I didn’t intend for this crap to be a four-part series that would eat up an entire month of articles, but here we are. Where exactly? Well, we’re apparently at part three of “Get Off My Battlemat: An Angry Guide to How Things Used to Better.” Believe it or not, the last two articles I wrote – those being Talk is Cheap, So is Thought and Maps: What’s On Your Table – have actually turned about to be about basically the same thing. Well, as long as you include the bonus Appendix: Break Your Mapaholism as part of the last two articles.

Now, you might be wondering how an article about how groups struggle to make decisions and how GMs overuse maps could possibly be related to the same topic. Fair enough. I didn’t realize they were related to the same topic either. Not until I sat down and had some more discussions with other GMs and watched a few games being played – and played in one or two myself – at a recent convention and also had a heart-to-heart with a couple of my current and former players. Well, that’s not entirely true. They are unified in the general feeling that something feels “off” in all of the games I’ve played and run over the last couple of years that I’m having trouble nailing down. And that “offness” seems to be at a very level. It’s an offness in the flow of the conversation between the GM – often me – and the players.

There’s issues happening with the presentation of information to the players, issues happening with how the players evaluate the information and make decisions, and issues happening with how those decisions get communicated to the GM. And the thing is, it’s hard to define because it isn’t destroying the game. It’s just making the game feel like it’s laboring. Like a car that’s stuck in the wrong gear. And it’s making the engine – that’s me and the other GMs running games – work extra hard to prepare the game and to keep it running. But the really weird thing is that not everyone I talk to has noticed something has gone wrong. It’s the older GMs, the ones who have been at this a long time, who feel like there’s something weird and unsatisfying happening. Newer GMs just seem to assume this is how things are.

Now, maybe – MAYBE – this is me just stuck in the nostalgia of my early 40’s and confusing my feelings about gaming with the fact that things used to be a lot easier and happier when I was back in junior high and high school and the biggest stresses I had didn’t involve the danger of not being able to afford rent for the month or the need for a vital medical procedure to stave off a heart attack at 50. That’s always a danger when it comes to looking back on the things that used to make you happy. And maybe it’s also just the natural resentment that every generation feels for the generations that precede and succeed it. And, by the way, millennials, get over yourselves. You’re not the first generation to get dumped on by the preceding generation and, in short order, you’ll be dumping on generation Z. And besides, you do plenty of dumping back about how boomers and gen X-ers have wrecked the planet and the economy. Just like I used to tell my parents back when the world was ending from global cooling and then ozone depletion. You know, before global warming was the environmental disaster du jour. Though that got supplemented by the more general climate change. You’re just part of an endless, ancient cycle of every generation hating every other.

Maybe that’s all this is. Maybe it’s just my cranky old grognard self-asserting itself fully even though I still have most of a decade to go before AARP sends me a pamphlet. But I don’t think that’s quite it. Because even though it’s us old-timers who are feeling like something has gone wrong, when I talk to younger gamers about what exactly is going wrong, they admit they have the same problems. They just didn’t recognize them as anything more than just part of the nature of the game. Either the players give no thought to anything at all, or they give way too much thought and talk themselves out of every idea until they are paralyzed with indecision. Communication is hard. Collaboration is hard. GMs have a hard time keeping track of information and a harder time conveying it clearly. They end up repeating themselves a lot. And to help the players, they end up overcommunicating certain aspects of the world and taking on the cognitive load that players used to take on. Players can’t communicate, GMs can’t communicate, and there’s an overreliance on maps.

Anyway, this Long, Rambling Introduction™ is going on way too long. Because I feel like I have to justify what I’m going to talk about in this article and the next article – which will be coming pretty hot on this article’s heals because I’m writing them in tandem. I want to talk about lost gaming skills. Things every gamer used to know how to do once upon a time back when I was a youngster and we had discipline because we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow against the wind barefoot uphill both ways to get to our games. Things I didn’t even realize I had forgotten about and things that I honestly would not have thought were important enough to worry about losing if I hadn’t been thinking so much about mapping and group communication. Most importantly, they were things that used to be spelled out in the rulebooks.

