D&D 5E Please help me understand Dnd Beyond "Maps"

[F5]

@Echohawk you are a gem. This is a really great guide and service to the community!

Agreed. Echohawk, your posts were really thorough. Worth bookmarking, because it's clearer than anything I've seen formally from DDB.

Maps really is easy to use though. But that does assume that you are already using D&D Beyond for a campaign and characters. I just tested setting up a map for an existing campaign and characters using one of the default basic maps and it took under 20 clicks to have the whole thing up and running.

I think this is the key thing: Maps is easy to use if you're already using DDB for other things. If you already have your campaign, the players' sheets, NPCs and monsters set up, it's trivial to pull it all together. If you're starting from scratch? Less so, but is it any worse than re-building all of that in a 3rd party tool? Possibly, but not by a lot. Like I said, the preference in my group is to use Owlbear Rodeo over Maps, but there are good arguments to be made either way.

 

[Zaukrie]

Agreed. Echohawk, your posts were really thorough. Worth bookmarking, because it's clearer than anything I've seen formally from DDB.


I think this is the key thing: Maps is easy to use if you're already using DDB for other things. If you already have your campaign, the players' sheets, NPCs and monsters set up, it's trivial to pull it all together. If you're starting from scratch? Less so, but is it any worse than re-building all of that in a 3rd party tool? Possibly, but not by a lot. Like I said, the preference in my group is to use Owlbear Rodeo over Maps, but there are good arguments to be made either way.

It is significantly harder to set up in most other tools (some have zero official dnd data other than the free stuff), not even close.

 

[Clint_L]

Agreed. Echohawk, your posts were really thorough. Worth bookmarking, because it's clearer than anything I've seen formally from DDB.


I think this is the key thing: Maps is easy to use if you're already using DDB for other things. If you already have your campaign, the players' sheets, NPCs and monsters set up, it's trivial to pull it all together. If you're starting from scratch? Less so, but is it any worse than re-building all of that in a 3rd party tool? Possibly, but not by a lot. Like I said, the preference in my group is to use Owlbear Rodeo over Maps, but there are good arguments to be made either way.

This is true, but honestly setting up a campaign on DDB is so trivial that I did it the first time within...I want to say 5 minutes? I keep using myself as the example because, unlike quite a few folks on this forum, I am not very good at tech. My point of comparison is Roll20: I spent the better part of a weekend trying to get it to do what I wanted before giving up. That is not a criticism of Roll20.

I look at Foundry and just shudder - not because it doesn't look great (it does), but because the process immediately intimidates me. For me to want to use a piece of tech it basically has to work intuitively right out of the box. Maps does that.

Of course, for me Maps is just a convenience - I use it for my school games unless it's a special occasion that makes me willing to lug all my analog miniatures and terrain to school and back. Home games are all about the real thing.

 

[plecostomus]

I tried Maps today and I did not find it difficult to create a map and put some enemies and characters in there over the course of about 5-10 minutes. Considerably more time was spent messing around with it after that and figuring details out (see #7) but I found that pretty enjoyable.

The immediate missing features for me were:

1. There is no polygonal select tool for Fog of War so it looks very messy. (Unless I'm missing something?)
2. There is no way to overlay a grid on a map.
   • I used a map for Quests From the Infinite Staircase to test. QFtIS uses 1 square = 10 ft maps. Tokens are pre-sized correctly, but it would be nice if the maps could be divided into 5 ft squares rather than telling players to always remember that just because they are in one of these giant squares it does not mean a Medium enemy can't stand right next to them.
3. There is no way of adding a status indicator to a token, though you can add colored rings.
   • Again this is an instance where you can say to players "if the monster has a purple ring, it's poisoned", or rename the monster to say "poisoned", or similar, but I would rather a VTT just show status when they mouseover. Automated-like.
4. I would prefer if I could pop-out the game log.
5. Not sure if there is a way to easily share artwork other than adding it as a map. Roll20 lets you put art in the game log.
   • The game log doesn't have any chatting features.
6. I would like an option to have the DM map version on the DM view and player map version on the player view.
   • To know what room the players are in during an official module, for example.
7. A little more technical documentation of features would be appreciated, but I did find this very pick-up and play. I even made a homebrew monster token and added it quite easily.
   • Technical documentation helps with situations like my last comment, below.

For a while I was worried I could only prep one map at a time, but you can just add more and save them fully prepped for when they are needed. Not sure how many you can add at once. I would note that if there is a limit, it means you couldn't keep a long campaign prepped from start to finish to rerun later.

Here's the player view of my first test map.

