrain piece and my collection is exploding these days. I also have some old wooden blocks I made years ago for fast and easy layout that I bring out on occasion. Sometimes I will print a map in poster format sized for 1' squares and run that or I will use my chessex mat. Honestly what I use depends on my mood that week. Some stuff is even hand crafted such as my Yawning Portal that I made for my first session of my Waterdeep campaign.

[garhkal]

Nice.. If you print out the sheets, how do you 'balloon' up a map you have, to where it is sized for 1" squares, on the regular size paper?

[Meph]

I load it into photoshop to resize it properly and then save it as Adobe PDF. Then I open it in Acrobat and print it as a poster. It spans as many pages as needed to print full size.

[garhkal]

so i need to get a copy of photoshop, to do that then..

[Meph]

I am sure you can do it with any image editing software. I use photoshop because I learned to use it years ago when I did a lot of photography editing. All I do is use the ruler tool. Resize the image so the 5' squares equal 1" in size. Lots of free image editing software will be able to do that also.

[garhkal]

Copy that. May have to see if i can find some.

[Lukafio]

I will admit when I first saw "theater of the minds eye," my brain processed it as Mind's Eye Theater and my excitement went up thinking this might be a WoD discussion. Silly me!

I was excited to see everything you are doing with your 3D printer. It is an awesome visualization of what I used to try and describe for my players. I've always been a graph paper kinda DM (until the mats first came out). I rue the day I get a 3D printer, for my imagination shall run amuck and my players will beg me to stop (insert insane laugh track here).

[garhkal]

I will admit when I first saw "theater of the minds eye," my brain processed it as Mind's Eye Theater and my excitement went up thinking this might be a WoD discussion. Silly me!

I was excited to see everything you are doing with your 3D printer. It is an awesome visualization of what I used to try and describe for my players. I've always been a graph paper kinda DM (until the mats first came out). I rue the day I get a 3D printer, for my imagination shall run amuck and my players will beg me to stop (insert insane laugh track here).

My big issue is since i game at a store, i can't really bring lots of terrain with me..

[JadedDM]

Way, way back in the day when I still ran face-to-face games back in high school, we didn't use maps miniatures or anything like that. I guess you'd call it 'theater of the mind.' We just didn't really pay much attention to things like spell range or character movement speed.

Nowadays, with my games played in forums, I actually do use maps and icons for battles. Sometimes I just draw up simple hex maps, and sometimes I find maps online I can download. If I'm running a module, I just upload the maps that come with it, usually greying out any areas that the party hasn't explored yet in MS Paint. For instance, here's the current map of Cragmaw Castle from my Lost Mines of Phandelver game:

[Cole]

"Theater of the minds eye for the most part, will periodically use vinyl battle mats to draw out dungeons nowadays as suggested by many of you, many years ago (quite like those)... as for mini's... nope, hate em... use your imagination.