D&D General Mapping: How Do You Do It?

[Thomas Shey]

What did you think of the Magic Square dungeon idea?* Doesn't that sound like fun?

* I'm making myself vulnerable here so be gentle.

I'm sorry, I think I either missed or forgot context for what you're talking about here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The OD&D variant Seven Voyages of Zylarthen suggests using dominoes to lay out a room ( removing them after the PCs have left), up to the PCs to map if they want. No idea how well it works in practice (current game is remote), but the tactile and aesthetic appeal is enormous. Best of both worlds as far as encouraging mapping while avoiding verbal back and forth about room dimensions. Maybe a really big room would be a pain.

Over and above any general feeling about maps, that seems to limit the kind of structures you can use there, and of course its of no use outside.

Whenever I've done simple mapping, it has improved the vividness of how I imagine the space (I guess continuing the negative correlation between map art vividness and imagination vividness), though I imagine this relationship breaks down if the verbal back and forth required becomes too much.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against having a map at all; I'm arguing whether its necessary to make players duplicate the map the GM has already made. Unless for some reason what the GM has done has is difficult to duplicate, you need to find a value in that process itself before it makes any sense, and the idea that's the default way to go hasn't been true for decades.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I will cop to that. I was assuming context based on the thread premise. I was not trying to say that all exploration focused games are map dependent.

Except I wasn't clear from your first post what the actual premise was. At first I was trying to figure out if you meant whether a GM should have a map themself.

I mean, we are really talking about a narrow gameplay style here. And it is totally okay that folks don't like that or want to do that. But the subject of the thread assumes that (general) you DO want to do that, and the so the question I was interested in is HOW do you do it.

Again, that was far from clear to me or I'd likely not gotten into the thread in the first place. Until post #109 I would not have thought it was a given for the thread. Now that you have, I will step out to avoid deliberate threadcrapping.

 

[M_Natas]

The problem, again, is the ambiguity of "mapping" here. I think the GM having a map is part of that, but I don't see why the players doing so manually rather than just being assumed to have have a pretty good idea as the GM reveals it has to be important.

Outside of VTTs it is quite time consuming to either draw a more or less detailed map at the table as the PCs explore the Dungeon or prepare ahead cut outs before the gam so you can reveal it on at a time. Even in VTTs, unless you buy a module, preparing maps is a pain (like in roll20, not intuitive at all).

And then, in VTTs, players are now playing a Board Game, where they move their litte figurine around the big exploration map - they are basically out of character. The whole time.
I had a DM once that wanted to put our tokens everywhere. Market? Here is a market map! Put your tokens where youbare shopping! Totally unnecessary and slowed the game down so much and now the players are playing with tokens instead of imagining the world.
Having a top down map of the dungeon in a VTT is like the difference in emergence into the game like ... Diablo vs Fallout 4 or Skyrim. The former is basically a strategy game but it not an RPG, in the sense that you immerse yourself in the character. When playing Diablo you are not imagining yourself to be the character the same way you do in fallout 3+ or Skyrim.

That's why I don't use exploration maps to reveal to the players and let them.put their tokens on when I DM, because it turns the game from Skyrim into Diablo.

While, when a Player makes even a scrappy map, they immerse themselves more into the game which is good.

 

[Charlaquin]

The DM giving them an accurate map one room at a time is far easier on a VTT than it is in person because the VTT very neatly preserves the map afterwards.

In person, the map the DM provides a room at a time will very likely be drawn on a reusable surface (whiteboard, chalkboard, etc.) and then erased once the PCs move on to allow space for the next bit of map; meaning that unless a player replicates that map onto some paper and thus preserves it, in the end the players* have no map other than the very last bit they explored.

* - and, by extension, the characters; mapping is one area where I'm pretty hard-line on saying if the players don't do it the characters didn't do it either.

Sure. But at that point the “mapping” is just replicating a map you know is accurate. It’s no longer part of the navigation challenge, it’s just procedural.

 

[Lanefan]

The OD&D variant Seven Voyages of Zylarthen suggests using dominoes to lay out a room ( removing them after the PCs have left), up to the PCs to map if they want. No idea how well it works in practice (current game is remote), but the tactile and aesthetic appeal is enormous. Best of both worlds as far as encouraging mapping while avoiding verbal back and forth about room dimensions. Maybe a really big room would be a pain.

A non-rectangular room would also be a pain.

Cool idea, though.

 

[Lanefan]

Again, I disagree. If you think both of those are required to be "exploration", then you're going to have to supply a word for a game that only uses the first as I've run.

I'll freely admit to bias as my degree is in geography, but without the "what is where" piece the other type of exploration can at best be ephemeral: relying on memory just isn't good enough.

I don't think you get it. That's absolutely true but it doesn't mean its relevant in play. You can just assume once they've found it, they can find it again. That was still an exploration game.

I make no such assumption, based on real-world experience.

Mine would be "Why should it be?" As I said, I don't go in thinking player-skill things are the automatic default as to how to handle things just because they were a half century ago.

It comes down to the same rationale as to why I don't like social-mechanics rules: that which can be directly replicated by player actions at the table (talking in character, mapping, tracking finances, etc.) doesn't need to be - and thus IMO shouldn't be - abstracted.

That doesn't mean its a worthwhile use of time.

Pace of play is not a high priority of mine. Hell, the last session I ran took a half-hour side trek into players telling old war stories from this and other campaigns and we all had a good laugh at them. Fine with me.

 

[PJSlavner]

Have never seen a session wherein the players were required to map as they go that did not end in a frustrating fiasco.

Also not sure what it really adds to the game, tbh. "Draw what I verbally describe" doesn't add any particular verisimilitude to the exploration.

We have had the players map as they go for 45 years and have never had a problem. When we first started playing, it never occurred to us to do any different. Once we learned that we were possibly in the minority, we were so used to it that we did not change.

Actually, there was one problem that I was not involved in. My friend was DMing for an acquaintance, who, every time there was something new to map, would repeatedly point at edges of squares on the graph paper and ask, Is there a wall here?” The mapping was excruciatingly slow, but my friend was okay with it. That campaign did not last long.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Outside of VTTs it is quite time consuming to either draw a more or less detailed map at the table as the PCs explore the Dungeon or prepare ahead cut outs before the gam so you can reveal it on at a time. Even in VTTs, unless you buy a module, preparing maps is a pain (like in roll20, not intuitive at all).

I started to respond to this, and then remembered that now that the OP has clarified his intent for this thread it'd be effectively threadcrapping.