A popular modification to RAW (rules as written) Curse of Strahd is to increase the map size and to make Barovia bigger. It's only 20 by 10 miles in the book, which seems really small for the kingdom of a once-great conqueror, so I get why DMs would want to make it bigger - especially if you want to make the campaign harder and scarier for your players.

But what if I told you that you might be making the campaign easier instead...?

In this video I discuss this topic in detail, and I go over my experiences as a player of CoS (before DMing it) and as a DM of another campaign/adventure where there's a big 'world map' (Lost Mine of Phandelver), which helped me to come to this conclusion, which is backed by game mechanics and game design (and I geninuely think Barovia has been kept small for game design reasons).

But I'm not the expert - I might be wrong! So if you increased the size of Barovia and you didn't encounter this issue, then feel free to leave a comment on this video - I'd be keen to know more. Thanks, Mist Wanderers!

00:00 Intro
01:53 Why do DMs increase the size?
05:38 Why DMs should reconsider - more long rests
10:00 Why DMs should reconsider - a thought on what makes horror scary
12:32 Why DMs should reconsider - filler between locations?
14:11 Why DMs should reconsider - parties might do more in an adventuring day
15:13 Why DMs should reconsider - small means claustrophobic
16:00 Why DMs should reconsider - distance to Strahd's coffin
17:00 Why DMs should reconsider - the Dark Powers' irony
17:37 I might be wrong!
19:57 Outro

Here's a link to my original Reddit post on this topic as well:   / an_argument_for_not_increasing_the_map_siz...  

Music credits - "Shadowlands 1 - Horizon", "Shadowlands 2 - Bridge", "Shadowlands 3 - Machine", "Shadowlands 4 - Breath", "Shadowlands 5 - Antechamber" and "Shadowlands 7 - Codex" - by Kevin MacLeod (a.k.a. Incompetech) licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

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