Dungeon Room Opinions: Mapping at the Table, Part 2

In my last post I established my preference for Abstract Player Mapping. The summary is this: making players draw the map yields lots of fun benefits, and making sure the map they draw is abstract and minimal prevents player mapping from becoming so burdensome as to overwhelm its benefits.

Today I'm going to give you some tips on how to verbally deliver such a map with as few hitches as possible.

Classes of detail

The first idea I want to acknowledge is that certain details (and levels of precision) are suited to specific needs. As a game master, you should always be tuned into what your players want to accomplish, and by paying careful attention to what level of detail is needed for that purpose you will save time and attention in the long run. For our purposes, there are at least three classes of detail:

Visceral. The aesthetics of a space--what do the players see, hear, smell, etc? These details focus players on the world, and are therefore the most important for immersion.
Visceral details are also the most approximate--at least in terms of rigid position and measurement. Positioning matters, but hardly more than "the paintings are on the west wall, and the windows are on the north wall", or "the desk is next to the north door". Visceral details should mostly not be part of a player map except for the sake of labeling rooms e.g. "that room with the statues".
Cartographic. The orientational details needed for map-making. In truth, this entails little more than: how big is the room? What shape is the room? Where are the doors, and what directions do they lead? That's it! And the answers to those questions don't need to be exact: the room is around 20 by 20ft--a square; there's a door on the north wall, and a doorway on the west wall that appears to immediately hook south. (You've entered through a door on the east wall.) The purpose of these details is to situate this room on the map--to indicate how this room connects to where you came from, and which direction you can explore from here. That's it.
Tactical. These are the nitty gritty details that matter only when the environment is to be leveraged or manipulated. Think: how wide is that ravine? How tricky is that lock? Is this barrel of black powder, like, flammable? Or super flammable? The level of detail needed for these will mostly depend on the crunchiness of your system, varying from very specific detail to more approximate. Most of the time though, these details aren't relevant to maps at all unless the system is crunchy AND a fight breaks out. If that's the case, you may want to use a nifty wet-erase battle map (or pull out something pre-drawn or printed), otherwise you are more likely to be fielding questions as they arise: "are these pillars wide enough to give me cover?", "is there enough space on either side of the door for us to flank it and get the drop?".

Even though we'll be mostly focused on cartographic details from here on out, it's useful to be able to recognize where one class of details ends and another begins, otherwise we may spend more time focusing on the paper and pencil then is strictly necessary.

Vocabulary: directions

The most foundational kind of vocabulary I want to cover has to do with directionality.

Absolute vs. Relative

The first decision you have to make with directions is "in reference to what?". In other words, will you describe where things are based on the actual compass directions, or is the door the players enter from always "south"? Let me show you an example:

It's pretty simple honestly, but there are tradeoffs:

Absolute - Easier to explain generally--you're probably looking at a map that's already oriented this way. Easier for the mapper as well--they're less likely to get lost or confused. (That might be a downside!) It might feel a little less organic and more artificial though.
Relative- For some this will be easier to visualize, since descriptions are relative to the player characters' point of view. It's slightly more inconvenient for the GM and mapper, but it's not too hard to just rotate your surface to match the character viewpoint. It's definitely easier to get turned around and lost while mapping this way however; it's more authentic to what the mapping character would really be experiencing. The most challenging aspect to this method though is what happens if you ever return to a room; suddenly you're explaining the same details from a different perspective and while that is very organic, it is definitely much more challenging to do.

Choose what you think will work best, and above all make sure that you and the players agree upon it beforehand, and you don't switch back and forth arbitrarily. As a good default if you're not sure: it's not crazy to assume that your mapper has a compass handy and you can just give them absolute directions; it's generally easier, and you can save relative orienteering for situations where they're well and truly lost (or you'd like them to be), or having a compass wouldn't make sense for some reason.

Compass vs. Clock vs. Positional

Another set of options is how you'll indicate actual specific directions. Once again, there are a few options, and they come with trade-offs:

Compass - Familiar and simple. But realistically limited to eight directions; "north by northwest" is a little inexact and not familiar to everyone.
Clock - A little less obvious, but still quite intuitive, though more abstracted from the map-maker's immediate concern. Gives you several more intuitive options e.g. 1 o'clock vs. 12 o'clock. Going as far as "3:17" is overkill, and might introduce confusion anyways as some might start thinking about the minute hand.
Positional - Ahead/In front, Left, Right, Behind. This is a very natural choice, but is certainly the most idiosyncratic. It pairs awkwardly with absolute directions, and more naturally with a relative frame of reference, but it's also awkward with any directions aside from the four cardinal directions. What are you going to say "front-left"? You certainly can, but the combination is more arbitrary--I leave it up to you to come up with the consistent terminology, and it's even more important that you convey your choices to the players before you start using them.

