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I want to talk about how I like to communicate maps to players.
Into it!
I used to discourage mapping pretty strongly and traces of my hesitancy to mapping still lingers in my group. Hereâs the backstory:
When I first started playing D&D as a player, before I started my own group, we were doing Labyrinth Lord (one DM used the AEC, the other didnât) and he would draw a map for us on grid paper. Ten feet was a five millimeter square (thatâs about a fifth of an inch).
At first, I abso-freakin-loved it! We could go âWe go hereâ and point to a place on the map deep in the dungeon and the DM would count up how many encounter checks that would entail, roll them, and be like âOK, as you cross this cornerââââpointing to mapâââyou here the sound of bones against stoneâ etc etc.
After a while, I got so swept up into the âmap as territoryâ thinking. I was starting to think of my character as âdown thereâ. A dungeon for ants!
One thing actually happened that was pretty cool. Our torches went out at one point and the DM snatched the map again and we had to go âleft, right, left, leftâ from our own memory (which unfortunately is super good (among the, I donât remember how many we were, five of us?) so it wasnât much of a challenge but it really filled us with dread since we had a carrion crawler chasing us in the dark) and it made the game feel more like we were down there.
As I set about to design my own play style (which, while Iâve made plenty of mistakes along the way, has had so many deliberate decisions), I wanted to instead convey a âfirst personâ feel. Like Quake or The Dark Spire or Wizardry. I want to describe what you see, from the PoV of your character. Up the steam tunnel factor a bit.
My compromise for mapping now is that if they do map, 1. It has to be diegetic, if their character loses ink and paper, bye bye map, and 2. They canât show me the map. I get so tempted at correcting them. âActually that turn shouldâve been left, not rightâ.
To compensate for that, I have to really double down on what Alex writes here:
Iâm totally honest about my reporting, though. If players donât want to map, that shouldnât be a problem. Iâll tell them if theyâve seen this place before, whether this passage seems to leads back towards an area they already know, which corridor to take if they want to go back towards the exit, and so on. Thereâs no trickery involved, here.
This is super key. Additionally, it leads me to emphasize features so they can be like âWe go back to the bull statue roomâ and Iâll be âOKâ.
People sometimes say that mapping allows for a part of the game where players look at their map and try to figure out where hidden rooms and secret doors might be. I find that the be a very small payoff. Itâs interesting two or three times, but then it gets old. You can have the same experience by carefully uncovering a shared map online, and I find thatâs not very exciting, either.
I agree with what youâre saying here. Some dungeon modules do seem predicated on this in order to be fun and to work (especially if you do finchian doorfinding instead of rolling for dwarfchitecture or whatever), but because of my âfirst personâ style, I often shy away from dungeons that rely on that kind of gameplay.
Now on to how to describe. This is something Iâve had to learn in the last two years, since we started playing most of our sessions over video, since before that I relied heavily on the actual room we were in. Before video, I would do a very larpy style, show in the room how things were connected etc, make short or long hand gestures. When things were extra tricky, Iâd have them leave their chairs and walk with me in the room. I wanted to convey a sense of space. We were playing in basically a ten by ten room so as far as larps go, it was pretty darn semi (as in, relying on the life changing magic of imagination).
My walls still have marks from accidentally using permanent marker when doing the skull puzzle rooms in Tomb of Annihilation.
Youâre in a 20 by 30 foot room, taller along the northâsouth axis. Thereâs a door in the middle of the western wall. (Players open the door.) You see a corridor going west for at least 30 feet.
Here is a huge difference.
I never say compass directions (unless theyâre explicitly using diegetic means to find them, which they usually do at sea, but not underground). Instead, itâs âtank controlsâ like Robo Rally or Resident Evil or Grim Fandago.
If I do give room dimensions, which is, Iâd say maybe sixty percent of the time, I do breadth first, depth first, and indicating with both hands (outwards motion for breadth, forwards for depth). Iâve sometimes said âthirty by twenty, thirty-wide-twenty-deepâ, but most of the time itâs the hand gestures.