The Wisdom of the Ancients

In my last two articles – or three, counting the mezzanine – I talked about several issues to do with the general pace, flow, and structure. In Talk is Cheap, So is Thought, I talked about how difficult group decision making can be and how players – and game designers – struggle with collaboration. In Maps: What’s On Your Table and Appendix: Break Your Mapaholism, I talked about how an overreliance on maps can hurt the flow of the game and I very specifically mentioned that the GM should consider NOT keeping a map of the site the party was exploring for the players.

What’s really funny though is that, in my experience, these are relatively new problems. I mean, sure, groups ALWAYS struggle with group decision making to some extent. But the extent of in-game decision paralysis has hit epic proportions in recent years. On top of that, there’s another issue with group decision making at the game table that I didn’t discuss in that previous article, but I will. I’m not saying no group ever had these problems way back in the day. I’m just saying they were smaller and rarer. Now, they seem like they are f$%&ing huge and they are f$&%ing crippling. Especially in online games.

Now, I want to show you something. Take a look at this:

That is the first version of D&D I ever played. Ever ran in fact. Those aren’t my original copies, mind you. They are replacements I had to obtain several years ago. But those are the two books that came inside the 1983 revision of the Dungeons Dragons Basic Set. Or, as it was called, Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules revised by Frank Mentzer and published in 1983. Now, I COULD describe it as the equivalent of the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set of its day, but that would be wrong for a couple of reasons. First of all, the Mentzer Red Box – as it was called – was a much better introduction to the game than the collection of abbreviated rulebooks slapped in the starter set. It took the time to introduce concepts in a reasonable order, to explain them, and to even walked new players and GMs through the procedures for playing and running a game before it jumped into things like character generation and creating adventures. Second of all, for a variety of reasons I won’t go into now that mainly involved not paying Dave Arneson any royalties for his work inventing the game, Basic Dungeons & Dragons was actually it’s own game completely separate from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. And Mentzer’s version – which ultimately would include five different boxed sets called the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal set – actually had a lot of depth of play and progression through different play modules that AD&D just didn’t. If you went through the five sets in order, you’d gradually move through dungeon exploration to wilderness adventures to leading groups of followers and building strongholds to mastering legendary skills and being the greatest in the world to becoming gods. So, yeah, it wasn’t a starter set.

The reason I bring this up is that the Basic Set Players Manual contained a section entitled Mapping and Calling. And these were two unique skills that used to be explained to players in detail. And, as unique as Mentzer’s BECMI game was, that particular discussion was not. Both the AD&D 1st Edition core rules and the AD&D 2nd Edition core rules also referenced mapping and calling and had discussions about both. They were things that were as much a part of the game rules – and therefore part of the things that were taught to the players – as using your THAC0 to roll an attack roll or making a saving throw against a rod, staff, or wand or the proper amount to charge for an assassination mission or how to hire and manage NPCs to accompany the party or how to take out a loan from an NPC in town or how to properly divide treasure recovered from adventures. And yes, those are all things that were covered in the AD&D 1st Edition and 2nd Players Handbooks.

Mapping and Calling were basic skills. They were things that every GM could assume that every player understood. And, if the player was new, they were things the GM would teach the player. Now, as presented back in the day, they were a little clumsy and clunky. Mapping was especially prone to being ludicrously overcomplicated, but eventually, most tables learn to calm down a little about it. And some tables started to reject Calling as the game became more individualistic overall.

Me, though? I think it’s high time these two skills came back. Because we’re now pretty deep into seeing what happens to the game when they aren’t there anymore. So, today, I want to talk about these two lost player skills and suggest – strongly – that you at least TRY them at your table for a month or two before you tell me in the comments why they are s$&% ideas were rightly left in the past along with the idea that the players should ever be rewarded for circumventing a battle with a single, well-cast spell. Because that’s just cheating.

