Multiple Drafts of Maps

How often are you satisfied with first drafts? Me? I’m rarely satisfied even with my 3rd or 4th drafts.

Way back when I started my megadungeon project I envisioned a great mohole with sections of the dungeon branching out from it. I scrapped that idea, and then moved onto an early draft of the current incarnation of the project. I was greatly inspired by Michael Curtis’ Stonehell, and the popular 1 page dungeon format. I expanded my dungeon from it’s initial map out into several levels and many maps.

Original Dungeon Map

Recently I’ve gotten to play in Stonehell, and I’ve run my own megadungeon a couple of times. It has shown me some of the shortcomings of my own design. For one thing, the map needs some reworking. It’s already gone through several incarnations, each of which incorporated some minor tweaks, but for the most part it remained true to the original design. I recently set it aside, and redrew it from memory, doing my best to simplify the lines and make describing it easier to players over G+. The result shown below isn’t bad, still fails.

Current(ish) map

Map from memory - an interesting experiment, but ultimately I’m not pleased with it. For one thing, it's missing an entire section that I forgot about. For another, it doesn't really do what I wanted - it's not really simplified.

Of course the option remains of scrapping the whole level and starting over, or keeping the original map in front of me when I redraw it. I think I’m going to try to redraw it one more time after I make note of the specific changes I want to incorporate into it.

This all leads me to my new poll - Do you do multiple drafts of your maps?