Strictly speaking a real compass expert knows that you could speak in terms of "degrees" for ultra-specificity, but as the whole point of this blog post is to turn our noses up at high precision, lets stick with eight compass directions, or twelve hours on a clock. (I wouldn't personally recommend positional directions; my default is the compass. I like having at least eight natural directions to work with, and I'm not going to need more than eight choices the vast majority of the time.)

Vocabulary: distance and dimensions

That out of the way, let's talk about describing distance and dimensions--if you read the first post, you got a sample of this already. As it pertains to choosing the right words in-game, there are two things to consider: rough distances, and relative measurement.

Rough distances

It is both unnecessary and unrealistic to describe the dimensions of a space with precision. (Plus, it encourages hand wringing over the map in way's we don't want.) Instead, describe approximations. The guideline is that the smaller the distance is, the more accurately you can describe it. Otherwise, use language like "around X feet", or "nearly X feet", or "almost X feet", or "more than X but less than Y feet". The larger a distance is represented by the X, the less accurate your description should be expected to be. Some examples:

This should be enough for most mapping needs. Remember, we're not drawing on a grid--our map is mostly only concerned with which rooms are big and which rooms are small--and these terms are sufficient for helping the players get a visceral mental image of the place.

Relative measurement

The farther back you go, the more units of measure are based on familiar things like the human body instead of absolute standards. I have to resist the urge to go on a long tangent defending imperial units, but the short version is: there's a lot of casual value in units of measure that are relative to the physical scale and features of the human body. The same could be said for the basic tools and capabilities that the players have access to.

That's the idea here: in a table-top roleplaying game, relative measures are really useful. Instead of "feet" and "hand-widths" however, I'm talking about measures relative to gameplay. Let me give you an example:

How wide is this chasm?

If we take our grid paper too seriously, we might answer "why, it's 14 ft. wide!", but if you've been paying attention so far you won't be surprised at my groan and eye roll. The "correct" answer is "far enough that you might be able to jump it, but it's a risk". Rather than thinking about an absolute measurement, and then comparing our mechanics to it, why not just start from the mechanics and get to the immediately interesting questions? (Of course, you can always add "around 15 ft." on the end of the first description, but notice how starting with the functional measurement moves us more quickly to the stuff that matters, while still being pretty descriptive to our mind's eye--is there any more tactical detail then dimensions in terms of mechanical ability?) If we extrapolate this idea we can come up with all kinds of actually useful and gameable units of measure:

As far as you can jump.
As far as you can throw. (Accurately, or maximum)
As far as the ranger can shoot accurately with their shortbow.
As tall as an adult human; twice as tall as an adult human, etc.
At the edge of your torchlight. (Useful corollary: in dark spaces, distances beyond your light don't matter!)
More?

I hope you're getting the idea. Of course, the same principles of approximation apply as the previous section: "about as far as you can jump", "farther than you can jump", "you could comfortably jump it", are all useful statements--and again, they get straight to the actual point.

A note on tactics

I want to briefly acknowledge that this mindset is closely related to that which produced combat distances like "close, near, far", and so on. Unless you just delight in the crunchiest combat systems, there really is so much speed and simplicity to be gained by ignoring hard numbers and focusing on functional utility: "the goblin is close enough that you can comfortably shoot at it, but if you don't take it out it might bear down on you next turn" gets right to the point, and spares so much useless (in my humble opinion) square counting.

Vocabulary: position

With our compass and measuring sticks in hand, we can talk about positionality. (In doing so we'll reap benefits for all three classes of detail described at the beginning.)

If all we cared about was our abstract map, and this was just an orienteering board game, we might not have to give much thought to the actual position of things--we could say "there's a door on the north wall" and leave it at that, no matter where on that wall the door actually is. But, this is not just a mapping game, its an imagination game, so we have to honor the importance of painting a picture for the minds eye. Plus, we have to acknowledge that there are times when the actual position of things is going to carry cartographic or tactical importance. In either case, we still don't want to spend more time fiddling over precision than necessary.

Let's look at a few examples:

The first observation to make is that the smaller the room, the less variability we can even have in noting the position of anything: in a 10 by 10 foot room, a door can only move so many inches to the left before its in the middle of the wall rather than the corner, and a reasonably sized desk or bookshelf or table or whatever is subject to the same constraints. So, recognize that in rooms that are small, position barely even matters. It is enough to just say the door is "on the north wall" (if even roughly in the middle of it) or "on the north wall, east corner" (if it's closer to the wall than the middle) for the sake of painting the picture.

