Why the focus on *geography* in RPGing?

[Umbran]

I don't think there's actually a focus on geography. The geographical path isn't the focus, it is a result.

There was a time when short stories were a dominant form of fantasy and science fiction literature. But those days are in the past. The dominant form now is the novel - a protracted narrative, typically with a series of rises in dramatic tension (and usually stakes) culminating in some resolution. A linear adventure is just the most basic and reliable way to emulate the major fiction form of the day.

The tie to geography comes simply from putting the incidents which generate the rising tension in different physical locations.

 

[Lanefan]

Why the focus on geography?

Setting maps (e.g. regional, city, world, etc.) are important. They let you know where you are, where various features and landmarks are, and - most importantly - how these things spatially relate to each other. They also give a very strong visual representation of the setting; and while a picture might be worth a thousand words, a good map might be worth a million - especially for those who take things in visually better than they do via the spoken word.

Time is important, and the equation [geography + means of transport + external environmental factors] tells you how much in-setting time it takes to get from point A to point B.

On a small scale, geography within an environment determines how many options there are when it comes to moving around and-or interacting with that environment; the easiest example being how linear vs branching vs looping vs wide-open dungeon layouts give increasing numbers of options as to what path the PCs might end up taking through the place.

Geography is also sometimes vitally important in the day-to-day adventuring lives of the PC, in that a PC's exact location on the map can be the difference between life and death when the fireball goes off or the cave-in trap gets triggered.

Geography, even if used for nothing else, also does a lot of work in picturing and-or narrating and-or flavouring any scene that is within sight of or taking place outdoors; in that it sets the background. Is it day or night; what is the weather doing; is the backdrop one of rolling fields or deep forest or high mountains or open ocean, all these things help paint the environment in which whatever the PCs are doing takes place.

On the game-play side, geography and the sometimes-detailed exploration thereof represents a large part of the "exploration" part (or pillar) of play.

And on the meta side, geography is important to (probably) anyone who enjoys worldbuilding either for its own sake or for use in play.

 

[OneRedRook]

So from the point of view of RPGing, what does a concern with geography - maps, precise locations - bring to the table?

They're cool?

On a more serious note, a lot of what a roleplaying game consists of is a way to answer the question "what happens next?"; and using map creation as a process to answer that question has some qualities that I suspect many people appreciate. Notably, it allows some of those answers to be prepared beforehand, perhaps making the process of running a game a bit easier on the GM during the actual game.

Also, as a framework for managing content in a game, it scales (literally) quite well. A map of a dungeon or space station can address the question of "what happens next" when the play is focused on moment-by-moment action, whereas a map of the local duchy or asteroid belt might come in handy when play "zooms out" to a more abstract timescale.

Maps can also potentially be used to highlight aspects of gameplay around puzzles and riddles and problem-solving in general. They also scale well here, from examples like "this room is too shallow", to "why did they flee east if their camp is to the west?", to "can we lead an army around the forest in time?".

I don't want to suggest that maps are the only way to address points like the ones above - I think 50-odd years of game design have shown there's plenty of ways to handle these issues - but they are both easily understood and easily used tools for doing so.

A somewhat cynical point is that it also allows the creation of pre-made content to be feasibly marketed, often in quite large and glossy products.

One last thing that comes to mind is that they're a kind of obvious partner to the process of roleplaying. Roleplaying (I think at least as is understood for the purposes of this thread) involves people describing a shared fictional reality, and what happens to fictional people doing things in that reality. That process will naturally lead to the participants asking questions like "what does this (fictional) place look like? where is this (fictional) character? can they see this other (fictional) character?". Again, I don't want to suggest that they're necessary to roleplaying, but I feel it's hardly surprising that they have broad ongoing use.

Finally, a small point but I feel this is particularly inapt:

In LotR, one of the more epic journeys is through Moria, but we don't get a map!

The whole of the LotR is an epic journey, and every edition of that series I've seen has included the maps of Middle-earth; indeed, it seems that the narrative and explanatory power of those maps has been such that other fantasy books have included their own maps for decades after the publication of The LotR, arguably to the point of over-use. Which goes back to my first point - maps are cool.

[edit - small clarification in last point]

 

[Manbearcat]

Post!

<So this comes up on my personal feed so I don’t have to search for it…I’ll actually contribute later!>

 

[aramis erak]

Fundamentally, I think it boils down to TRADITION!!!

