So recently I've been enjoying playing around with Dungeondraft and made a few maps using it for an ongoing travel adventure IMS.
It's a travelogue type adventure (a senior magus from Stonehenge travelling around Hibernia to see what the fuss is after it was a topic of heated discussion at the Stonehenge tribunal meeting) so most of the maps are just nice ways to show the differences in the Hibernian covenants and a good way for me to cement the details about them in my own head, to keep everything consistent.
But I did use one for an encounter on the road, and because we had a tactical map and the encounter involved a lot of movement we actually used the tactical movement rules from Lords of Men. A few of the other players were surprised to learn Ars Magica even had official rules for that!
That got me wondering about different ways of playing the game. So I've put together two multiple choice polls here. The first asks if and to what degree you use maps in play, and the second is about to what degree people use extra combat rules, particularly the ones in Lords of Men.
- No maps or images, theatre of the mind all the way
- We use images to set the scene
- We don't use pre-drawn maps but sometimes make them in the course of play
- We use high level maps sometimes (e.g. tribunal maps, maps of the continent or a large region)
- We use high level maps frequently (e.g. tribunal maps, maps of the continent or a large region)
- We use detailed maps sometimes (e.g. battlemaps, layout maps of a covenant, maps of small areas)
- We use detailed maps frequently (e.g. battlemaps, layout maps of a covenant, maps of small areas)
- Other
0 voters
- We don't use the Ars combat rules at all
- We use the combat rules as described in the Core Rulebook
- We have used some of the extra combat rules in LoM but don't regularly
- We regularly use some of the rules from LoM
- We always use the full optional rules from LoM
- We extend the combat rules but not using LoM
- Other
0 voters
P.s. If anyone's interested here are a few of the maps I've made with the tool, I highly recommend Dungeondraft (and its cartographic sister program Wonderdraft) for this stuff:
A muddy cliffside road near Bannow where an infernal beast threatened to chase the travellers off a cliff
The Paruchia of St. Nerius