Second thing is that dear darkness covers us, darkness is my friend. Patrick Stuart has perfect advice:
Never assume light. Assume dark. A simple way to do this is to imagine the darkness as alive. Instead of being a simple black absence regard it as a kind of active liquid. It does not meekly disappear on the lighting of a candle. It follows the players like as stalking predator.
Works great.
So mine would be:
âItâs pitch dark and youâre likely to be eaten by a grue.â
Characters light a lantern or, if they can afford it, a Frotz spell. On my DM screen I have a list of lamps and their duration and their reach. So letâs say they use a Frotz spell, 20 feet of bright and 20 feet of dim.
âYouâre in the corner of a room, the wall to the left of you is in dim, so the room seem to be around thirty by twenty. Thereâs a door in the middle of the opposite wall.â (And I would point diagonally, if they were standing in the corner.)
Characters open the door.
Now, I like to have more of a dialogue, twenty questions type game play than me giving long descriptions. (My descriptions seem super long when I type âem up here, I hope theyâre not that long at the table. Stuff like gestures, staccato, pauses, rhythms all modulate âem, but above all I want interaction.) So theyâd be like âdoes the door opens towards us or the other wayâ or theyâd be like âI use my Xance spell to open the door.â If they donât, Iâm like, even if the door is totally vanilla and safe, Iâm like âSo you put your bare right hand directly on the handle?â.
Theyâre like âWhatâs behind the door?â And Iâm like âThereâs a corridor stretching straight ahead. It continues beyond the reach of the dim area of your Frotz spell.â
So the light also helps me know how far they can see; if they take a couple of steps they might see more.
Back to Alex:
After 20 feet thereâs a corridor branching off to the south. The corridor seems to continue west.
Here, Iâd ideally (and, I mean, I fall short of my own description-ideals all the time so no sweat), Iâd hold out my left arm straight ahead to indicate the continuing corridor, and put my right arm over it pointing to the left and say âthereâs a corridor going left after twenty feetâ (or if Iâd use the light cone to indicate distance, thatâs fine too), âand the corridor continuesâ.
Now, since we donât have as much mapping, Iâm often repeating what they see, and since itâs first person âtank controlsâ, Iâm changing the description to match their current direction. I try to be like âThe corridor goes straight ahead, back to where you came fromâ if theyâve made a 180Ë.
After 20 feet thereâs a T-junction with the corridors going north and south.
Yes, this is good (although, again, I wouldnât do the ânorthâ and âsouthâ part). Just like Alex, I only say T-junction when the characters are coming up along the stem, not when the corridor branches off to the side and also continues ahead, but, that lesson took me years to realize. I shouldâve figured that out way more quickly.
Monsters first! Surprise, initiative, reaction rolls, whatever needs to happen immediately comes first. But then we need to talk to the mapper.
Thatâs something Iâve change my mind on twice. I went from not monsters first, to monsters first, to again not monsters first.
These days, Iâm case-by-casing it. I try to think of what the characters actually would see first.
If monsters literally ambush them, then yeah, monsters first.
Monsters last if the monster is inactive (or hidden), like yesterday they entered a bedroom and the monster, well, NPC rather than monster, was sleeping in the bed. Not hidden, easy to spot once they looked at the bed, but not lunging at them with spears and moxie either.
If the monsters or NPCs are active, but the character would also get a glimpse of the, urm, âmilieuâ, then Iâd be like âThereâs someone in here, but let me set the stage. Thereâs a huge window looking out over the night-time garden to your left. This is a big hall and the edge of your light canât see a back wall. There are shards of glass everywhere. In the middle of the room you see an abandoned card game as four men, they seem to be dressed in torn al-Hadhar clothes, come at you screaming Bree-Yark! Squa Tront! Kreegah Bundoloh! Jamil, you speak Geeba, right?â
âYeah, so theyâre saying dork alert, surprise, warning I kill, right?â
âYep!â
âAre they all goblins?â
âThereâs one goblin and three humans. Theyâre all speaking in Geeba.â
âI say in Geeba âCalm down!ââ (Jamilâs player holding up hands in a calming gesture)â
And weâd keep roleplaying from there.
