If you're dealing with a dungeon that's a dozen rooms or less, how often do you just say "fuck it", decide not to draw the map and just link everything verbally and numerically like a choose-your-own-adventure book? Or does a map add something vital, even on a small scale?

For a small dungeon I forego the map and just call it out as visualized or if its more than say 6 rooms, then I plot out the major locale numbers and draw lines between them showing connections.

One method I tried way back once was grouping rooms into four clusters of three. When the group came to a junction I rolled a d4 twice. Each path lead to a cluster. And those two clusters lead to the remainders.

So it ended up looking like this.

D---A---@---C---B

That way the players choice of path determined what they encountered first and wether they needed to backtrack or not. Only used it once. Should probably go back and flesh it out and re-use it some day.

Usually though I plot out a dungeon ahead of time that way the players choices have meaning rather than being totally arbitrary. And removes a bit of temptation to shuffle things afterwards.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;788722If you're dealing with a dungeon that's a dozen rooms or less, how often do you just say "fuck it", decide not to draw the map and just link everything verbally and numerically like a choose-your-own-adventure book? Or does a map add something vital, even on a small scale?

I'd either draw a map or just leave the location totally vague by not even deciding how many rooms there actually are or how they relate. If there actually is a specific number of rooms and a relationship between them, then drawing a map is far easier for me to do that creating a choose-your-own-adventure linkage or textual description of the number and relationship of the rooms. So why not draw a map?

Thinking about this, even a sketchy map is just a more elegant to put down the layout of an area.

Why spend a whole paragraph on which doorway connects what areas how, when I can commit all that info to paper with a few strokes of a pen.

Still, if it's only half a dozen rooms that might as well connect randomly?

Sure, screw mapping.

5 Room Dungeons

I've got to have a mental map, and a drawn one is usually a valuable aid to memory. Also, as the saying goes, "a picture's worth a thousand words," so it tends to be a lot quicker to draw a sketch than to write a text conveying the same information.

Depends on how comfortable you are improvising. Even with much larger dungeons I have done away with the map before. Sometimes what I do is a brief write up of each "area" of the dungeon, sort of a general description of what it may be like and how it is connected to the other areas. Then I will do a write up for the important rooms only and come up with a few tables for filling out the rest as I make it up.

Depends on what your game is about.

My game is OD&D and in the original OD&D the game is about exploring a hidden map that is described to you verbally.  The map is vital.

For me, if the dungeon is pretty small, then it's even more important to have a map.

With a mere 5 rooms close together, it's a whole lot easier and more credible that the rooms will be interacting, with monsters/players in one room moving through the other rooms to get a better position...so I'd want to have a good map.

Now, if it's some 30 room megacomplex, I still need the map, and I might need some individual rooms, but I don't need quite so much detail...except if there are some rooms that are liable to be interrelated.

Quote from: Shipyard Locked;788722If you're dealing with a dungeon that's a dozen rooms or less, how often do you just say "fuck it", decide not to draw the map and just link everything verbally and numerically like a choose-your-own-adventure book? Or does a map add something vital, even on a small scale?

Are you talking about prep or during play?

If we're talking prep, sketching a quick map is much, much faster than trying to verbally describe pretty much anything other than a linear connection between rooms.

During play? I've run entire megadungeons without drawing a map.