When you read a review of a video game, almost always there are comments about the graphics: How do the characters look, how are they animated, how do their surroundings look, and how do things like spell effects look. There are both artistic considerations to that, as well as technical ones, like how blurry a texture looks when viewed from close. In a pen & paper game like Dungeons & Dragons you would think there are no graphics. And in fact there are a lot of people talking about the "theater of the mind" in which their role-playing sessions take place. That is all fine and dandy if the scene is about roleplaying a negotiation with a tavern-keeper or merchant. But once you get into combat, the theater of the mind quickly breaks down, with every player and the DM each ending up with a different picture of the combat situation in his head, usually leading to heated arguments.

So many people use some sort of aid for depicting battles in a pen & paper game, for example figurines on a battle map. And suddenly you have graphics in your game. Of course that works perfectly well with minimal graphics, badly hand-drawn with a dry erase marker on a blank map with 1" squares. But just like graphics in a video game are nice to have, having better graphics in a pen & paper game can also help immersion.

I was thinking about that because I am preparing Madness at Gardmore Abbey, a huge adventure with 30+ encounters, but only 2 poster maps. The books propose using the official tiles to create the rooms for the other encounters. But I find the tiles both ugly and not very practical: You need to lug around a huge box of them to have all tiles for the various rooms, then you need to find the right ones and assemble them on the table, and as they aren't fixed in any way they can easily be accidentally moved when a player wants to move his figurine, throwing everything over. So I was happy when I found a set of encounter maps at the Cartographers Guild. They are a *lot* prettier than tiles. The grid isn't always visible enough for my tastes, but I'm not going to recreate those maps myself in Campaign Cartographer just to change such a minor issue.

So now I'm spending a lot of time printing those maps out to scale on a color laser printer and taping the pages together to form a battle map. That works reasonably well for up to 2x2 pages, which is 16 x 22 squares. I have been experimenting in the past with having maps printed on poster, but that is only a minor improvement and a lot more expensive. Besides maps, I also try to make other handouts in my game graphically appealing. For example in my current adventure the players found "The Book of Strahd", and I printed the two pages of text in a handwriting font on a parchment-like background. I got real Tarot cards for the fortune teller in that adventure too.

You might say that graphics aren't essential to pen & paper games, but I do think that they improve the final result. And as I can only play a session every two weeks, I have the time to do some preparation.