I touched on this briefly in TT’s first PDF (Player Tips: Everyone Likes a Three-Way; 273kb PDF), but it’s worth bringing out into its own post.
When you’re running a game and someone needs to draw a map, that someone should always be you, the GM.
Many GMs like to ask a player to map as they go, particularly in fantasy RPG dungeon crawls. The rationale I hear most often (and the one I used myself, back in the day) is that it’s more realistic — after all, a party stumbling through an ancient dungeon isn’t likely to have much time to spend on cartography. And it is more realistic, but given how many other elements of gaming aren’t realistic, this is a poor spot to draw that line.
On the surface, it sounds like a great timesaver for GMs. Instead of pre-drawing the map and having to carefully reveal it as you go, or drawing it on the spot, you just describe the rooms to your players and have one of them draw the map.
In my experience, here’s how that usually goes:
- GM: You enter a large square room with a low ceiling. Smoky torches line the walls, and there’s a door in the back corner. There’s also an alcove just to your right.
- Mapping Player: How big is the room?
- GM: Roughly ten paces on a side.
- Mapping Player: The door is in the right corner?
- GM: No, the left.
- Mapping Player: Okay, and here’s the alcove…
- GM: No, the alcove is midway down the wall.
- Mapping Player: Okay, got it. Crap. Was this room down the right or left fork of that last passage?
- GM: Left. And you need to leave more room between the other door and the edge of the page, for the next room…
All the time you “saved” by asking one of your players to map gets wasted by explaining things twice (mapping on the fly is hard!), and the flavor you supposedly gained from the added realism is lost when you have to describe the whole place in agonizing detail anyway.
I’ve played in several games that featured player mapping, and filled many roles — I’ve been the GM requiring the mapping, I’ve been the player doing the mapping and I’ve been a player on the sidelines — and every single time, this is how things went. Occasionally they’d go better for a little while, but we always bogged down again before too long.
Save your game from becoming high school Drafting 101, and handle the maps yourself. In the long run, you’ll save time — as well as your sanity.
One problem with the GM drawing the map is reaching the edge of the paper. When I GM’d I would naturally avoid splitting a room across multiple pages. My players eventually would say things like “Let’s go back the other way. This must be the end of the catacombs because there’s no paper left”.
I recently began using 3″x5″ index cards (the GM’s best friend!) that have grids. They are easier to “tile” together than graph paper because the index cards are smaller and stiffer.
i used to have the players keep a map, out of tradition, but we gave that up years ago. now, i draw a mini-scale (1 in = 5 ft) map on the whiteboard, updating it as the party progresses and wiping it back and redrawing as it gets to the edge.
if a player wants to keep up with a traditional-scale (1/4 in = 10 ft) map on a sheet of graph paper, awesome. otherwise i assume that their characters remember where they’ve been well enough (barring teleporter traps and the like) and draw a quick layout sketch of the corridors and rooms they’ve been in as needed.
for a while, i had an online tool which would generate the dungeon, and allow me to mark where they party had been. this would push a limited map of where the party had been to each player’s web browser. unfortunately, that got lost when the host server crashed, and i’ve never gotten around to re-writing it.
Player mapping from GM description can work, but you need to know why you’re doing it, and you need to be careful about how you do it.
Why
Your goal should be to capture the excitement of exploring new areas.
This largely limits player mapping to dungeon-crawl style games (although one might do interesting things with an overland map).
How
The goal is to focus on exploration, not on nit-picking. As a result the emphasis on the maps should be on broad brushstrokes, not fiddly details. As a GM your descriptions should be rough, avoid giving lots of exact measurements. To minimize time clairifying details, you need to keep your map designs extremely simple. If you stick to rectangular rooms with doors evenly spaced on their respective walls you’re doing well. Discovering and correcting errors is a time sink, so let the players know when they revisit an old room from a new direction.
This also requires buy in from the players. They should be open to keeping the map very rough. Indeed, I would suggest against graph paper. Reduce the map to rough rectangles for connected by lines for hallways. Distance errors should be linked up as best possible. “Not to scale” is the appropriate label.
Given these limitations, player maps from GM description are playable, but probably not for every group. Even for those groups that like it, it’s probably not suitable for all sessions. Combined with an interesting puzzle or two that requires knowledge of a dungeon’s layout, you can have some fun.
One problem with this is labyrinths. A friend of mine tried to run us through the World’s Largest Dungeon a while back. There are a number of empty rooms early on (I don’t know about later, because we quit), and also a maze. The DM was drawing all the maps for us, though, and it came to a point where we were just telling him “Draw until we run into something interesting.”
If the map and the dungeon are really just there to provide background, then having the DM draw the maps is fine. If the dungeon, though, is a major part of the story, where getting lost and retracing your steps may cause other types of problems, then the players should be doing the drawing. Had we been drawing our own maps, I think the dungeon would have been more enjoyable.
I do all the drawing these days. Mostly it just goes on the battlemat. If we’re doing a larger dungeon, and we need a longer term map, I try to use tracing paper (I have some tracing paper with a faint grid that is really nice when the grid matches).
I’ve mostly given up on player level puzzles, so mazes and such are not of interest to me.
If players want to get some place they’ve already been in a dungeon, I just let them go there.
I think I mostly stopped doing player mapping back in high school…
Frank
Why does anyone need to literally make a map? As long as you’ve established that the characters are making a map, isn’t that enough? Then the players can just say, “We go back to that room with the beholder,” and, boom, they go. Then you only draw out what you need for combats on your battlemat.
For the most part, I handle mapping the same as Buzz mentioned, but I believe this issue should be dealt with differently with each playing style. My former group absolutely loved the depth of tactical combat, and I actually did highly detailed maps on tear away poster board.
