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Play By Post RPG Maps: Discussions & Map Sharing

Play By Post RPG Maps: discussions and map sharing

I have been running my own Role Play Game on this forum for about 2 months. At the beginning I noticed a good description was good enough to help the players see the setting with in their own minds and imagination. But as we got in to trap rooms and combat a map became drastically vital to relaying space and layout to the player.

My first several maps where crude and little more than flat blocks of color with lines or dots on them.

My next group of maps had words labeling items, but even this did not help clear up the confusion, some players had with where in the space there character was, or what was a round them. So I upgraded my renderings to be more detailed using premade tile images one can get offline or that comes with a map generating soft where. Or that can be downloaded as images.

Still a couple of players seemed to have difficulty with telling where they were in the space, even in non-combat situations where they may move about freely.
At the request of a player I added small token markers color coded to each player in to the maps. Even if their small mark was not moving with every step of the player, just having it in the same room they were in helped a lot as they navigated and explored. However this made it much harder for me to use the maps. Because I would either have to redraw the map every time someone moved, or by hand edit the map.

I found the editing at first to be hard but then I figured out a better system.
By making a blank map and saving that image file under the name of the room, then editing the image to have my players markers in it and saving the modified version of that map under another name made it so I could always go back and have the blank room to work with if anyone changes there positions. I then could just plug in the markers for the players making them something that was easy to reproduce and put into a map using the paint program that comes with most every computer I know of.

So I would have my master file for the map "room one" and I would have my active version of the map with the player markers "room one -1" and every time a player declared that the moved or the following combat round took place I could just open my master file, added in the markers, re save it over the modified file name.
And finally it was easy.

By freeing up the struggle of tracking player tokens on the map I started to play a round with making the maps look better and better. (Don't worry you do not need artistic talent to make good maps even by hand there are some easy tricks ill share them with you lower in this post.)

As an artist I have some imaging soft where such as one of the more famous ones," Photoshop" and I began to play around with the layering system and the filters. I found a small lines flare in the program made the perfect glowing object to put in to the map such as to indicate a torch or a glowing rock or fire light in a fixed point.
And that the lighting affects offered a spotlight shading to offer a blinded of faded view out to pure darkness to show what area the torch lite was lighting.

I then went about looking for textures online that where free source such as images of dirt, grass, sandpaper, grit, stone and other natural items. I used the photo editing soft where that again comes with most computers with windows to play around with the tent adding or changing or even taking a way color form the texture, changing the contrast bring more details in it out or making it softer and less rough. I found you could lighten and darken it fairly easily and then take the custom texture and put it in to the paint program. In paint its fast and easy to cut a shape out using the lasso tool or cut it down to a small chunk and add a grid over the top of it in a faded color, light on dark or, dark on light to show the standardized grid used to show space.
This new set of custom colored or tented textures is all you need to make custom tiles. This way if you want your dungeon's floor to have blue stone floors you don't have to be stuck using the gray ones that you can get off the net easily, or if you want to show a cave outline and don't want all the walls to be perfectly caved squares.

So I took a little time and made some of my own custom tiles. I now had even more opportunity to customize my maps for my players. All of a sudden the confusion was gone and player's stopped asking where in the house am I. Seeing there marker in whatever room they indicated verbally to of entered.

The questions of where are the steps where gone because the detailed custom tile showed the steps shaded from light to dark indicating up or down depending on which side they were on. Light always being the side higher and dark lower even if the rooms where evenly lit.

With the added use of highlight from my editing soft where a glowing stone on the wall was no longer a blue dot but a blue glowing dot that slightly changed the color of the stone gray around it.
The stone was not a flat gray anymore but looked lightly rough and uneven like real stone might be.
The more I toyed around with how to edit and make maps for the game the more I saw the importance of them and they became easier to make. Again allowing me to try new things and work on improving them.

I started this thread because I want to know from the players and game runners here on the forums the experience you have had with maps, good and bad.

What you have seen work. What troubles you have with making them. I understand not everyone is an artist but with the per-made tiles online map making is really fairly easy even at the most basic level. And, I have no problem righting some easy how to guides on working with paint to make a custom map.

The more complex things I have been toying with where more to satisfy my creative need, but also helped to relaying information to play player's. From the lack of questions for clarification, I could tell the new maps where being accepted well. Now I still try to do a fairly nice description of what they see after all words how power. But, when they want to navigate that same space a visual aid dose wonders, "A image is worth a thousand words" I believe the old proverb goes.

So I want this thread to be a place where people can talk and work out problems or share experiences with reading, using, seeing, interpreting, making, creating, and navigating maps made for forum run play by post RPG games. Ideally I also want to have this be a place where people can post maps they have made and show examples, good and bad, of successes" or failures, they have had in maps in the past, as well as share maps for others to use.

Hopefully the Mods can certify if this is okay or not.

Generic maps without player markers and ones showing different kinds of player markers or tools used with descriptions on how to achieve this kind of effect. At least I think would be a wonderful source of gamers in powering each other and a benefit to this community.

So please join the fun in talking and sharing all things RPG maps, from your experience making them to what you look for in one.

Sharing Map and Discussions Maps RPG Post Play

I thought maybe it was a graphics program set for role-playing games that you were using and that would have been awesome for map creation. What you're doing is awesome anyway because you have the natural skills to get it done with whatever program you find, but some of us are not so gifted. Oh well, thanks for explaining how you did it I got a few tips from it.

Play By Post RPG Maps: Discussions & Map Sharing Reviews RPG & Card Board

It is not as hard as you think to make them. Really it's not, but like I said if you feel you can't make the tiles, then just use the pre-made ones you can get off the net. Then you can just 'copy past' peace thee together in a program(Paint)like putting the pieces of a puzzle together in any order you want to make your map.

You can find the tiles in Zipped or torrent files as well as in most of the basic free generator downloads within the programs files. They are easy to extract. Drag drop the image files into a new file save it wherever you ant and then in the Paint program you can use the Past from file tool to drop them in to the map you are building.

Sharing Map and Discussions Maps RPG Post Play

I always say I'm a disaster in drawing maps but that doesn't mean I can't make maps (with a computer almost everybody can have good results). I just don't want to make any map that will require more than 30 minutes in a whole weeks
Why? Because I have a job, a wife and a kid. Not only. I have friends, I like to play computer games, watch tv, going out for a walk, listen to music, smoke a cigarette while drinking my coffee in the front yard at morning, help my wife clean the house in my day off, bring her to the mall or eating somewhere, play with my kid and, last but not least, participate in many areas of this same website.
Making maps is time consuming. I play in games with no maps and never had problems so it means that they are useful but not unavoidable. Moreover, even if I have a laptop now, I almost always post from my phone since I'm rarely home. Play by post is an evolution of the old pen and paper, with lot of imagination and crude maps used almost only for complex dungeons. Where am I in the room? Why? Is that so important? As long as I know if I have enemies next to me, I can be by the door or by the window or wherever. That doesn't prevent me from taking any action. I can see a use for maps only in combat, for large groups, or inside a maze. For the rest, people played table-top Dungeons & Dragons without maps for decades, why should be so difficult here?
A last consideration is this one: a map is an image. If every member of this community added images to their posts, the administrators would be forced to charge us for joining. Internet space doesn't come for free and managing a community is not only a hard task. Is also expensive.
Well, these are the many reasons why I'm against the use of maps, at least in my game. Sorry, Kit, this is my point of view. If I want graphics, I play Skyrim.