You Want a Map, YOU Draw It

In my last article-and-a-half on mapping, I mentioned three types of maps. I mentioned the tactical map which the GM uses along with tokens to run a combat. I mentioned the setting map which the GM uses to show the players the world. And I mentioned the exploration map which the GM reveals gradually to the players as they explore an adventure site. And I said the exploration map needs to f$&%ing go. That it puts too much of a burden on the GM and that it also robs the players of an essential feeling of exploration.

The thing is, though, I’m not actually down on exploration maps. I’m okay with the players having a map of the place they’re exploring. I just don’t think that’s the GM’s job. And I think that when the GM takes on that job, it changes the essential dynamic of exploration. I also don’t think players ALWAYS need maps.

As noted above, once upon a time, the rulebooks actually talked about mapping. And it talked to players. It told players that one thing that they should do – one thing that was basically a part of creating a party of adventurers – was to appoint a mapper. The mapper’s job was to keep a map of the party’s adventures as they explored the wilderness and any dungeons they found therein. The mapper would also serve as the party’s navigator. The mapper would keep track of where the party hadn’t been yet and how to get back to the entrance of the dungeon and all that stuff.

And this wasn’t just a player role. It was also a character role. See, it was assumed that any smart group of adventurers would keep an in-game, in-world map. How do I know that the game assumed that? Well, because there were notes in the rules about how the party couldn’t really map if they were fleeing from monsters through the dungeon per the evasion and pursuit rules that used to be a part of the game. Yeah, there were rules for running away. And chasing things that tried to run away. And whether or not things would run away from the party. Thank the gods we don’t have to bother with that crap anymore so everything can be a nice, straightforward fight to the death every single f$&%ing time.

The funny thing was, in any game that focused on dungeon or wilderness exploration – because not every game had to focus on those things – in any exploration-focused game, mapping was assumed to be a part of the core gameplay loop. And this really shows in the Mentzer Red Box I mentioned above. A lot of space is given over to explaining to players how to keep a map of a dungeon and to GMs how to describing things in such a way that the players could keep a map of a dungeon. There’s even a walkthrough for players that lets you map a dungeon as you play a choose-your-own-adventure style game in it.

Now, mapping in the old days was very precise. The GM was expecting to explain things very clearly with the detail of an architect trying to apply for a variance for a building renovation where the town council was made up entirely of the architect’s bitter ex-wives. And the players were supposed to make their map on a sheet of graph paper with the goal of producing an exact replica of the blue map inside the cover of the adventure module.

But the level of expected precision wasn’t the only obstacle to good mapping. The other was just the general way dungeons were laid out. Dungeons were weird, windy, chaotic labyrinths with strangely shaped rooms and diagonal passages. Mainly because they were meant to fill every possible square of a piece of graph paper. That s$&% was impossible to make even a general schematic of, let alone a map that belonged in the annals of the Faerunian Geological Survey.

In spite of the obstacles, player mapping actually brought a lot to the game. Mechanically, it allowed for the creation of certain types of challenges and puzzles that are rendered meaningless and useless if you provide your players with a prepared map. Some dungeons, for example, contained teleporters that would whisk the players away to some distant room. And the players would have to start an entirely new map from that starting point and wait to see how – or even if – the maps joined up by watching for recognizable rooms and landmarks. Other dungeons contained shifting halls or rotating rooms that would confound the mapper by changing the way rooms and halls joined up. The party might not realize what was happening at first. It was only when they were following their map back to the entrance that they’d discover their map wasn’t accurate. Magical confusion effects could make the party think they were going in one direction when really they were going another. And, of course, errors made by the map maker also added a challenge to the game.

Mapping was also an essential element of the hex crawl game. The hex crawl was basically the equivalent of dungeon exploration in the world outside the dungeon. Basically, the party would explore a wilderness area – building a map as they went – and then explore any dungeons or points of interest they found. The map was divided into hexes to make it easy to keep track of where the party was and how far they traveled. Essentially, they moved from one hex tile on the map to the next, making note of the terrain in that hex and what they found there. And if the navigator led the party northeast instead of north due to a failed navigation roll, they’d be mapping wrong until they discovered they were lost and then they’d have to try to recover by backtracking or by marching to a known location.

