Tuesday, August 2, 2022

Mapmaking as a Game within a Game

When I first heard about Dungeons & Dragons, an aspect of the game that both fascinated and confused me was that it didn't have a board, unlike any other game with which I had experience up to that point. The lack of a board was something I remember reading in the many newspaper accounts of the game I saw during the late Summer and Fall of 1979. How could it be a game without a board? Furthermore, many of the media accounts of the game also talked about how the players made use of sculpted miniature figures to play. Figures? But no board? What was going on? 

My confusion only increased after my encounter with Dungeon! over the Christmas break of that same year. Dungeon! most certainly did have a board and it certainly seemed quite similar to D&D, though it didn't make use of any sculpted figurines. In time, I made more sense of it all, thanks in part to various gaming mentors, who showed my friends and I the "right" way to play D&D, including the fact that the game's "board" was a hand-drawn map that a player drew as his party of adventurers explored a dungeon. This lesson from my elders was potent and, to this day, I continue to associate D&D strongly with maps and, more importantly, mapmaking. 

Mapmaking is an aspect of D&D that, so far as I can tell, has largely disappeared or at least has been downplayed over the years. In the present moment, one might even say that it's been superseded by technology like virtual tabletops that obviate the need for graph paper and pencil. Nevertheless, maps themselves remain an important part of gameplay. Nearly every adventure, whether prepackaged or homebrewed, includes a map of its most important locales and, in many of them, exploring that map is a central feature of gaming sessions. 

From my extremely anecdotal survey of the situation, I have the impression that many gamers today don't really miss the days of making their own maps. Some have even admitted that they never really enjoyed mapmaking, which they found, by turns, tedious, frustrating, and generally unpleasant. I completely understand this point of view, especially when you consider the kinds of dungeon maps that frequently appeared during the first decade of the hobby. They're filled with mazes, one-way and secret doors, teleportation traps, shifting and sliding walls, dead end corridors, and similar annoyances, all of which are specifically intended to foil or at least hinder accurate mapmaking. Where's the fun in that?

The question is more than fair in my opinion and I don't begrudge anyone who has limited or no tolerance for the vicissitudes of mapmaking – or the labyrinthine dungeons that necessitated them. At the same time, I think it's a mistake to think manual mapmaking has simply been supplanted by virtual tabletops and the like. It's increasingly my feeling that mapmaking – by hand, based on the referee's verbal descriptions – is a key activity of the game, since D&D is as much a game of exploration as it is of, say, combat. I'd also argue that it's a game with a strong element of puzzle solving and tricky dungeon maps play a big part in facilitating that element of the game.

None of this is to suggest that D&D can only be played with manual mapmaking, only that something is lost when it's not included. That's why certain races, character classes, spells, and magic items have or grant abilities that pertain to exploring the physical environment of a dungeon – finding secret doors, sloping passages, etc. It thus seems pretty clear to me that, at least as envisioned by Gary Gygax (and probably Dave Arneson as well), the play of Dungeons & Dragons revolved around, at least in part, "solving" the puzzle of a dungeon's layout, much in the same way that players did in early computer games like Wizardry or Telengard.

I don't know. I'm still trying to figure this out for myself. It may well be that manual mapmaking is simply a transitional technology that isn't nearly as integral to the way its creators intended D&D to be played as I'm suggesting here. Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that there's more going on than we realize and that the large scale abandonment of fumbling around with pencil and graph paper is another step on the road to a fundamental shift in the way Dungeons & Dragons is conceived and played.  

21 comments:

  1. As a 100% devoted, play-by-post only GM, I can say over the last twelve years maps have played a very little role in my games (as well as the games where I'm a player). Only the rare ASCII map of a room or street rears its head maybe a half-dozen times during the course of an entire campaign.

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  2. Is that map of Tegel Manor from Judges Guild? If so, I had a flashback! That was one of the most interesting maps, tantalizingly only sparsely described in the sentence length descriptors.

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  3. So two comments.

    You want to have mapping using a VTT use Dynamic Lighting like what Roll20 has.

    I guarantee the players will get their act together after they lose a party member who went down and they couldn't find them before the party member bled out.

    Second I played boffer fantasy LARP (live-action RPG) for over a decade. Sometimes the adventures I went on involved a dungeon crawl. Usually set in a maze-like building. Or a couple of times in a large barn using pallets as partitions. Which I found was surprisingly effective.

    In any case what people don't account for enough is situational awareness. It is a skill that can be developed even when it involves only pretend kills. You can get lost or misdirected but it is generally a result of being in a stressful situation like combat and you don't have time to think about it properly.

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  4. I think that maps and map-making is a large part of what drew me into the game. My pal Darren and I used to draw mazes for fun in class when we were 9/10yo. We used squared paper, had some basic rules and tossed coins for decisions. Although the majority of our mazes were for tanks hunting one another, we also did the occasional hero trying to find the treasure while avoiding the minotaur. This small game came out of playing battleships where Darren had the full plastic set-up.

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  5. I WAS mapping the dungeon we are exploring via play by post. I need to get back to my map though other players have maps also. Mine is paper and pencil on several sheets of graph paper...

    The GM of that game also did some mapping when I was running a play by post.