D&D as created by Arneson was used for wargaming, but on a character scale. At the time, 1 being per 1 figure was not as dominant as it is now; most used between 4:1 to 10:1, with 1:1 and 100:1 bringing us to about 2 sigma.

Now, minis gamers often fixate on the table terrain; we can see this for D&D in Strategic Review v2 i2 April 1976... with the ad for GenCon (p12-13), and continue to see it through SR and early Dragon...

Given that D&D OE is labeled "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures" it was received as such by many wargamers; some of us were wargamers first.

 

[Bedrockgames]

In this thread - Why Jargon is Bad, and Some Modern Resources for RPG Theory - @niklinna has helped me to understand what is meant by a "linear adventure".

My tentative conclusion is that "linear adventure" has two uses:

This thread is prompted by the first of those dot points.

I know the historical answer to the question: D&D has its origins as a game of exploring dungeons and exploring wildernesses.

But why has this endured? Why is there such a concern over where things happen and who gets to decide where things happen? Is it because of the additional premise I flagged - that where a PC is determines what scene the GM frames? Or for some other reason?

Just thinking about it, my first thoughts are this (and maybe I am off base as I am thinking out loud): it probably goes deeper than a need for a place to explore (though that I am sure is part of it). Even novelists will frequently map out the geography of their world and have a setting bible. And novelists can, if they want, basically make it up as they go, or operate with a very elastic sense of place and distance. Obviously not every writer starts out with a map, or makes one. But I think many more do if you take a more expansive view of what geography is (and when I took my geography course in school I recall it encompassing more than maps of the world but also human geography and the underlying patterns that explain it). And all this is in the interest of things like consistency and giving depth. So that is probably similar when it comes to settings (it is a lot easier for example to prepare a bunch of adventures or dungeon crawls, even if they are almost entirely linear) if you know where those places are because that can inform the details: players might not know what the map even looks like but I think they can sense the geography is sound or being made up as you go (i.e. if you have a map of your setting that includes the extent of an ancient empire with a specific cutlure and there are places on the map where ruins and relics of that past exist, but overlap with the present, that gives a sense of the setting having roots and players can sense it (and some players have great memories or are sticklers for detail and will bring up when these kinds of setting details don't like up so a lot of GMs, even if they could care less about geography, probably feel an incentive to map stuff like that out, and also map out the geography of things like criminal underworlds, politics, etc).

That said, reasons I think you would want maps (and reasons I find I want maps in many campaigns: though certainly not all) are:

-Exploration: Obviously there are approaches where this isn't needed as much, but in many campaigns, if you are having players explore things, you need a place to explore and the more work you put into that, the more rewarded you are on the other end of exploration. Even in games like Hillfolk, where you don't need a map of physical geography (it begins with a map of human relationships), as the sessions unfold you might have to map out stuff and develop a setting bible just so you don't end up with inconsistencies (i.e. in game a place can suddenly appear out of nowhere if a player just says "The Germanites to the north from their cities of basalt are encroaching on our land"-----that is a detail you will want to track, especially as those details add up).

-Tradition: RPGs come from a tradition of map making. One of my first memories of fantasy is looking at the map of middle earth and before I even read the books I found the map itself fascinating

-History: I think there is considerable overlap between RPGs, especially fantasy RPGs, and an interest in history. And if you like history, you probably spend a good deal of time looking at maps, historical atlases, etc. Even if you don't, most history books will have several maps that you have to keep referring to

-Objective sense of place: This ties to exploration, but I hear this all the time from players when I run sandboxes: they say they like that the world feels real, that it has a consistent logic to it that exists outside their characters. I think what you are saying makes sense because there is a style of play where the world essentially exists around the characters (the setting sort of revolves around the PCs and it doesn't necessarily require a consistent planned geography for that to make sense). But even there, even if you are pushing suspension of disbelief to its limits (which I often do in more pulpy and genre heavy games) suspension of disbelief is still happening. So you may have more flexibility in a game like that. You may may have more room to hand wave, but the room you are given to do so isn't absolute or limitless. You will still hit points where players say "but how is he doing that if......". And that applies to geography as much as anything else. Obviously this doesn't mean you have to map everything out in advance. If things are fast and loose, or if you are making everything up as you go, and people aren't counting miles of distance when they travel, you have more room to be flexible and you can lay down details as they come up (but over a long campaign, those details will pile up and it is going to be handy to have a map to refer to, even if it is one you made over the course of play). I think this is no different than why GMs have logs.