But player-made maps also offer another benefit beyond just creating navigational challenges. They enhance the feeling of exploration and discovery. As I discussed extensively in Appendix: Break Your Mapaholism, when the GM is revealing the map to the players, psychologically, the players are basically functioning like one of those robot vacuum cleaners. They just have to ping-pong around until they’ve covered the whole space. And once they’ve revealed all the rooms, they’re done. If exploration is a focus in your game, this is entirely the wrong feeling. The act of keeping a personal record of your exploration is much different than the act of cleaning the fog of war off a map. It becomes an act of intellectual conquest. It is an act of understanding the space and charting it. And that’s notwithstanding the fact that the map also becomes a sort of journal of the adventure. Just as the players might keep written notes in a murder-mystery adventure to keep track of clues and to remember the story, the players would keep a map of a dungeon or wilderness exploration adventure to keep track of the space and remember what happened there.

The point is, I am totally in favor of mapping as an essential part of the exploration component of the game. And I also find it really, REALLY f$&%ing interesting that so many GMs I’m talking to these days are looking for rules and mechanics and systems to make exploration a part of the game. Like, I hear that a lot. It’s weird how the game doesn’t feel like it’s really ABOUT exploration these days. It’s also weird how player mapping really stopped being an assumed part of the game between 10 and 15 years ago depending on who was running which edition. I wonder if there’s a connection.

That said, I DO NOT want to roll back to the clock to the 1980s and go back to the players trying to copy my graph paper map perfectly from only verbal descriptions. That s$&% was patently unnecessary. No, if we’re going to bring mapping back into the game, we have to do mapping right.

I Volunteer You

The first and most important facet of doing mapping right is also the most tyrannical and heavy-handed part: as a GM, you need to ask your players to appoint a mapper and you need to write that person’s name down. I will have a lot more to say about this when I get to the final part of this series and talk about calling because there’s major problems when you ask people to opt into something instead of opting out and when responsibility is diffused across a group. For now, though, I’m just going to say that it’s important that you make sure the players feel like mapping is an expected part of the game. They can choose not to do it, but if they get lost in some dank hole and die, it’s totally on them. Because you warned them.

So, step one is to ask the party to appoint a mapper and then make sure that everyone – including you – knows who the mapper is. That conveys that it is a part of the game and also absolves you of blame for not providing maps. It also ensures that absolutely everyone knows who it is that is actually responsible for keeping track of where the party is and where they haven’t been and how to get back home. And here’s the thing: that actually makes it easier on everyone when you’re narrating the space. See, when you’re telling the players what exits there are from the room and where they go and all that crap, the player who’s mapping can keep track of that crap and the other players, meanwhile, can pay attention to the more descriptive elements. Basically, the non-mappers aren’t trying to construct a mental map in their heads so they can focus on odd details. If one of the exits smells like fresh air and another has a moaning noise coming from it, the players are more likely to remember those details if they aren’t also trying to remember which exit goes in what direction and how many there are. Meanwhile, the mapper can fixate on just building the map and rely on the other players to focus on the minor details that help them make decisions. Basically, you’re allowing each player to pay attention to only certain highlights from your description which means the party as a whole is more likely to get all of the information.

It also allows you to teach one player how to map best and to check in with that player periodically to make sure they are keeping track of things. And when you’re describing the space, it gives you a specific player to talk primarily to. You can direct your description of the physical space to the mapper. Remember this because I’m going to revisit this technique when I talk about calling too. This is a way bigger payoff than you might think because people are more attentive when things are directed specifically to them. They are more likely to retain details when they are singled out.