Compare that to the largest room. It's big enough that now we could really start wasting our time if we care too much about exactness. Therefore, to make headway with cutting down on our wordcount describing these bigger rooms we need to deeply internalize that--for all intents and purposes--these two rooms are functionally identical:

Again, the smaller the room, the more differences start to matter as a function of proportion, so as a useful exercise, lets consider every position a north door could be in in this apparently large room, and how you might verbalize it:

Pay special attention to the overlap. There are positions that are unambiguous (a door "in the corner" couldn't be considered a door "in the middle"), but there are other positions that could really go either way. That's ok! (I'd even drop the extra specificity for doors C through F and just say "on the north wall", unless some specific circumstance makes specificity more important.) The key is getting the feel for communicating a gist, and for how much specificity is needed--for what sorts of differences matter. Lets look at that array of rooms again but with some useful overlay:

As a room gets big enough as though to be composed of smaller rooms, it can be useful to start talking about it in quadrants (or "orthants", for the generic term for n sections--isn't vocabulary fun?). The goal of doing so isn't to start treating every quadrant like a whole new room, with a whole new room's worth of detail (I'm probably never going to even key a room to that level of detail!), the goal is simply to have a way of expressing differences that's descriptive. So, as an example, here's a room with a whole bunch of points specified and how I might indicate a really significant object at (or near!) each of those points:

A - northwest corner
B - north wall, (middle of the north wall)
C - northeast corner
D - middle of the northwest end/side/quadrant
E - middle of the north side
F - middle of the northeast end/side/quadrant
G - west wall, (middle of the west wall)
H - middle of the west side/half
I - middle/center
J - middle of the east side/half
K - east wall, (middle of the east wall)
L - middle of the southwest end/side/quadrant
M - middle of the south side/half
N - middle of the southeast end/side/quadrant
O - southwest corner
P - south wall, (middle of the south wall)
Q - southeast corner

Relative position

It's worth briefly addressing a useful principle: only the most striking or important features of a room are deserving of an absolute description of their position, e.g. the big, important statue might be "in the middle of the north side of the room". Lesser details of note (those which clearly depart from the cartographic or tactical to merely visceral set-dressing) are best understood relative to the most important details: use word like "near", "in front of", "behind", "next to", etc. Indicate a side if necessary: "near, on the north side", etc. Harkening back to our rough dimensions, I'd say two objects that a character can touch at the same time are "next to each other", and anything they can't, but is still meaningfully close, is "near". Farther than that and the object is almost certainly better understood relative to some other detail; if no other meaningful features are nearby, then remember that the walls and doors of the room are already laden with significance: "next to the north door, on it's left" (at this scale and separation from cartographic concern, the positional term "left" is overwhelmingly the most natural).

And of course, even if the specific features of a room are "important", they probably don't need to be drawn on a player map (unless positions suddenly become very interesting and important to a player strategy--a planned battlefield).

Vocabulary: shapes

As a final concern, let's look quickly at the shapes of a room. Most of the maps I draw myself might have all kinds of interesting detail in their outline:

And yet, I'm just going to call this room "basically a hexagon" or "roughly circular", and perhaps note alcoves on the wall faces.

The thing is, the shape of a room is barely a cartographic concern; it can be a useful landmark when there's sufficient contrast ("let's go back to the circular room"), and particularly large and oblong rooms are useful to track to place rooms on a grid-less piece of paper with greater accuracy, but mostly the shape of the room is visceral, and occasionally tactical.

For this purpose, prefer basic shapes: squares, rectangle, circles, ovals. Under duress, compose larger, more complex rooms out of simple shapes (a square with a circular side; a rectangle with a triangular protrusion). This is easier if you resist the urge to draw a lot of trapezoids and parallelograms and isosceles triangles... so don't do that.

I suspect this mostly won't be difficult. Except when you draw natural caverns. Drawing them as squares and rectangles stunts my imagination and mind's eye, but describing in detail all the nooks and cranny's and undulations in the topography of the walls is a huge mistake. Default to the nearest applicable simple shapes and occasionally dip into composite shapes or shapes of super recognizable common objects (the cavern is "bean shaped") where needed.

Final thoughts

If you hope to adopt the principles I have described here, I highly recommend having a conversation with your players about it. If you don't, you may find yourself fielding a lot of frustrated questions as your players try to reassert their prior expectations.
Take away their graph paper... and then maybe reintroduce it later. It will be harder for players new to this approach to embrace it when the lines on the page cry out to them asking for precision. But, once the players have fully accepted this approach and become comfortable with it, it may be nice to have a grid to help them draw their boxes and lines with some consistency of scale. Your mileage may vary.
Accept that you will never be able to adequately describe in words exactly what is in your minds eye. I anticipate some consternation with this approach will arise from a general love for "impartiality". How can we possibly have a fair and balanced game if we aren't all completely on the same page about what's in front of us?! This is a quest for sharply diminishing returns. Of course we need to align the mental picture between the players and the GM, but we should also be willing to recognize "good enough" for our purposes and move on with actually playing. I think the principles here strike a reasonable balance. It will all be fine if you...
Encourage your players to share their intentions, and ask questions about what matters to them. Much of the speed to be unlocked by these methods is in ignoring details until they're important. This is good advice in general, but it doesn't work if the players feel like they have to hide what they're trying to do from the GM; this is a breeding ground for the kinds of miscommunications that just make players more frustrated, and you don't want them to attach their frustration to your shiny new mapping standards unjustly.

And with that, thank you for reading.

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