I personally recommend going old school and drawing your dungeon out on graph paper. Additionally, don’t plop the map down in front of your players. Instead describe where they are as they explore the map and have them draw the map themselves based on your descriptions. In my experience this leads to much more engaged players and also opens interesting gameplay.
Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
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Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#12Amen, real person role playing will remain superior to video games until AIs are more capable and fantastically deprived than humans. Until then, people bring the surprise, serendipity and wonder that makes a new game unique
Depraved, even.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#13I feel that list articles don't meet the standard for a good HN submission.
In the interest of discussing tabletop map tools, one that isn't mentioned which is frankly amazing is: TaleSpire[1]. The quality of their asset packs for building maps is fantastic and you can actually play with friends using it.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#14It’s been fun playing with an online DM that has been stretching and upping his game. When he pulled out Dungeon Alchemist especially we were super impressed. I’ve stopped playing video games for the most part as the impact and sense of wonder just isn’t there for me the same way it is when I play D&D with my online compatriots. We’re even meeting up later this year! It’s been a fantastic experience. On the topic of…
How did you find your online role-playing group? There are a lot of sites (after a quick google search) and I'd love to have some suggestions.
startplaying.games
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#15I personally recommend going old school and drawing your dungeon out on graph paper. Additionally, don’t plop the map down in front of your players. Instead describe where they are as they explore the map and have them draw the map themselves based on your descriptions. In my experience this leads to much more engaged players and also opens interesting gameplay.
I've been using Dungeon Revealer [1] a self-hosted web app. It's a simple halfway point between a fancy VTT and a paper map. It's easy to use and allows you to upload any kind of image, which makes it a rudimentary presentation tool too.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#16To make importable square-tiled 3D maps for Tabletop Simulator, I use Illwinter's Floorplan Generator to first create 2D maps and convert them to 3D using Blender. This workflow allows me to prepare both indoor and outdoor maps very quickly. If I feel like putting in more work, I can model props like bridges, buildings, platforms etc. separately and link them to the maps in Tabletop Simulator.
I have a small tutorial here: https://wiki.tyghsh.net/creating_3d_maps_tabletop_simulator.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#17Foundry VTT has a steep learning curve but it has a good Javascript API and can be extended quite heavily. The community on Discord is large and super friendly: https://discord.gg/foundryvtt
Foundry VTT is excellent, but it's also not a map creator, so it really doesn't fit the article. Same with Roll20.
The article doesn’t seem to have any consistent idea of what a map maker is, including map generators, map drawing tools, and VTT that mainly let you use maps.
And kind of odd not to mention CC3 or any of the rest of the ProFantasy suite when it comes to drawing tools.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#18This person was using Donjon generated maps and passed them to a specialized Stable Diffusion model:
https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/11kpesp/dn...
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#19I've recently started DMing, and my biggest surprise when I looked into this is just how poor the general tooling was when I looked for it.
I found the user experience of Roll 20 horrible. I fumbled my way around the interface, eventually sort-of getting some maps going but the scene "transitions" were me just deleting the previous tiles because I couldn't work out how to set out proper scenes.
A lot of the other tools were random "download this .jar" applications which didn't run well at all.
I was fully prepared to throw £20 at a good solution for designing a few maps I could then easily put into roll20 to coordinate a session or print out for offline sessions.
But while there were a few good open sets of raw tilesets, the actual tools for putting together tilesets into dungeons seemed completely missing.
For such an established market I expected to be inundated with mature tooling, but even the official stuff like "d&d beyond" is only just coming together and still mostly lacks the tools for actually running a session.
Re: Best D&D map makers for dungeons, cities and worlds
#20I was happy to see that they included Watabou's Medieval Fantasy City Generator, but Oleg has much more to offer: on https://watabou.itch.io/ you can also find:
* Cave/Glade Generator
* Neighbourhood Generator
* Perilous Shores: Fantasy region generator
* One page dungeon generator
* And my favourite: Village Generator