Vistas and Vantage Points

[Slick]

As I was recently re-reading the Castle Xyntillian review, I noticed Bryce bring up the issue of vistas, and how ideally a module should give the players adequate information about their surroundings on a larger scope than just what's adjacent to the room they're in.

There’s an occasional miss. Every once in awhile there’s a bit of information that you wish were present. The most notable, for me, is the roof/window/vista-view situation. Only a sucker goes in through the door. A couple of words on the exterior entrance situation, and overview if you would, would have been nice. And, also, a little description of Xyntillian when seen from approach. This is clearly a tie in to the roof/window/door commentary, giving the party notable landmarks to seek out (a dome, etc) and/or holes to poke their heads in to. “Where are the doors?” the party asks. One can intuit a great deal from the maps, especially major border landmarks like doors and side towers, but the dome, interior towers and courtyards are less clear without intense study … the kind I don’t like to do during play.

He's mentioned this in the past many times before, and I agree that it's a nice feature to have, both because it gives players more options to plan their forays into the dungeon, and it helps build that shared vision in everyone's head of the game world. My pet project megadungeon (I know everyone must have one of those) is primarily a giant palace/royal city more than an underground complex so communicating spatial information from the vantage point of rooftops/spires/balconies is inevitably going to become important.

I wonder what the most effective way to do this is. Bryce suggests using written description, so maybe include a section on vantage point at the end of each room key that has a significant one? It's probably the most space-efficient way to do it, but in terms of fulfilling the purposes I outlined earlier (especially regarding shared immersion) it might be better to use a picture like this to do the heavy lifting. It seems like the better approach for the more complex vistas which I could see easily getting bogged down by boring technical language akin to droning on about room dimensions, etc. My other idea was to create a separate map specifically for vantage points, showing most of the complex as a muted grey while the higher elevated areas stand out, with vision cones extending from windows, etc.

Does anyone have any experience running a game with a lot of rooftop crawling or tower climbing where this came up? How did you go about it?