Dungeon Room Opinions: Mapping at the Table, Part 1 - Prefer Abstract Player Mapping

(Note: to my "usual audience", the next entry in the Dungeon Room Index has been slowly moving forward for months now. New baby is starting to settle into routines, so I hope to get back to completing the Index sooner than later, but who knows. I can't make promises right now. In the meantime, this piece has been mostly done for like 9 months, and a recent flash of oomph inspired me to cut it in half and publish the first part. Enjoy!)

Welcome to a new Dungeon Room Index category: Opinions!

Where my usual focus is to provide lego blocks and inspiration fuel, this is going to be more of an examination of some especially subjective principles. I hope it will still be helpful.

Introduction

If you make dungeon crawling a serious part of your fantasy adventure games, then the question will inevitably arise "should I make my players draw the map? Or, should I give them one". 

My opinion is this: you should make your players draw the map, and you should push them to draw an abstract map (shapes and lines) not a precise map.

This is, of course, a subjective preference. I will give reasons, oft rooted in my personal thresholds for what I can tolerate in games like this, and you may find that your thresholds or goals are different. One of these problems alone may not bother you, but when they all bother you, something has to budge. 

There are no silver bullets here, only trade-offs. 

Player mapping > Giving them the map

Asking the players to make the map produces the following advantages:

Preserving exploration

One of the reasons I like Dungeons is because they bring exploration to the forefront; but, for exploration to "work", you have to preserve a sense of "unknown".

What I have typically found when I present players with a map is that it bludgeons that sense of unknown to death. The worst case of course is giving players a detailed, uncovered map; this reduces the list of unknowns to little more than "is there a monster in that lavishly decorated ballroom?" or "will I find treasure if I follow this hall to the bathhouses?". 

Of course, few people really hand out a map uncovered--they may be playing virtually and have access to convenient "fog of war" tools, or they may slap a map down on the table with pieces covered by sheets of paper.

This has never satisfied me.

What I have observed under these conditions is that players stop exploring because there's a doorway over there and we don't know what's through it, and instead "explore" over there because the fog of war would suggest that there's one more room we haven't been to yet. They neglect to look further to the west because that's where the graph paper ends, not because they have actually run up against dead ends. 

This is not exploration. This is painting by numbers.

Making the players draw the map means they will never know if they've seen the whole dungeon unless they've dug into every nook and cranny of it. It keeps the surprises surprising.

Preserving scale

I have said before on this blog that I like big dungeons. And in my big dungeons, I like big rooms.

Giving players a map puts a downward pressure on how big your dungeons can get.

Often, giving players a map goes hand in hand with using miniatures, which means every grid square is suddenly constrained to be at least an inch across. This eats up table space very quickly. Even if you're not playing with miniatures, typical 1/4" letter-size graph paper allows for about 30x40 grid squares. Unless you are dedicated to taping pieces of paper together (what a nightmare for throwing your map in a backpack before game night...) or just carefully setting out a series pages on the table, that means that if you're using 5' squares, you're looking at a dungeon that maxes out at about 150x200 feet. That's "big" when you're talking about something like a single-family home, but it's positively shrimpy on the scale of anything more interesting. My local grocery store is bigger than that, and it's not big.

Mines of Moria this is not. What use could a ranged weapon really be in a space so constrained? How can I create set pieces that are awe-inspiring within these constraints? Surely not every dungeon needs to be big, but if providing a map is your crutch, no dungeons will be.

Preserving tension

This is something of a synthesis of the prior two points.

When you don't have a map given to you, you don't know anything about what to expect. You push from one room to the next, with no idea whether or not you brought enough torches, or which way you ought to explore next. You don't know if you've seen most of the dungeon or only a tiny sliver. The only way to know is to press forward, and to persist. You don't know if the room with the ghouls that you skipped is a dead end, or the path to an even deeper part of the dungeon.

This means that delving remains risky, and knowledge becomes all the more valuable.

When you don't give players a map, the map becomes a resource, just as valuable as any other kind of notes that players might keep. The map becomes another tool the players need to survive.

(And a partial map gained from some NPC becomes an actually useful, gameable in world artifact! Turns out when you make things matter, then more things matter.)

Preserving immersion

I'm guessing this will be my most controversial take, but I firmly believe that providing a map kills immersion. 

Yes, that includes maps that are highly detailed. In fact, I think they might even be worse.

In my experience, when you provide a map the map becomes the territory: slap a map down on a table and suddenly the map is the world, and the only things that exist in the world are the things that are pictured on the map. Is the room on the map an empty square? Then the room is empty. Is there a bit of rubble drawn on the floor? Then there's a rock in that exact spot ("I check under that rock right there."). As I see it, this causes two problems: 

• It dampens the unique generative potential of the player-GM back-and-forth (e.g. "this is an armory right? Can I find any crossbows in here?").
• It robs the GM of their authority over "the spotlight". I speak about this idea a bit in this blog post, but the gist is that a GM gets to subtly point at the interesting things in their scenes. A detailed map injects a lot of "noise" into the information pipelines from the GM to the players.

