Do you ever map by hand?

[siggboy]

My sense of orientation is almost useless. I get lost in the Hall of Champions... so, yeah, mapping is pretty much essential for me.

Working with an existing map (by someone else) is cheating, esp. so if that map is directly pulled from the game (like the "perfect" DM maps showing creature generators and other things that are either impossible or impractical to find out in-game).

In a game like Dungeon Master, and even more so Chaos Strikes Back, the map IS the solution of the game, or at least a large part of it. In this games, working with an existing map is like playing an adventure game with a walkthrough. No fun at all.

I also kind of enjoy it. It's very rewarding to finally look at your map and see the big picture from above -- and even use the map to quickly trace back in the dungeon to a point of interest.

In Chaos Strikes Back this is especially awesome, because the map is, in a way, three-dimensional. With zealous mapping it's much easier to find a "good solution" to the game with less frustration.

I'm probably going to buy some semi-transparent engineering paper and make my CSB maps on it, so I can actually layer the maps and quickly gather reference points.

[Chaos-Shaman]

not recommended do to spinners and teleporters, if rtc, use editrtc to map roughly