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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8937391" data-attributes="member: 42582">I don't think that you seemed harsh!I will ask you to indulge me in more autobiography (hopefully to a more generally applicable point):A breakthrough I had in my thinking, somewhere around 10 to 12 years ago, was to realise that if all the map and key is doing is to serve as a type of index or checklist for encounters, with the players' choices of where to go and what to look at activating the encounters, but that being either arbitrary (as per [USER=22779]@Hussar[/USER]'s posts) or pre-determined (as per the linearity that I think [USER=71235]@niklinna[/USER] mentioned upthread), then why bother with the map and key?Why not, instead, manage the encounters through some more systematic framework like a skill challenge, and/or just have the GM make a non-arbitrary decision about which encounter to activate now, in light of the current trajectory of play?(I realise that I'm not the first RPGer to have worked this out! What I've described in the previous paragraph is directly influenced by Burning Wheel, and clearly also has some basic similarities to AW prep of threats and fronts. And in practice I was doing it as long ago as 35 years, but it took me a long time to work out what was working in my practice, and what elements of received technique - like map-and-key - were just a burden or a fetish.)It took another development in my thinking, in the past 5 years, to work out how map-and-key could be used as a framing device - basically for anchoring the fiction about a detailed bit of geography - that was different from the hidden gameboard approach I was raised on (see my post upthread about Classic Traveller).To me, a lot of D&D play seems to want to use the map-and-key as a type of anchor of the fiction, and to do this with it serving as a hidden gameboard in the classic sense. I think there may be an aspect of "tradition" here that is not necessarily fully reasoned. I think there is also the element of hidden stuff being revealed is fun. I'm sympathetic to your view that the less of it, the better - or (hoping that my rephrasing as I flip it around isn't losing your meaning) that if there is going to be a hidden gameboard, then the players should have the opportunity to uncover its secrets in a non-arbitrary way. But I think this may be a minority preference, or at least just one among a range of preferences, in the current RPG milieu.</blockquote>

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