The group loved it, but my current group would rather be much more story involved and roleplaying heavy. I GM weekly and don’t have enough time to delve deeply into both aspects.
Through my GMing experiences, my players can understand the situations and environment with some sort of clarity, whether through detailed maps or clear, understandable descriptions. I’ve even had groups that couldn’t care less about what the map looked like, as long as they were to able hack things. I guess I believe a GM should really pay attention to their players and find what suits best.
Martin, congratulations on the excellent website. I’ve found this to be one of the most beneficial websites to aid GMs, and that also includes the community. Opinions of the readers are much more informative than most GMing forums.
Shane
Chris: Amen to index cards — that’s a great use for them, and one I haven’t tried!
Rick: If you’ve got the time and the scratch, I think the digital projector option is damn near perfect. I don’t have either ingredient, though, so that one remains untested at my games. 😉
Alan: Just to play Devil’s advocate, I’ll argue that it’s nearly impossible for player mapping to capture the excitement of exploration. In-game, the idea of a map hastily sketched by torchlight, which may be needed later on when something big and bad is chasing the party through the dungeon, sound pretty romantic. But how do you capture that at the table?
StingRay: Oddly, I had the same experience with the WLD — the whole first section is pretty terrible, and it’s an awful advertisement for the rest of the book.
Frank: Tracing paper sounds like a good option. Another one I’ve never tried — does it hold up well over time?
Buzz: That’s a tough question. Whether I’m playing or GMing, if there’s a large area involved I like to have a persistent map. It makes it easier to make informed decisions during the game, especially in dungeon crawls — where doubling back, picking a room to rest in, etc. are crucial. After a few hours, I find details pertinent to those decisions to be hard to remember without a map.
Shane: Thanks for the kind words! I agree 100% about the TT community, and I can never say enough good things about the folks that post here. 😀
Tracing paper holding up over time – It’s not much of an issue, if a single adventure/module/dungeon lasts more than 5 or 6 sessions, I start to get seriously bored. The stuff I have (not sure exactly where I got it) is fairly durable (though actually I think it’s thinner than the tracing paper I’ve used in drafting classes and such). Although they have never been used heavily, I do still have tracing paper maps from college games.
Martin, your concerns are why I tend to get a map into the players hands if the exploration will take more than a few game sessions. For very short, simple, explorations, Buzz’s methods work just fine.
I do always do a temporary map for combats. Unless I’m playing a game that totally doesn’t do tactical combat, I will 99.9% of the time draw out a map on a grid.
Frank
Ever since I started using my computer to do stuff for game I’ve been all about the use of programs for mapping. I usually make a map, and then throw it in photoshop, or maybe GIMP and put a fog of war layer over top.
Also, the website rptools.net has a great map tool.
Heh. I’ve always done the mapping (as GM) for my players when they’re in dungeons. Broad brushstokes is right.
One sneaky trick is to ask the players to make an INT roll after a rest period or if they have to escape some Big Evil Beastie. Call it an “orientation roll”. If they all fail, I toss the map in the trash. They’ve lost their way and sense of direction 🙂
Watch the player’s faces………
When I went to the local RPGA gameday, the GM complimented a player for making his own map, calling it “old school”. Otherwise, the local trend seems to be that the GM draws, unless he can’t reach and hands a pen down.
I like Buzz’s method of only drawing tactical maps; that might allow for some of the ambiance of exploration in between. (I know that if I see a room drawn 6 squares by 4, that it’ll be described as 30’x20′. The other stuff: furniture, draperies, smell and the like, all tend to drop back when the room’s being drawn.
FWIW, I have no problem with mapping. It’s certainly beneficial to have documentation of where the pary has been. I just think that sometimes you only need to get so literal, in the interest of moving the game forward. And if you’re just using the map as a sort of record, a simple flowchart (boxes = rooms, lines = passages) will do.
Not to mention, I’ve seen players get confused even with a map. 🙂
Ooh, I like the flowchart idea — I can picture exactly what you mean, Buzz, and it sounds good.
A simple flow chart does get used by folks occaisionally. It works really well when playing text adventure games…
There was an article in Different Worlds magazine many years ago about creating city maps as flow charts.
When it comes down to it, the reasons to have anything more complex a map are:
1. Scale is important somehow. Old school “hey, there’s a void here, we must have missed a secret door!” is the best such example. Knowing how long it takes to get from A to B is another (especially based on knowing the relationships between A/D and D/B).
2. There is an interest in the map as “artifact.” There is an inherent beauty to a nice looking map.
An interesting bonus of using pre-made maps and revealing them to the players is that the pre-made map can have details that are meaningfull without the GM having to call attention to them.
I can also say that for myself as GM, a pleasing map is key to my enjoyment of a module even if there is detail that attracts me that will never be shared with the players. But that’s just to highlight that there’s a difference in function between a map for the GM and a map for the players. Of course factor #2 above may mean it’s important for the players also.
Frank
One thing I’ve thought of doing is adding X & Y coords to my battlemat, ie down one size it goes from A to ZZ or whatever, then 1 to whatever on the other. Then I can tell the players “Okay, it goes from E19 to E 23; then from E 23 to J 23, then from J 23 to j 25, then…” etc.
Frank: On maps as artifacts, preach on! I’m pretty much the same way, and I created maps for oodles of worlds that never got any further than that as a kid.
Jason: Using coordinates sounds like a good idea. You could even use them to classify un-identified magic items without giving anything away (like room numbers sometimes do). Just plot the room on the grid, and tell your players the coordinates where they found the item.
Zephyros: Thanks for the link! It’s great that that site just outputs your selection as a PDF — very handy.