Would you hold it against a DM if they burgled a world map from a video game, but used original settlement locations...

Is it just me or does that look like a map of Manchuria-Japan?

Either or. Real ones are more authentic but might not have so many interesting features.

Looks roughly like Earf, as seen from the north pole. There's a north america and an eurasia and an africa with a hole in it.

Eh, if I know the game it might throw me off a bit, but making maps is kinda hard and shitty unless it's a thing you like to do. I wouldn't hold it against them.

If it was a game I knew, the worst part would be holding my tongue with references to that game.

Not at all.

Do it well and you won't be caught.

Also it's a case of "know thy players," for example in one quickly assembled game where players were a Slaaneshi cult, one of them instantly made the fact that their cult HQ was a Salamandra base from W1tcher.

But none of them realized it was an incredibly obscured, never-visited in the books map of a Haradrim city from Lord of the Rings, even though it was s'post to be in Araby from Warhammer.

I don't see the point of maps. I feel limited if I draw a map for a game. And it's not like my games will go all around the world so why make that much more work for myself?

You could just draw a flowchart instead, with adjacent areas connecting to each other, and then draw the map around it as it forms.

Honestly pretty good idea.

Yeah, I mean if you're in a game about being the first people to circumnavigate the globe it makes sense for it to exist (if not be shown directly to players), but I think here we mean a map of the "play area."

Like do you have maps of dungeons & such or do you rely wholly upon description?

Making landmasses is a pain in the ass.

Well maps of dungeons are one thing, because the players are set to explore them thoroughly and it helps immensely. But for world or even town maps, I just can't be fucked. Probably from all my years running Call of Cthulhu and Delta Green- leave it to the imagination if you can

>I don't see the point of maps
Because when 4 people sit down around a table and they all have to guess where everything is, every one of them will have a different idea in their head.

Not a bad policy, but I like to have some struggle from traversing the environment and lay it out before them in some campaigns. Obviously in others it doesn't matter.

I'm telling you guys -- flowcharts.This connects to that, that connects to those, the path splits here, that way is a dead end, it can all be summed up as a flowchart.

Draw a basic outline, right?

Then make a cloud render, then use magic wand on a low tolerance to pick out jagged areas. Drag and distort these jagged areas into the outline. Repeat until full. This gives you a black landmass with rough coastlines.

Start up a new game of Civilization/Alpha Centauri/Whatever, keep generating new maps until you get something you think you can work with, alter to taste.

I stole mine from a Dwarf Fortress world. I redrew it by hand and tada! I have a map that looks good and is completely unique!

Oh yeah, Dwarf Fortress also gives me settled areas, a trade map, and shitloads more stuff. What a useful tool.

I'd be stuck thinking "if they were too lazy to steal a lesser known map or make their own, what else is ripped off in this game?", and start looking for renamed and fluffed shit everywhere.

But eh, maybe that's just me. But there are enough fake fantasy maps out there that you can avoid ones that have been published and distributed to millions.

>Would you hold it against a DM if they burgled a world map
I can only picture a neckbeard wearing a balaclava breaking into somebody's house and walking out with a globe all nefarious-like now.

>show world map
>to players

I'm trying to remember a session when the party EVER got a look at a map they hadn't drawn themselves as they went along ... There was that one regional map on a chapel ceiling the GM let us "copy." It only represented the area of the parish and was faded as it had been painted @700yrs before we got there, so it was of limited use anyway. But a WORLD Map? Fucking never.

False dilemma is false.

>In MY world, cartography is non existent

That might work for an exploration based campaign where you're pilgrims discovering shit for the first time. But as points out, any established world worth its salt will likely have maps, and players are going to be capable of buying them (even if at an exorbitant cost) or stealing them. if they go anywhere near a major settlement. Even a tribe of forest squatters older than two generations are going to at least draw a shitty map of their surrounding explored area for reference, even if only in the dirt or on the back of some animal hide with berries and dung.

Tell us why.

Particularly when I gotta come up with something for your asses with only 1 day to work on the game you ungrateful asses bleat for me to run.

I got a real life, and I'd rather play a damn game but NO, you want me to run.

So deal, I used a pre-made map, made some different cities, and I got a basic damn game to start us off with.

Now, my boss at work is sniping at me, so I gotta get to work on time tomorrow, so we're ending about an hour early tonight.

You sound upset, user. Do you want to talk about it?

Anyone who tries to say they're not stealing ideas for games is a liar. Some people just hide it better than others.

Me, I've stopped giving a shit about other people's thefts, or my own. I am beyond caring about whatever petty intellectual thefts are made in the service of a good game.

I usually take 15 minutes to make a session or an hour to make a rule, but I am 100% on the DM's side if no one else will step up to run.

No criticism from a purely plAyer perspective can speak to "laziness" in the same way video game critics can criticize a game but their guessing about development will be woefully inaccurate. You're allowed to dislike something you couldn't do, but not smugly call inferior if you can't stack up to it.

*an hour to make a world

Nope.

Ultimately it's meaningless, especially when half the people don't know that it resembles a game world.

Strawpoll.

strawpoll.me/10877589

That western continent is aesthetic as fuck.