 

[pukunui]

The immediate missing features for me were:

1. There is no polygonal select tool for Fog of War so it looks very messy. (Unless I'm missing something?)
2. There is no way to overlay a grid on a map.
   • I used a map for Quests From the Infinite Staircase to test. QFtIS uses 1 square = 10 ft maps. Tokens are pre-sized correctly, but it would be nice if the maps could be divided into 5 ft squares rather than telling players to always remember that just because they are in one of these giant squares it does not mean a Medium enemy can't stand right next to them.
3. There is no way of adding a status indicator to a token, though you can add colored rings.
   • Again this is an instance where you can say to players "if the monster has a purple ring, it's poisoned", or rename the monster to say "poisoned", or similar, but I would rather a VTT just show status when they mouseover. Automated-like.
4. I would prefer if I could pop-out the game log.
5. Not sure if there is a way to easily share artwork other than adding it as a map. Roll20 lets you put art in the game log.
   • The game log doesn't have any chatting features.
6. I would like an option to have the DM map version on the DM view and player map version on the player view.
   • To know what room the players are in during an official module, for example.
7. A little more technical documentation of features would be appreciated, but I did find this very pick-up and play. I even made a homebrew monster token and added it quite easily.
   • Technical documentation helps with situations like my last comment, below.

Have you submitted any of these via the feedback form? They are actually quite responsive to feedback. Just the other week, I said I would love it if they could add a way to "lock" shapes and tokens together so you can have auras and spell effects that move with the token. What was in the latest Maps update? A "lock" feature that lets you group tokens and shapes together. So now I can have the paladin and her aura grouped together and they move together instead of separately!

For a while I was worried I could only prep one map at a time, but you can just add more and save them fully prepped for when they are needed. Not sure how many you can add at once. I would note that if there is a limit, it means you couldn't keep a long campaign prepped from start to finish to rerun later.

I've got a whole heap of prepared maps. I have no idea what the limit is, if there is one, but I haven't hit it yet!

 

[R_J_K75]

I saw this yesterday when working on our next session in maps. Haven't read it yet, but it looks the most comprehensive "how to" from WotC so far. It was just posted March 12, 2025.

D&D Beyond Maps: How to Start Playing Today

With D&D Beyond's latest Alpha feature, you’ll be able to use interactive battle maps straight from your digital D&D library!

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[R_J_K75]

Click Next, wait a little bit and then you will need to match the square with a circle to the grid of your image. Do that, and then click Save:View attachment 400126

How do you personally get a grid to equal 1 square = 5 feet on a random imported image? Considering in maps you have to add the image before adjusting the grid, how do you know how much to adjust it? The only way I found to do it is to multiply the pixels of the image by 5 which usually works, but sometimes you have use a different multiplier.

 

[R_J_K75]

@Echohawk I have a question on using fog of war. Last time we used maps I had my laptop set up for two different screens connected to my TV. I had the player spectator view open on my TV and the main maps page for the DM open on my laptop. I had the map fully blacked out with fog of war except for a small portion where the first encounter started. When I reveled more of the map by erasing fog of war, it showed on the DM page but didn't show on the spectator page. I refreshed both pages, but that didn't work. Do I need to reload the spectator view?

 

[Echohawk]

I've got a whole heap of prepared maps. I have no idea what the limit is, if there is one, but I haven't hit it yet!

According to the map uploading tool, there is a 10 GB limit:

 

[Echohawk]

How do you personally get a grid to equal 1 square = 5 feet on a random imported image? Considering in maps you have to add the image before adjusting the grid, how do you know how much to adjust it? The only way I found to do it is to multiply the pixels of the image by 5 which usually works, but sometimes you have use a different multiplier.

Almost all of the maps I've uploaded already had a grid, so I just adjusted the Maps grid to match that. On the rare occasions that I've used a map without a grid, I just eyeballed it to get roughly the right scale. I usually have the whole map image open in another window so that I can judge that. Doing any sort of math on the number of pixels will only work for images of a particular resolution—a higher resolution image will have a lot more pixels per square than a lower resolution one.

@Echohawk I have a question on using fog of war. Last time we used maps I had my laptop set up for two different screens connected to my TV. I had the player spectator view open on my TV and the main maps page for the DM open on my laptop. I had the map fully blacked out with fog of war except for a small portion where the first encounter started. When I reveled more of the map by erasing fog of war, it showed on the DM page but didn't show on the spectator page. I refreshed both pages, but that didn't work. Do I need to reload the spectator view?

Probably. I've never experienced that particular issue with the fog of war not working, but I have occasionally had situations where my view (the DM's view) somehow lost synch with Maps so I couldn't see that a player was moving a token. Reloading has always fixed this for me. This happened a lot more in the past than it does now, but I moved from a location with shoddy internet access to one with high-speed fibre last year, and that definitely reduced my desynchs.