When you describe a room, you can start by giving a general description of the most prominent feature of the space and then you can give the mapper the details for mapping. And then you can give the caller and the rest of the party information, even assigning information of interest to particular characters to those players. For example, assuming Alice is the mapper, Bob is the caller, and Dave is a cleric, you could do this:

You enter a large chamber with a black, obsidian altar to the god of darkness and death. Alice, you note that apart from the double doors you entered by, there’s another set of double doors in the opposite wall. In each of the two side walls, open archways lead out. Bob, you and your companions notice statues standing in alcoves in the four corners of the room, each with an offering bowl in front of it. Dave, your eyes are drawn to a runic inscription on the altar that looks like it might be written in the Infernal alphabet.

You’d be surprised at what a difference that makes. Especially when Carol forgets how many exist there were. She won’t ask you; she’ll ask Alice. And Alice will be able to remind her. That means that when the party is deliberating, they don’t need to pull you into the deliberations as much. Which, again, will be important when we get to calling.

The point is, though, ask the party to appoint a mapper. If they feel they don’t need one, don’t force the issue, but don’t change the game you’re running just because someone doesn’t want to keep a map. They can live or die by that choice. But once the responsibility has been doled out – or refused – how can you help the mapper map?

Being Imprecise

First, let’s throw out the notion that it is in any way necessary for the party to produce a map of the same quality as one of Pathfinder’s in house cartographers. That s$&% is useless and pointless and it sets the bar way too high. Instead, let’s agree that the best way to map is the way that those of us who ever played a game Zork already knew – one of the old Zork games before graphics were invented that is. All the party needs is a flowchart. A room is just a box with a name in it. A connection between rooms is just a hash mark on the wall between the rooms. A hallway is just a line. That’s it. Quick and dirty.

The point is that a player’s map isn’t meant to be a f$&% architectural rendering. It’s just meant to show how to get from room to room and which rooms are where. Basically, a player’s map just needs to answer some very basic questions:

How the hell did we get here?

How the hell do we get back?

Where the hell do we go next?

Where the hell is that room with the statue with the missing eyes because now we have those two eye-shaped gems?

In other words, players don’t need a map. They need a flowchart. That’s it. Hell, it’s really just a list of rooms with identifying features and some way of showing how to get from one to another. These are perfectly fine player’s maps:

And it is very important that, when the players appoint a mapper, you explain to them that that’s all they need to do. They can do more, sure. Some mappers love to do more. But no one NEEDS to do more. And, look, anyone can map that way with a little bit of practice. So no, the fact that each and every one of your players insist they suck too badly at mapping to be the mapper doesn’t get them off the hook. I mean, come on, you’re a GM and no one – NO ONE – will ever claim that mapping is not an essential skill for a GM. Eventually, every GM has to draw a map. At the very least a crappy, scribbled tactical map to play out a complex battle at the table. You can’t tell your players “sorry guys, I suck at mapping.”

Oh, and if you do have one of those players who is trying to draw a map that they plan to submit to an architectural digest, you are under no obligation to help them. No, you will not give them exact descriptions of every room down to the last foot. There’s no reason to do that.

See, the dirty little secret is this: if you follow all of my other mapping advice AND you teach a mapper to map out boxes and sticks and hashes, well, it turns out you don’t have to map your spaces any better than that yourself. You don’t need graph paper or $50 mapping software based on the AutoCAD engine to build your own dungeon. You just need a flow chart and some basic estimates. While it’s true that a painting contractor can estimate the dimensions of a room to within six inches, most human beings can’t. I know most of the rooms in my apartment have dimensions roughly between eight and twelve feet this way or that, but that’s about the best I can figure without a tape measure. And that’s all you, as a GM, need for anything that doesn’t have a matching tactical map. And even then, the sizes of the rooms on the tactical map are dictated more by the needs of D&D combat than they are by any reasonable sense of human proportion or architectural concerns.

So, once you have a mapper and get them trained up, you can make your own life A LOT easier. Unless you really like drawing maps. In which case, go to town. I love me some mapsturbation, so I totally get it. But I also understand that I don’t really need an audience.

