Against Mapping

 

Many years ago the Alexandrian guy noted in his OD&D retrospective that mapping sucks. More recently the Coins and Scrolls guy noted something similar about his OD&D game. And maybe a day after that the His Majesty The Worm guy said something identical on his discord about his OSE game. After running two campaigns of Esoteric Enterprises where I enforced player mapping, then one where I didn't, I agreed with all three of them. 

 

Then a couple weeks ago, the Knight at the Opera guy posted his advice about what to do if you tried mapping and everyone hated it. I was excited to learn his fix and it turned out to be the exact thing that I had already tried, which made everyone miserable. "Balls and sticks" style mapping where you give the exits and directions out of the room, rather than the precise dimensions of every wall and corridor. 

  

A while back I wrote Against Torches. If I'm against torches, which never really did anything to me, I'm definitely Against Mapping, which is a whole lot worse.

 

  

WHAT IS MAPPING?

Mapping in this context refers to making the players draw their own map in a dungeon crawling game. Or a wilderness exploration game, but usually a dungeon crawling game. Instead of drawing a map on your chessex grid or revealing it in a VTT, you give them room descriptions and they draw the map based on those. This is how it was done in the early days of RPGs, though for exactly how long I couldn't tell you.

 

Instead of creating a strawman I'll open with the parts I actually agree with.

UNDENIABLE BENEFITS OF MAPPING 

The dungeon feels a lot larger when you can't see the edges of the play area. If the point of the game is to explore an unknown realm then it's better if the realm is actually unknown, rather than a coloring book whose overall dimensions are known and can be filled in piece by piece. 

 

Mapping creates an artifact that does for me what my play reports do for the players. It shows that someone paid attention to what I said. I still think about some of the maps the players drew for my Esoteric Enterprises game half a decade ago.

 

DUBIOUS BENEFITS OF MAPPING

Mapping is a "player skill". You, the person playing the game, have to do it rather than just say your character is doing it. Which makes it gameplay. A minigame. Not every part of the game is meant to be fun. In order to create the feeling of exploration (rather than just saying the characters are doing it) you need some friction, some resistance against free traversal of the unknown and unexplored space.

 

Mapping immerses the players by making one of them do the same activity their character is doing. At the same time it breaks immersion by spending lots of time and effort on something that would not actually be that hard for the characters in the game world. While I'm describing the entrances and exits of a room, and describing them a second time, and a third time, nobody else can do anything. The actions of the other players are queued behind a text description of something that their characters can just see. 

 

 

THE BIG PROBLEM WITH MAPPING

Everyone hates it. I know someone out there probably doesn't, but in thirty sessions I never met a player who enjoyed it. 

 

It takes too goddamned long. Pacing is really, really important. The players getting lost is not fun for them but more importantly it's not fun for me, the guy running the game. Repeating myself and watching other people repeat themselves is not gameplay. It feels like I'm stuck in a meeting at work, going around in circles on ground we already covered.

 

I love the maps the players made for Esoteric Enterprises. I still think about them. I also think about how frustrated and downright nasty I got when I had to constantly repeat room descriptions. Either because someone was trying to assemble a map or because the people who consistently updated the map weren't there that session. It wasn't fair to them. I should have recognized it was making me miserable and fixed it myself rather than counted on other people stepping up to do something they didn't enjoy.

 

And that's what I did. I switched to using a predrawn map with fog of war in a VTT, or drawing the map at the table in person, or just giving them the map ahead of time. 

 

JUST GIVE THE PLAYERS THE MAP?  

A huge advantage of this approach, which the guy I linked at the beginning also pointed out, is the players get to see the most visually interesting thing in the game. I hand drew maps for both His Majesty The Worm and many of the minidungeons I made for my Somethingawful FATAL and Friends monster book series (thank you to everyone who read and replied to that series). His Majesty The Worm is a game much improved by peripherals. Cards, miniatures, hand drawn map.

 

I find it easier to hand draw a player facing map then dig into a program like Dungeon Scrawl and make a scale map on a grid. There's no mediating layer of software between thinking of what I want and just doing it. I can't easily go back and revise things the way I can with a digital tool, but that forces me to either plan things out in advance or work around whatever I've already sketched. The typical dungeon is built in phases by successive occupants and the later inhabitants have to work around what's established by the previous generations of builders.

 

I also don't think that showing the players the big map diminishes the sense of exploration. Mythic Bastionland is the most I have ever enjoyed overland travel in an RPG. The feel of discovery does not come from being unaware of the macro structure of the realm, but from not knowing what each hex holds. The realm stocking and myth system mean each hex could hold a surprise, and traversing them all to get somewhere is just enough of a pain in the ass to feel like a mythical journey and not a complete waste of table time.

 

REVEAL THE MAP AS THEY PROGRESS?

In online play this is near-frictionless, one of the few things a VTT makes easier. Load the map into the VTT, drop fog of war overtop, reveal it as the players traverse the dungeon.

 

In Esoteric Enterprises three, Maintenance and Preservation, I used two sketchbooks for in-person play. One held the master copy of the map, the other the player facing map. When the players explored the undercity I penciled the rooms onto the player facing map using the DM map as a reference. I spent a lot of time shuffling papers. Aside from that I don't regret this approach at all, it worked great. The low combat power of the player characters, the strict timetable enforced by session length, the mission structure that sent the players somewhere new every session, and the totally bonkers random encounter tables that could generate deadly monsters anywhere you went all ensured there was never a dull moment. While the players knew, roughly, where they were on a given page of the map, they never knew how big the overall structure was or how it all fit together until they fully explore it. In a game about maintenance workers braving traps and monsters to repair underground infrastructure, huddling around a handful of faded pages showing rough blueprints of known areas and charting a path to a vaguely understood destination does not short circuit exploration, it is exploration.

 

SHOW THE PLAYERS INDIVIDUAL ROOMS? 

Knight at the Opera does not like this approach. I can only think of one game that does it. The Fighting Fantasy Introductory RPG shows the players drawings of what they see when they enter individual rooms. They have to make the overall map themselves but they get a picture of whichever chamber they're in. The pictures are basically useless for mapping because the image is from the perspective of a character entering the room from a specific direction. It might not actually reflect what you see from the entrance you used. Even if it did, relative directions suck. The DM still has to describe the room in terms of north, south, etc for the players to get an accurate picture and have any hope of mapping.

  

The only benefit of the Fighting Fantasy approach is flavor. Drawing a bunch of pictures and showing them to the players as they traverse the rooms is a lot of work and does not help them navigate, but recreates the feel of the original paperback books. Just like playing with cards is an important part of His Majesty The Worm, looking at the pictures is part of Fighting Fantasy. 

 

Arguably this is also a benefit of grid based mapping. If you want to experience OD&D with all its obtuse and sometimes clunky systems as a player would have in 1974, then tedious grid based mapping is essential to recreate the feel. Just don't be surprised when it sucks. One thing I learned from Mythic and Worm that I am still trying to incorporate into Begone, FOE is how much better this genre gets when you stop accepting garbage just because that's how a prior generation did it.