    In my Gloranthan RQ campaign (VTT), we have had some crude maps drawn by players. In my Thieves Guild RQ campaign, I started dropping a whole town or city map into the VTT and scaling things to have 1m hexes... For the RQ campaign I have also dropped maps into the game and just revealed bits using fog of war but then the players didn't make any attempt nor need to make any attempt at mapping.

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    1. The post is about the making of maps by players as their characters explore the dungeon, not by the referee beforehand.

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  7. My anecdote: In one campaign I played in recently, there was one player whose character was an Indiana Jones-like archaeologist, always interested in the details of the tomb(s) and ancient ruins we were exploring. That player made a point of mapping as we went, bringing a small notebook of graph paper to the table. Outside of that one player, who sometimes maps in other games, I've not seen much mapping by players since the 80s.

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  8. I think there's an element of verisimilitude (including the potential for errors and inaccuracies) in the act of making a map based on the DM's descriptions. It's what adventurers who were actually exploring a dark, unknown location would actually do - much like spelunkers do when they explore a cave.

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    1. As a caver, I have explored many caves without a map or making a map. 99% of the time, it's easy to retrace your steps. The worst is when you pop into a large chamber from a narrow passage that is obscured. I have spent 10-15 minutes looking for the passage.

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    2. Well fair enough I guess. I'm just going by various spelunking docs I've watched which always seem to feature maps of the cave systems. If I imagine myself in a dungeon exploration situation though it makes perfect sense to me that a bit of a map would be a good idea.

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    3. Ah, well cavers really like to MAKE maps. I've done it myself, or at least done the surveying, I never actually completed a map... And maybe there are some caves where you really do need the map to navigate, and maybe if you want to find a specific place without having been there before. But I've explored many a cave without a map and had no trouble finding my way back out.

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  9. There's definitely a tension between the desire for a free-flowing game with a good pace, and the desire for a suspenseful, cautious dungeon crawl with player mapping.

    I currently play in a couple of different online games. One of them is 1975-style OD&D over Zoom, with player mapping of the dungeons. This does take some time, and we've made occasional compromises, such as allowing us to orient ourselves to North after a teleporter, to make things a little easier. That being said, teleporters and anything else that sabotages efforts to map are brutal, and the DM uses them sparingly.

    I don't think player mapping has to go the way of the dodo, but certainly many of the tricks which were suggested to the DM in the first years to screw with mappers seem now counterproductive, more likely to engender a level of frustration which will discourage players from wanting to play in this style at all.

    On a related note, I will say that I have played in one online game where we often still wanted to map despite the DM giving us a map on a VTT (Roll20). That was specifically in a Stonehell campaign, where we used a single icon for the party as opposed to individual tokens for party members, the map was kept at the 10' square scale, and we had a 30' radius of light from our torches (so three squares in any direction). The DM employed Dynamic Lighting instead of Fog of War (which I usually use in my own game). At that scale, and with the size of the Stonehell maps, it was absolutely possible for us to get lost. Our visibility was limited to a small circle of light in the midst of a large labyrinth. I was very impressed by this style, because it didn't require a length dialogue between the DM and mapper, but still required us to map or have very good memories if we didn't want to get lost. There was a lot of genuine suspense, especially when fleeing monsters!

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  10. I remember buying graph paper at the office supply store downtown, near my fathers office. A budding architect my mother asked? No, dungeon explorer said my father haha

    and we would compare the after adventure player maps with the module for laughs, and see how off they were.

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  11. One of my occasional players has aphantasia, the inability to create mental images. She is entirely unable to visualize what I am describing, so player mapping would be impossible for her, and I have to rely very heavily on VTT maps and illustrations in non-social encounters.

    I gather having partial or total aphantasia affects just under 4% of the population, which gives a reasonable chance of having at least one person in a group with it (although other people I know with it gravitate to video games instead of TTRPGs because of it). That means there is a fair segment of the population for whom "theater of the mind" is not an option.

    It's not something I ever considered before; until a few months ago I didn't even know to ask. But now I find I'm planning a somewhat different game because of it. At the very least it limits who can be on mapping duty, and puts more of the onus on the DM to make sure the map is not wrong in ways that would be obvious to the characters.

    For me it's just easier to use a VTT. If the players say they are mapping, I will save in image and give it to them; if they are trying to move faster and are not mapping, then I periodically reset the fog of war.

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  12. We never did much manual mapmaking in my groups, but perhaps this was also due to the fact that when we started, modular (cardboard) floorplans were already available, and esp during our early days, we used those a lot. So the "map" built itself when the GM would lay out the next room or corridor or whatever.

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  13. I shake my head at people having to say "please don't take this to extremes, I just mean..." I mean, I see why it is there, but it should not have to be. Seth Skorkowski (sp, I am sure) has to do it too.

    anyways this plays to the whole "game within a game" idea of OD&D, like the outdoor survival, etc all just being tossed in to keep the play going

    combat, one game, outdoors, another! mapping, another! Land management, another! I like the fact that there is no forced one size fits all ideas shoved in, you play the game that matched the idea you are working at.

    my 2cents

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  14. I've noticed that over the years, more and more players are less interested in world building and prefer to just used published settings instead. That's certainly good to to do when your beginning running all those classic modules, but one( if not the most enjoyable at times) of being a DM is coming up with your own ideas These days I rely entire on my own campaign worlds and use just the basic rules depending on the system I'm using. I wouldn't have it any other way.

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