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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8936297" data-attributes="member: 5142">I will give this a shot. I am in one group that is playing B/X. This is a well-designed game for map and key scenarios, especially of the dungeon-crawling variety. The GM is using Keep on the Borderlands. I know from experience being on the other side of the screen that nearly everything in B2 literally has a map and key component. I know that the key even tells how much money a given resident of the keep is carrying. When it comes to the Caves of Chaos, the caves are also mapped out, keyed, and detailed. It's probably the most frequently mapped and keyed module in the history of the game. The caves, doors, tunnels, and so on all have fixed positions. Admittedly, the map is not permanently immutable. A cave-in, for example, that's part of play could change the map and key. However, imagine that we were playing Keep on the Borderlands using Dungeon World. (Actually, I do sometimes think during play about how certain parts of this campaign would have gone if we were using other systems.) There may be an initial map of the outer Caves of Chaos in the ravine that the GM sketches out to help frame the scene. However, the GM is not likely consulting a map or key here, especially once the players go into the caves. For example, a player may look for a hidden door in the caves, a move which prompts the GM to call for a Discern Realities roll. The DW GM does not have a map or key to tell them that there is a hidden door where the PC is looking. In a map and key game like B/X, the B/X GM could easily consult the prep and know that there isn't. But the player's Discern Realities result of <7 means that the GM is required by the game rules to make a hard move. The GM decides that what makes the most sense in the fiction is to "split the party": the PC has triggered a hidden door in the cave wall that rotates them around to another tunnel. If we consulted that original map and key of that cave in B/X, that tunnel and hidden door wouldn't or even shouldn't be there! It would be a violation of map and key play! A fair number of people who prefer map and key play often find this latter approach to be an offensive foul on the play's integrity! But it would be similar to an American football fan watching a game of rugby union and being offended every time that the rugby players did something that would be illegal in American football but is perfectly legal or normal in rugby union. The game of rugby works perfectly fine by its own rules and principles. Rugby does not need to conform to the norms of American football.</blockquote>

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