Printing RPG maps at correct scale

[@shaunamobley5052]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! You just explained this better than any other video, website, or friend could possibly explain it to me! You're the absolute best. I'm a new DM and wrapping my head around printing maps to size was really hurting my brain but my players want to use their minis very badly.

[@aleksanderk6765]

Good stuff! Worth mentioning for all us noobs out here that you want the actual printed tiles to be 1x1 inch, and that is the basis of the pixel density as well.

[@simplefox4455]

I tried a bunch of different ways to scale maps. This is by far the easiest. Thanks

[@scottlittle9615]

I was on DM David's page, and I wasn't quite understanding this. This video gave me the best explanation.

[@zombietommie92]

Once you mentioned Redbrand Hideout I screamed, I'm running Lost Mines of Phandelver! Thank you for the video! Also I like that idea of doing one room at a time!

[@larsjrgensen4740]

Used this A LOT! (Using it, then forgetting it, but always come back to this video :) )

[@oddballvolp3]

This is clearly an old video and you may be done with KZbin now for all i know but THANK YOU this saved me money and time.

[@jameseichinger7262]

This is great! I'd love to see how you carve up a map in order to preserve rooms on the fewest sheets of paper possible.

[@scottlittle9615]

PosteRazor will overlap the images that have been cut up.

[@williamjasonmapp4782]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! I go back to this video all the time when I forget how to scale the map printouts.

[@katfish9868]

This was super helpful! I've been struggling to print my maps in scale for ages! Thankyou so much! :D

[@kap79]

This was fantastic! Thank you for sharing this! Very helpful!! Printing my first campaign's maps now!

[@j.d.7923]

oof i did this for the Mountain's Toe Gold Mine map from Dragon of Icespire Peak and it needs 32 pages and is 66x44 i could always lay out sections to get around the size but god thats gonna take sooo much ink

[@justaduckquack123]

Solid instructions. Thanks. Helped a lot.

[@ItsTemLock]

This worked perfectly for me. Thank you so much for this video

[@DanLangford]

glad it worked out

[@edwardrichard2561]

I tried this and it works. I did all the maps to D&D Icespire campaign. Then I went to Stables. For the whole campaign player maps colored was about $300.00s. You can get the maps off of D&D beyond. If you buy the campaign you can use the code to get access to campaign on the site.

[@edwardrichard2561]

Fyi to laminated them was around 1000.00s. I did not choose to pay that.

[@LuxFerre21]

Jesus 300 bucks! How exactly did you print it? Like a poster size or multiple pages for each map?

[@edwardrichard2561]

@@LuxFerre21 multiple pages 11 x 8. Normal printer size. I used staples the can not print with out a border. So i didn’t realize that. I went back and they returned my money and let me keep the maps for free.

[@edwardrichard2561]

@@LuxFerre21 with the pages combined the maps are around 5 by 6 feet

[@LuxFerre21]

@@edwardrichard2561 sweet!

[@FluffyMountainlion]

You made my life as a DM so much easier. Thank you so much for sharing your video! :D

[@DanLangford]

I should have sourced my Lost Mine map directly from the author. Those are much higher resolution, include a secret-less and grid-less copy and support the craft. prints.mikeschley.com/p856083253

[@GrayGeist]

Dan Langford Good call! Have you discovered any more tricks in the past year or has everything stayed relatively the same?

[@megamanstarforce4315]

Thanks so much. You saved me a lot of time

[@Herteldk]

OMG! Thank you! This is wonderful!

[@rhombus2212]

Awesome guide, thanks for making this!

[@familybrandis3393]

Can anyone suggest a way to do this on mobile/tablet?

[@donnyhallam]

How do you prevent the printer from creating white margins?

[@mikestuckless2841]

is there a place I could take this and print on a poster size paper like staples or something? If so how would that work?

[@TheBossManBoss319]

Finally a useful guide.

[@purringc5552]

Thank you so much for the tutorial. Just spent over two hours drawing the same map and still not finished!

[@markr.7655]

Thank you soooo much for sharing this!!!! Great stuff! As others have said, saves so much time.

[@Thornspyre81]

Did I miss where the your "telling" the software to make the suares 1 inch??

[@richardboulanger3393]

Very helpful! Thanks!!

[@FastHandJack]

My maps still get an 8” border around them. Is there a way to get rid of that?

[@RorMac_Photography]

Awesome tutorial, works a treat.

[@hildawgsoldtimetastytampon2042]

so basically i just scale every map to 53? isthat right?

[@AyameAkito]

you might need to look it up depending on each map to make sure

[@tonyandchachi8102]

If you have 53 pixels in one square on your map yes, if you have 54 pixels in one square on your map change it to 54 etc etc

[@JohnnyRelentless]

Thanks for this, it's very helpful.

[@cloud1973]

Awesome video

[@heraclitu-s]

Thank you so much for this guide!

[@DanLangford]

Glad it was helpful!

[@jasonnix2254]

This was a life saver

[@HungryHypnotoad]

"Quickly show you" 13 minutes

[@lutalassard]

Oh my gosh, so helpful. Thank you!

