Quote from: jhkim;887445My question was about the fun rather than the exploration. That is, do you think dungeons would generally be less fun for you if you had reconnaissance of the layout?

Yes it would be less fun for me.

Quote from: one horse town;887348there's a rolemaster item which is a bug in a jar. You have to care for the bug, feed it etc and once you loet it out of the jar it scouts out a 300 foot radius from your position. As its a bug, it can crawl under doors and into small places, cracks etc. It takes a while for it to scout the area, but when it comes back it squirts ink out its bum onto a surface (either the ground or a hastily placed piece of parchment). I swear my players preferred that bug both as a pet and a magic item to anything else they had through the campaign.

As it has to use its own 'ink' it can only make 1 map a day, which you might want to change.

stolen.

(shrugs)  Every item, every skill, every spell, every ability provides -- however great or small -- a shortcut.  We've just decided, based on force of habit and tradition, that certain shortcuts bother us a good deal less than others.

Think about the plain, old magic sword, for instance.  It's so ubiquitous in D&D circles that I expect a fighter not having one (for anything other than a unusually low-magic campaign) after a certain point is the sure mark of a schlep loser.  But, unless my memory fails me, an ordinary vanilla +2 sword represents two whole levels of attack capability.  I doubt one player in a hundred thinks of it that way.

I think it's a pretty good idea. It sounds like an exciting find for the players and I think it will make the story and flow of the game slightly easier in the long run.

Quote from: jhkim;887273As a straw poll, how would you feel about such an item as a player? Would it spoil the fun of dungeon exploration? Or would it be a useful reconnaissance?

I ran a dungeon-crawling post-apocalypse game a few years back and the pc's got a "Personal Navigator" which would give them a degree of insight into the dungeon layout depending on things like what services were running, etc.

It could be anything from a gross outline to a beautiful, complex, pre-prepared map.

I found it added a lot to the game, and I've kept some of that in the current (again, high-tech) dungeon-crawling game I'm running.

A few bonuses:

1) Giving the PCs a map creates a different kind of interaction with the game world than blind exploration -- the PCs can make guesses about where the good stuff is, where the dangerous stuff is, etc.

They can also make tactical decisions -- choose paths designed to avoid things that look like hazards or blind alleys.

For this to really work, I had the device show some degree of peril -- displaying (some) traps, for instance, or significant monsters. It rarely showed everything.

2) I've found I enjoy creating interesting maps that make cool artifacts. I'm no artist, but handing over a map that I've spent some time on to make it look pretty gives me a sense of satisfaction, and the PCs seem to like it too.

3) When the power doesn't work, it creates a sense of ominousness -- this place is shielded or very dead. This place is powerful and dangerous. It forces the PCs to go back to blind exploration

4) We game using laptop PCs and shared google docs (even when we're all physically in the same room), and I typically draw tactical maps in a shared document.

Using a prepared map reduces time and effort. Having a map streamlines some of the interactions.

5) My experience is that verbally describing terrain more complex than rectangular rooms and halls is usually a failure. Even when we were young and had all the time in the world, the DM trying to describe a room with significant complexity created a delay that I didn't find added to the game.

Worse, it meant that the players were often confused or wrong about things their characters would have found obvious (the size and shape of the room, the relative location of items and enemies, etc.)

Having mapping software with the GM drawing the map helps with this. Having a prepared map makes it go even faster.

Cheers,
-E.

In the roguelike Nethack, there were "Scrolls of Magic Mapping".  I have frequently used these in my D&D games: one-use items that will either partially or completely map out a single level of a dungeon.

I don't think its unbalancing at all.  It maps out the shape of the dungeon, and depending on the scroll quality will reveal secret doors, but won't tell you anything about what's in the rooms.

Quote from: RPGPundit;888442In the roguelike Nethack, there were "Scrolls of Magic Mapping".  I have frequently used these in my D&D games: one-use items that will either partially or completely map out a single level of a dungeon.

I don't think its unbalancing at all.  It maps out the shape of the dungeon, and depending on the scroll quality will reveal secret doors, but won't tell you anything about what's in the rooms.

Which is pretty much where I got the impression of what the OP wanted.  Traps (at least some) and monsters are not going to show up.  Simply because the monsters may just keep moving.

Yeah, I don't know how it could be possible that this would be thought of as 'session breaking' or something like that.

yah and if you want to keep a few more secrets you limit it to line of sight no bigie