And since we’re on the subject of simplifying your map to facilitate a mapper…

A Map a Human can Map

There’s a really good reason to simplify your own mapping once you’ve got a mapper mapping your spaces. It’s so that you make some spaces that a mapper can actually f$&%ing map. As I mentioned above, D&D has a long tradition of having some very odd and convoluted maps. Mainly because they were trying to fill the graph paper. And some of the maps from newer D&D products – given that all the recent content is ripped-off inspired by those older maps – are also pretty convoluted. Consider this map from Ghosts of Saltmarsh:

It seems simple, but it is deceptively tough to map out as a flow chart. Especially from the inside. And what purpose do all of those windy and branching corridors actually serve? See how there are no numbers in those corridors? That means NOTHING HAPPENS THERE!

But if you had to use only straight line hallways and boxes for rooms, you’d draw the thing differently. You’d have. It’d look something like this:

And that is much more manageable and still functions exactly the same.

Now, that isn’t to say your maps have to look like a bunch of sticks and lines. They can still look like things.

That’s the first floor of the haunted house from the same adventure. Drawn in two minutes. It looks like a T-shaped house, right? Sort of? Here’s the same map if a player drew it as sticks and squares:

The point is before you bring a map to the table, make sure you can draw it QUICKLY and EASILY as sticks and squares or as boxes and hashes. Or both. However you like. And wherever the layout of the map makes you think for more than a moment about where the next line has to go, fix it. Because if it gives you pause when you’re looking at it, it’ll stop a mapper in their tracks when they have to map it without seeing it.

But that’s not all. The other important thing to keep in mind that empty rooms are okay but bare rooms are not allowed. Empty rooms happen in dungeons. There’s usually way more rooms in a dungeon then there are puzzles, encounters, and treasures. That’s fine. Empty rooms are good. They help make the dungeon seem bigger and help manage the pace of the game. But remember someone is going to have to label every one of those rooms. What are they going to call the third bare, empty, square, featureless room in a row?

Every room needs something to distinguish it. The room doesn’t have to have an encounter in it to be unique. The room could be the one with the patches of purple mold. Or the one with all the skulls and bones. Or the one with the candelabra in the corners. Or the one with an inch of water covering the broken floor. Or the one with the graffiti. Or the one with the red sarcophagus. Every room needs one feature for someone to use to bestow a name on the room. First, it helps the mapper keep a record. Second, it helps the mapper realize when they’ve come into the same room from a different direction so they can join up a line instead of drawing a new room. “Oh, that red sarcophagus; we must have come in this northern door.”

See, that’s really important because if you take the mapper’s graph paper away and tell them they can get by with lines and boxes, they have no way of knowing precise distances and positions. Which means they can’t recognize when the dungeon loops back in on itself. And that also means that you can’t use the dungeon layout to give clues about things. For example, the party will never be able to notice that there’s extra space between the walls of various rooms that implies a secret room and a secret door to hunt for. If you want to do that sort of crap, you have to be a little more explicit. You have to tell the players flat out after they’ve explored all the rooms around the secret door that something seems odd and the rooms in this wing of the house don’t seem to fill all the space, as if there’s something missing on the map. They’ll still have to search and investigate and all that crap to find – or fail to find – the secret door. But by keying the clue to their map and the fact that they’ve explored the whole wing of the house, the clue becomes a reward they earned, not just something you gave them.

And that’s really what’s at the heart of the difference between revealing an exploration map to the players or asking them to make their own. That’s why one feels satisfying and meaningful and one feels like filling out a checklist. When the players consult their own map to find a way out of the dungeon when they desperately need a rest, they EARNED those directions. They weren’t just GIVEN. It’s a reward for their diligence, not just a feature of the UI that the GM reveals by his largesse. And that is the best reason of all to get away from revealing maps, to appoint a cartographer, to give them the skills they need to do their job, to create a game that lets them do their job, and to make the players keep their own damned maps.

And in the last article in this series, I’m going to talk about the other forgotten player skill I referenced: calling. And talk more about how you can narrate to specific players to help improve your own communication skills. Come back on Monday – yeah, in just a couple of days – and I’ll have that online for you.