[@doxull]

Sorry If I seem stupid and I am stupid lol but I have a question. Basically if you try and measure a tile in the map you have created or downloaded and it it was optimized to be 72 x 72 which is most of the maps online the Tile is default, 54 right? I tried following along and I tried measuring the square but it ended up being 30, does that mean I have to scale the image to 30? instead of 54? Thanks!

[@ııN-w8k]

Don't trust me on this, but I'm pretty sure you just use 30 instead.

[@Atuleon]

Thank you!

[@DrakeHollow]

I tried on a regular road to phandalin map via google image search, followed through with the whole process and done comparison of one scaled like you did and one not scaled like you did and both print exactly the same in poster format.. what am I doing wrong? didn't seem to make any difference even after doing everything..

[@edwardrichard2561]

Go to D&D beyond.com you can get the player maps off of it. If you bought the campaign you get a code that gives you access to said campaign. Just follow the directions he gives. Fyi Icespire maps colored cost about $300.00 from Staples.

[@lucasmohallem8136]

Hello There Friend, First and foremost I would like to thank for you video. This as REALLY helpful and is about to change the way I DM. However, I have a problem: I trying to print the cragmaw castle, from this same adventure, which is a 8 sheet pannel. For some reason, the upper sheets of paper are missing half of the last row of tiles.

[@DanLangford]

Lucas Mohallem off the top of my head I can’t imagine what would cause that. When I print across sheets I sometimes use Adobe Acrobat Readers poster mode (in print dialog). However other times I find it better to cut the original into smaller images and print each one individually. When I do this is cut the original image into 8 squares by 10 squares. 8x10 inched fits nicely on a piece of paper and doesn’t split any squares across pages

[@lucasmohallem8136]

@@DanLangford Thanks for your reply. I am an absolute noob when it comes to editing. How do you cut the images? Can I just use GIMP and save each piece as a separate pdf archive?

[@DanLangford]

Lucas Mohallem what I typically do is crop the image down to 8 squares by 10 squares then “Save As” or “Export” the image to whatever file type you like. Then I undo the cropping and crop the next sections. There are ways to do it all at once and I think the term you want to Google for is “slicing” if you want to try to do it all in 1 action. Pro Tip: once you get comfortable with that method try just cropping down to your paper size maybe 8.5in x 11in. Center the cropping around the 8 x 10 squares of interest with some of the surrounding squares showing around. Save As / Export the image. When you go to print be sure to set it to print the image/pdf at 100% scale. This will likely chop off portions of the image to account for your printers smallest required margins. Now you have 8x10 squares of interest with as much additional surrounding content as possible. As you tape these together you will have very little white space as determined by your printer capabilities

[@marct307]

What do you do when squares are 10 feet and not 5 feet?

[@jahoodunrama]

Some maps sometimes have 1" squares on the map representing 10 feet squares in the game, as opposed to the normal 5 feet.

[@marct307]

J-P Sacko so I basically do the same?

[@jahoodunrama]

@@marct307 yeah, but adjust for the size or draw in your own grid on top if you don't want oversized gridsquares

[@marct307]

J-P Sacko thx, I’ll try this!!😁👍🏻

[@Chandicuts]

This is great - thanks for the tutorial. Out of interest, how to cope with massive maps (I just tried one that scaled to 42 pages!)? Do stick/glue them or introduce them piecemeal 'fog of war' style?

[@jonwooldridge3766]

Thank you. Very helpful.

[@GrayGeist]

Uhh this is awesome Dan, thank you!

[@alterangel]

Super helpful! Thank you!

[@DanielMt.]

How can I keep the width and height from changing when I change the resolution?

[@DanLangford]

Daniel Mtanous if you are in gimp and you go to Image menu, Scale Image and you ONLY change the Pixels per Inch then the overall width and height should not change. Double check the menus you are in and the values you changed. Also make sure the width and height is set to “px” unit. If it’s set to “in” unit then those numbers will change. Since we are changing pixels per inch we are changing how many total inches the width and height will be. I maybe didn’t mention the width and height unit in the video but I can see that it’s set to “px” . Good luck

[@bryanpweaver]

Thank you - much appreciated!

[@evilhomer54]

Only thing that's rough is the fact I'm getting front and back on one page....and well 81 pages for the first area in SKT soooooo I'm gonna cheeeeew through ink

[@TheBigFluffyOne]

Hey I love your video and found it super helpful, I just wonder how I would translate a 1.25” square to the correct pixel value for it to print at that size.

[@pablodublin7424]

I just went through this to scale to 1.5" square for Lego minifigs; basically once you know how many pixels are in the 5' square, divide by the number you want it to be. For example, I measured via Dan's technique a 5' square to be 150ppi, so I divided by 1.5 (100ppi) to achieve my desired scale. You would divide by 1.25 (120ppi) to get a 1.25" square.

[@masonator2526]

And to do a smaller scale (for instance 0.5”) you would multiply. For a half inch space you’d multiply by 2

[@seanmayer1695]

Thank you for this!!!

[@alexwebster90]

YOU are the man! thank you !

[@wompratadvocate7245]

Why the fuck is this 13 minutes

[@ddrew1973]

Sweet lord, this sounds complicated 😫

[@tarciosousa6684]

BRABO

[@exuld8338]

Man you're slooooow

[@deadboydeadboy]

Great stuff! Thank you very much!