How to Handle Dungeon Maps in PbP?

[LordOfLemuria]

Imagine you are playing a classic OSR style game, AD&D1e for argument's sake. You've got a map of the dungeon made up, one for player and one for the GM. How do you handle this kind of exploration? In real life it's handled in segments of declaration and resolution (at least if you're playing by old tournament turns), and it seems like that could work roughly as well online.

But how do you handle the actual, gradual, revelation of the map? One thing that occured to me, perhaps the obvious, is to have a Roll20 tabletop which players can view, which I manipulate turn-to-turn. They could even make notes, take screenshots (or I could do this) and indicate where they want to look, etc. with the VTT. But this is already adding another layer onto the game, now everyone must be able to at least view the VTT on another website and make decisions.

I could have a similar situation but simply use the VTT for my own map tracking - positioning tokens and gradually revealing areas, and posting the image to a file somewhere that I can link in the post.

I tried to search this section for 'mapping' but I didn't find exactly what I was looking for.

[Retry]

On roll20 you have the ability to "view as player" so you can see only what the players see. Set the map up as you'd desire and turn on fog of war. Reveal the selected area(s) and then screenshot it and upload to an image hosting site.

Then simply post that image's URL in an image tag. No need to have players access roll20 at all. However, it does add more work on your plate.

I have a recent example in my one-shot game over here. It is in a spoilerbutton near the bottom of the post.

Edit: plus with the nature of pbp (unless you actively delete the old image links from the hosting site or the post) players will have the ability to look back and piece the map together.

[LordOfLemuria]

Originally Posted by Retry

On roll20 you have the ability to "view as player" so you can see only what the players see. Set the map up as you'd desire and turn on fog of war. Reveal the selected area(s) and then screenshot it and upload to an image hosting site.

Then simply post that image's URL in an image tag. No need to have players access roll20 at all. However, it does add more work on your plate.

I have a recent example in my one-shot game over here. It is in a spoilerbutton near the bottom of the post.

Edit: plus with the nature of pbp (unless you actively delete the old image links from the hosting site or the post) players will have the ability to look back and piece the map together.

Thanks, this is what I was thinking about and I think it serves both battlemap and worldmap needs well. I already use Roll20 in my tabletop games just for mapping, and a simple image capture would be straightforward enough.

[jj_wolven]

Thread moved to GM Screen thread.
-me

[jj_wolven]

I use roll20 for it's maps a lot.
You just need to post the link they give you and you can choose which map to have up whenever they look at it.

-me