-Consistency: Pretty much laid out this argument above in the final sentences but I think players expect a degree of consistency and mapping is one tool for ensuring consistency. It isn't that maps are central, it is that consistency is. I have to use similar tools for other things. For example if the players kill Jack Darkness in the first session, and he shows up five sessions down the road because I forgot they killed him, unless he is some kind of weird immortal immune to death, it is going to present a consistency issue, so I have a list of all the NPCs and mark whether they are alive or dead on that list . Obviously in some games, like ones with very few characters or where combat isn't significant, this might be less of an issue but even then you still have to track other details that could be contradicted later (especially details involving things the players did). So maps are just a way to make sure there isn't an unintentional contradiction later. Even if you are running linear adventures, the players still have freedom of movement and could decide to hike it to a nearby town (if that information doesn't match what you told them before, they may scratch their heads).

-Maps and world building are fun and a part of the hobby: Obviously some of us go off the deep end here and it isn't essential for every RPG or campaign, but world building and maps have a big place in the hobby in part because GMs enjoy mapping. My first experiences GMing always started out with maps. I had tons of maps I made just for fun before I even ran a single campaign. And the act of mapping itself, I find, leads to inspiration of ideas.

 

[Campbell]

I have never been particularly keen on concentrating on time and space in my RPG play. Fairly early on I embraced There are no maps in Rokugan and a cinematic sense of time outside of dungeon crawls and hexcrawls. I think the draw is mostly because it makes the setting feel like a real place you can touch, that you are moving through space in the same way you are in real life or a video game like Skyrim. I tend to not pay a whole lot of attention to my immediate physical environment so it's never really been much of a draw for me personally.

 

[payn]

I was thinking about battlemaps, tokens, pawns, minis, etc... the other day. I have been running some folks through a Traveller game and going mostly theater of the mind. The players asked for more frames of reference. They wanted me to use more battlemaps even if movement and character actions didnt require it. They kept asking what each square meant for placement. I told them it wasnt important they start at a distance from the target and can change it in increments with actions as can the target on their turn. Despite that, they kept asking if it was better placement to be in square A or square B for approaching or retreating. I told them again its abstract and doesn't matter, they can do what they want on their turn. The game doesn't have attacks of opportunity, facing, or any of the myriad of actions that can be found in games like D&D.

Two things occurred to me as I refereed the game. Players really like a visual frame of reference. I cant say myself that I prefer not to have one. I can go from a granular level to simplified depending on the game, but just a simple picture goes a long ways towards helping jog the imagination and maintain immersion. The second is old habits die hard. Folks have been playing this way for a long time. I noticed this sometime ago when I started branching into other types of TTRPGs. Players instincts tell them that everything plays the way they learned their first game. Often, that is D&D with maps and granular battle grids.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Also pemerton are you talking about maps the players use, GMs or both? I think for players, the maps are often more like props and handouts given to give them a sense of what their geographic options are (and can matter when the party has to make strategic choices: if we take the pass it’s faster but brings us through Orc territory, if we go along the coast, it’s safer but we might not make it in time

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Why does geography matter in RPGs?

I think part of it is because of history. As pointed out in the first response by @gamerprinter - it's just the way the games arose organically from the wargaming scene. If TTRPGs had, instead, arisen from the Second City Improv scene, geography might have a lesser importance.

The second reason is it can help ground your play. For this, I am going to make an analogy on the fly (h/t @Cadence ) to the Game of Thrones series. While I am not as ... severe ... on the last season as many people are, I think that one of the major issues as the series got into the latter parts is that it lost a sense of place. Even for casual viewers, the earlier seasons felt real, and felt like they existed in a real place with a place of scale. Traveling took time. Places were far apart.

Toward the rushed end, the series lost that. Instead, everything moved at the speed that the fiction demanded. Which felt jarring and off-putting, especially given the much more grounded nature of the show that came before it. Even if you didn't know the exact distances involved, it would feel wrong to have characters suddenly show up in new places that you had been taught were far apart.

In many RPGs, especially those that feature (or have) some sort of exploration component, the use of geography separate and apart from the fiction created during a game is important for a group- otherwise, it starts to feel arbitrary and capricious, which is uncomfortable for some people.