I am often faced with a dilemma when I set down to draw a map. My players are very in-the-moment gamers, and don't obsess over their characters or the campaign setting outsie of our sessions. They don't look at and examine maps very carefully and often don't absorb themselves int he campaign world that I'm creating for them. Sometimes its discouraging and makes me want to just dump them in a pre-made setting, but I personally love and enjoy the world-crafting that is involved in my own campaign setting.

An example, this weekends session involved a dungeon map...I actually used the map of mystery from this recent Dungeon magazine as a basis but modified it in my own special way. When I began crafting it in CC3, I started doing all the pretty fancy things that I usually do, and it started looking really awesome...BUT...I realized that the map would basically end up being printed out on one page and being held in my hand as a reference for when I drew the relevant sections on the wet-erase mat that sits on our gaming table.

This means all that effort to make a gorgeous dungeon map was wasted on somethign I would look at and then probably hand to them to file away after they finished exploring the whole thing.

So I ask, how much effort do you usually put into maps that won't be actually printed out directly for the players versus maps that will? Should I bother?

For dungeon maps, I probably should start printing them out to scale for miniatures..as opposed to the drawing mat.