Listen up! This article is an appendix to the article: Maps: What’s on Your Table? It’s 2,800 words of bonus content where I rant about why you maybe don’t want to use too many maps at your table. Or any at all. It’s really good advice. But it’s sort of ancillary to the previous article. The point is, you probably want to read that previous article first about using maps at your table before you launch into this diatribe about NOT using maps at your table.
All right, let’s talk about the problem with overusing maps. And I want you to understand this: I love maps. I love looking at them. I love drawing them. I love using them at the table. I buy modules based solely on the strength of their maps. And I even buy maps to hang on my wall. I am a big fan of maps, okay? Keep that in mind when you lose your f$&%ing s$&% and tell me how wrong I am.
Like absolutely every other gaming decision you make, maps have a cost. They aren’t just a free game enhancement. And it’s important that, no matter how much you love maps, you admit that like the f$&%ing adult you’re supposed to be. Maps take time and energy to prepare. Lots of time and energy to prepare. Even if you don’t draw your own maps, even if you just print them out or download them from the internet and import them into Fantasy Grounds and add a grid and add a fog of war layer and add the encounters or whatever, they take time and energy. If you prepare maps in advance, you’re spending precious time – the most important resource there is and the one resource you can never, ever get any more of – on those maps. And that time can always be spent doing something better. Making an encounter better, for example. Or getting some extra sleep. Or playing a video game. Or spending time with your cat. That’s called opportunity cost.
Maps also chew up table time. If you generate maps at the table, that obviously requires a certain amount of time to draw them. But even if you have absolutely every map you’re going to use already prepared and ready to go, there’s still the paper-shuffling and the handing out and the moment where the players move the map around to get a closer look and study it and all that crap. And tactical maps slow down combat resolution. They do enhance combat resolution, I’m not denying that. They make it so everyone can see everyone else’s position and no one is unclear on who is targeting what and where it’s safe to launch a fireball spell and all that crap. That is all absolutely true. But they also add extra time to playing out that combat. Partly because you need to move things on the map and interact with the map and partly because once you get people counting squares and being precise, you create a situation where everyone has to micromanage their actions. Every square counts.
And by the way, this is all just as true if you use maps online as if you use them in realspace. This is all factually, undeniably true.
As a GM, you have to decide if the cost of a thing is worth what the thing gets you. Which I already alluded to. You have to decide if tactical maps and tokens – with their prep time and increased resolution time at the table – are worth the enhancement they provide to combat. And the same is true of setting maps and exploration maps.
The reason I use setting maps a lot is because they require very little prep time and they don’t eat up a lot of time at the table. But having that map in the middle of the table serves as a good focus. And if you know how to use it, it can even drive interaction with the world. And it does draw the more visually-focused players into the game. It’s a very small cost for a moderately smallish benefit. Almost always a good trade if you only use one or two a session.
But things get a lot hairier when it comes to tactical maps. And that’s because the cost-benefit equation actually changes from combat to combat. The fact is, when the party is fighting a single ogre in a fairly open space with maybe one terrain feature that might play a role in the fight, the tactical map offers almost no enhancement at all to the game. People are either engaged with the ogre or not. They are either in the terrain feature or not. And the ogre is either in the terrain feature or not. That is not a lot to remember. In general, people can remember about five details in any given game situation. And, as a GM, your narration skills should minimize the number of things people need to remember by providing reminders of the important details every couple of turns anyways.
It turns out there are actually quite a few combats that break out in <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em> that DON’T really benefit substantially from a tactical map. And if the combat doesn’t benefit from it, then all the time spent prepping it or setting it up is just wasted time. And that’s what I was talking about when I was talking about young Angry’s experiences with his awesome Chessex Battlemat™ and Megamat™. And the problem with the ubiquity of maps – especially online – is that no one questions their utility. No one stops before they roll initiative in a fairly straightforward fight between the party and three skeletons in a fairly neutral battlefield and says, “do I really NEED a map for this?”