How big is the room? Most of my rooms usually 20Ă20, 20Ă30, 30Ă20, or 30Ă30 feet. Thereâs of course the occasional hall thatâs bigger, but many rooms are just that, and the only problem is describing it concisely.
I have a lot of 10Ă10 too, but yeah. Since my apartment is 10Ă10, anything bigger than 20Ă20 is definitively a âhallâ.
Treasure, statues, columns, altars, wells, pools, curtains, everything else that is of no concern to mapping comes after mapping is done.
The reason why I disagree with this for my own style is that I want them to get a non-spatial vibe of which room this is. Remember, I came up playing IF games rather than Nethack and Diablo. If I can establish that this is âthe reading roomâ, âthe well roomâ, âthe room with the moldy curtainâ, thatâs a huge win for being able to play in this space without relying on maps.
Anyway. I think itâs all about having a structure for how you say things, and a benefit to using the same phrases over and over again.
I definitively agree with that.
Glossary of key phrases while DM:ing
Now, you might be thinking:
âOMG the number of pixel hunty hoops to just go one inch on the mapâ but remember that itâs ten minutes of lantern oil for them. My rule is:
See âTimekeeping for DMsâ for details.
Looking at a bunch of faces is distracting, and it puts some focus on how people look, how they present themselves, what they do, and so on.
A huge amount of my play, I often express myself or my NPCs wordlessly âĽď¸
Just to have an NPC sob or smile. Miss super hammy over here âĽď¸
Oh! And our fights! This is gonna sound dorky but theyâre super larpy! Drawing back bows, swinging swords, somatic components for spells etc.
Yeah, the problem I see there is that it makes communication for the mapper harder.
Here we are again with how words can have a lot of aspects to them.
Communication: What do I wanna communicate? What the character experiences? Then left-right makes that essier than south-north.
Mapper: The word âmapperâ, as you know from your own mapper apps, and maybe if you like me have dabbled in some NES dev, in the sense of âaccurately and quickly lay out the game boardâ, then youâre right, south-north is way more efficent. If the âHero Questâ style game board map is your desired ludeme. Ss a game piece for conveniece, or as an accurate record of the expedition. But, if the ludeme you want instead is the experience of feet on flagstone, sounds and smells of the charnel or gold vault or fey rabbbit hole, the sweaty corsair hands on a piece of parchment with quill in hand, then left-right is so awesome, and up-down and back-forward too.
Harder: Maro once said that if a game designer were to make a lamp, theyâd make the lamp difficult to turn on and off. Game design, unlike product design, can sometimes have a challenge aspect. Now, we donâ wanna go overboard with this. If the d20 weighed 20 lb, that would be cumbersome and detract from what we want the experience to be about. I donât know about other game setups, but I want dice rolls to be unobtrusive, to give us our RNG quickly and get out of the way. So itâs easy to think that a map should fsll into that âkeep it easyâ category (especially since mapping is already super difficult and error prone and time consuming even when made as easy as humanly possible). But it comes back to what role as a ludeme we want the map to have. To what extent itâs diegetic or symbolic. To what extent itâs the territoryâpart of our interface to the game realityâor, as in my game: very much not.
I always wanna focus on what do you see, hear, smell, experience right here, right now. Who do you meet, who are you with, how do you feel about them.
Making the dice weigh 20 lb would make something that should be easy difficult. But, before Video Era, weâd have the rule that âyou can take calls (because thatâs usually an emergency, but you canât textâ. Making phones a liâl bit more difficult. Same, I feel about maps. Iâm not saying itâs the case for you but Iâve seen mapperâs focus on mapping detract from the experience. Half listening, half doodling, not looking up.
We have the worlds fiddliest inventory and logistics rules, and I think itâs worth it, because decisions and challenges being brought on by them are moments when youâre facing the same difficulty as your character would. You and your character vulcan mindmeld for a moment. Same goals, same desires, same obstacles, same options. Whereas with north-south description, that completely bypasses the characterâs ears and is directed only to the player.
Which is a legit way to play, and Iâm not trying to be patronizing about thatâagain, what you want out of this thing can be so different and all legitâbut Iâm also saying that my way is legit and effective and deliberate.