At the end of the day, it subtly changes the kind of game I'm playing.

Abstract > Precise

I will shamelessly admit that I very much prefer drawing my own maps on graph paper. This has certain advantages to me in the role of the game master (that I hope to elaborate on in some future day). Even so, I strongly prefer that my players shun graph paper and rigid precision in favor of good old-fashioned boxes and lines.

Here's why:

Precision is needlessly time-consuming

How much time is it worth sussing out that this cave is not quite "bean-shaped"? How much time is it worth clarifying that the two doors on the west wall are 10ft apart, and the first one is 5ft from the north wall? How much time is it worth waiting for the mapper to carefully inscribe these details into a smudged piece of graph paper? Does the hall turn left immediately, flush with the wall? Or is there a 5ft spacing from the door first? Better erase that and draw it again...

I speak very deliberately here in terms of cost. Not only do interactions like these fill our playtime, to the exclusion of other things we could be doing, but in doing so they are also anti-immersive. They interrupt the flow of the gameplay loop in favor of something that looks like it's happening in the game world, but actually isn't. 

We're focused once more on the facsimile, not the world.

(You may note that this very reason is why most people tend towards just giving players the map. Go back and read the first half again; ideals are often found in balancing the tension between competing priorities.)

Precision seldom matters

When was the last time that it made an actual mechanical difference that the door was 10ft from the wall instead of 5?

Even if you can think of a time--perhaps because you play a tactically crunchy, counting-grid-squares variety of fantasy game--how frequently could you say that it matters? In my experience it's rare, if it happens at all. If you tend towards theater-of-the-mind combat, it's downright unconsionable. If your combat rules tend towards distances like "close, near, and far" it's nearly so.

But, even if you love counting your combat-grid-squares, I boldy assert that you only need this heft sometimes. Lean on these details only when they matter. In the meantime, enjoy a faster game, in which more is accomplished with your precious time, and pull out a nice dry-erase battle map or pre-drawn encounter space when the combat becomes inevitable. 

Even if that ends up being half the dungeon, that still means you don't waste time on the other half.

Precision is unrealistic

Look out a window and tell me how many feet (or whatever system of units is customary where you live) it is to the other side of the road? Or to the nearest tree? How far can you throw a common object? Can you tell on sight 10ft from 12? Can you distinguish 30 from 35? I don't mean placing them side by side, I mean if I placed you in a spot, and pointed to a flag in the ground and asked you "is that 30ft, or 35?", how often would you guess right?

Our senses are simply not this accurate, nor do they need to be.

The reality is, the larger distances get, the less accurately we can estimate them, and the less they matter anyways. At some point I just know "that is almost certainly farther than I can reach, or jump, or throw, or shoot accurately".

Now pretend that you are truly in a dungeon, and you are trying to map it. You would probably not take the time, burning away precious torch light, to measure every room and hall. Instead, you would estimate. "This room is around 50 ft wide, and 20 feet deep. The ceilings are low." (The same might be said for combat, but I won't poke that bear anymore here...) You would note the major features, and that the doorway or opening to the west appears to turn to the north, and be done with it.

Yes, yes, players might be (even should be) interested in minutea at this point to flesh out their mental picture, but without the paper and the pencil getting in the way and kludging up the works, this can usually be a quick exchange that is focused on enriching our mental picture instead of distracting from it. More importantly, attention remains focused where it matters most: in the scene, between the players and the GM.

Precision is not worth it

I repeat myself, but allow me to address one very specific and well-known "benefit" to precise mapping: you can play games like "there is a gap in our map; perhaps that's where the secret staircase is".

This is an occasional benefit at best, and it's a meager reward for an otherwise tedious exercise. The cost is far too great; I don't buy it. (And I won't.)

Doing it well

These things may not bother you, or perhaps only some of them may bother you, but not enough to ruin your experience. If that's so, I'm happy for you. For my part, they claw away at my sanity and curdle in my gut like rotting milk. (I can be quite a codger for someone as young as I actually am. Who uses the word "codger" anyways?)

Anyways, I called this "Part 1". That's because, if you have found my ranting persuasive, I would like to give you more help than just "don't do that other thing".

Therefore, at some point, I will follow this up with a primer on the sorts of expectations and vocabulary that should make the player-GM interchange as frictionless as possible when mapping in this way, and whatever other advice I can give on the subject.

Until then, thanks for reading.