Now, I know some people will take that statement differently. They’ll say that if you have a fight in your game that doesn’t need a map, maybe you need to make your fights more interesting. But me? I say maybe it’s okay that some fights are smaller and quicker and easier and some fights are bigger and grander and need miniatures and maps. In fact, I don’t say maybe. It is actually a good thing if fights vary in scale and complexity. In fact, if you only break out the Battlemat™ for important fights and keep the minor fights off the grid, then the players will say, “oh s$%&, this is getting real” whenever you draw.
This is something I used to know. And then I started running games online with Fantasy Grounds with its grid and combat tracker and fancy tools and maps and tokens and s$&%. And then I stopped questioning whether a fight warranted a map. And all of my fights ended up on the grid. And a lot of game time was getting sunk into playing with the tools instead of running the game. So, as of a couple of weeks ago, I actually rewrote my own game design system to designate encounters not as easy or medium or hard but as minor or major or climatic. Minor encounters were small enough that should they never need the grid. Major encounters usually – but not always – end up on the grid. Climactic encounters always end up on the grid. Consequently, major encounters should usually be WORTHY of the grid and climactic ALWAYS have to earn that grid. I’m still testing it. I’ll let you know how it goes.
But fine, maybe you think the time commitment is still worth it. Because maps are fun and the idea of combat as a tactical chess game is fun. The strategy is part of the game, right? And if you take the game off the grid, some of the strategy is going to go with it. Well, what if I told you that time and resources aren’t the only things a tactical map costs you. What if I told you it has a hidden cost? What if I told you that too many tactical maps ruin your game? Does the equation change then?
Look, I love the strategic chess game. I really do. And a lot of players do too. But, after a while, that’s what battles start to feel like. When the players are sitting above the action looking down at a board and moving pieces around and can see everything and react to everything, they start to lose the sense that they are in the character’s heads. They stop seeing the world through the eyes of their characters. Combat becomes a strategic chess game. It becomes very mechanical. And none of the fluffy descriptions you give each action can put the players back in the characters’ heads once that happens. And it eventually happens. The reason it feels like roleplaying ends when combat begins is that the grid-and-minis effectively zoom players out of their characters and put them into the role of RTS players looking down on everything.
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As I said, I do love the strategic chess game. I’m not going to stop loving it. But I do wish players were still playing it from inside their characters’ heads. And if you run a certain number of combats inside the players’ heads in each session, they actually do stay rooted in their characters’ heads for the fights on the grid. So, if you identify the fights in each session that don’t benefit from a tactical map – and make sure that about half the fights in any given session are minor encounters – you save yourself some prep time, you gain some time at the table, you enhance the importance of the bigger fights, and you ground the players in their characters’ heads.
Of course, when you start doing this, you’re going to discover that it’s really hard. If you don’t regularly run combat without a tactical – or you’ve never tried to run a combat without a tactical map – you’re going to discover something else your mapaholism has cost you. Your narrative skills are atrophying because you’re not using them. See, combat is the most narratively demanding thing you’re ever going to run. You have to be on your narrative game one hundred percent to run a good fight without a tactical map. Which means it’s basically a GMing workout. It keeps you sharp.
Once you start running without a map – even if only some of the time – you might also discover how much you were leaning on the map to help you describe the space. You might discover that your narration skills really suck now. You’ve been relying on a bunch of pictures for thousands of words and now you’re struggling to string together even five hundred words without a picture. And you might say, “yeah, maybe that’s true of other people, but not me. I never let the map replace my narration.” No one ever thinks they have a problem. Try going without a map even some of the time for a good month or two and see.
And that brings me around to the exploration map. The f$&%ing exploration map. Because of the limitations of the game, that was never a thing before. But now, thanks to VTTs, we’ve got these full-on, to-scale maps of every dungeon with dynamic lighting and fog of war with hyperlinks in there so the GM can seamlessly shift the map into combat mode as the players move their little tokens around the dungeon, exploring and fighting. They never get lost. They never get confused. They never misunderstand the space. It’s all there in full graphical splendor.
And now players spend the whole game zoomed out of their character playing a board game. They are never imagining the space, never picturing it, they are just looking with a God’s-eye-view at a schematic. A gorgeous, detailed schematic they get to move their little pog around. I know it sounds a bit hyperbolic. A bit hysterical. But it’s not good. It hurts immersion; it hurts role-playing. But it also hurts the wonder of exploration and discovery.
See, one of the things that giving the players a full map of the dungeon that they can see all the time does is make the whole dungeon visible all at once. And then it becomes clear how small and simple most dungeons are. When you have to picture the dungeon in your head and explore it narratively, it feels big and confusing, even when it’s not that big and pretty straightforward. Once you move out of a room, if all you have is your memories and your little hand-drawn notes that might be wrong, those things immediately become shady and murky. The distance you’ve traveled feels longer if you can’t just look at the dungeon and say “oh, we’ve only covered three rooms.” It made exploration feel grander. And scarier. And more mysterious.
Now, once upon a time, players responded to the sense of size and confusion by trying to keep their own map. And while it might seem that that’s exactly the same as just keeping an exploration map for the players, it really isn’t. First, when the players keep a map, they have a sense of agency and empowerment. And, because of that, they also get a sense of intellectual conquest. Which is what discovery actually is. Second, when the players keep their own map, they never really know if they’ve gotten it right. So the dungeon still retains some of its air of mystery and wonder. Sure, the mapper can now look down and see they’ve only covered three rooms. But that is three rooms out of how many they’ve conquered that may or may not be drawn correctly and therefore that may yet still conceal secrets. And thus, when a dungeon is “finished,” it leaves a lingering sense of wonder. “Did we really get it right? Did we really find everything? Did we miss a secret door or hidden path because we didn’t recognize some obvious clue in the layout?”
When you keep the map for the players, you’re robbing them of the chance to figure out the dungeon for themselves. You’re taking exploration and discovery – intellectual conquest of the darkness – and reducing it to a checklist. You reveal this room then that room then that room and then they are done. Yay for them.
But that’s not all. When you keep maps for the players, you’re also training THEM to be overly reliant on the map. And just as your narration skills atrophy if you don’t challenge them, players lose the skill to listen and remember. There is a very persistent pattern I have been watching really closely in my current group about how often I am asked to repeat myself. And it’s a pattern I had noted before in other groups as well. I now feel reasonably confident in saying that the more you rely on visual aids – especially maps that you hand the players – the less your players listen to and remember narrative details. But part of why I feel confident in saying that is because it’s just another expression of a neurological thing that has been well-studied and well-documented.
Now, this is the part of the speech where someone points out that they – and many other players – are just visual people. Some people grasp things better if they see them than if they hear them. And to those people I say, “so f$&%ing what?” After all, some people are less spatial than others. The game forces those poor non-spatial people to try and comprehend all these three-dimensional spaces and complex movements and distances using a two-dimensional schematic. No one ever dares to suggest that you remove the maps to make the non-spatial people have an easier time of it. They just have to learn to read and grasp a map. Well, the non-visual people can step up once in a while and challenge themselves by having to deal with something outside of their preferred mode of information transfer.
At the end of the day, <em>Dungeons & Dragons</em> is a narrative game. It is a game of choices played out as a conversation. And that is how it manages to be such an open-ended game limited only by the imaginations of the participants. So, you’d better be ready to flex your imagination, your conversational skills, and your ability to understand and remember a narrative. And if you need to take notes or draw a map because you’re a more tactile or visual person, well, that’s on you.
The exploration map is nothing but bad for the game. There is no benefit it provides that outweighs the extreme cost. And I, personally, am pretty much done with it. And I strongly advise you to be done with it too. Because it’s doing a lot more damage than you think it is. It’s going to painful, but I’m going to regain my atrophied narration skills and my players will actually learn to listen and pay attention. It’s funny, but I’ve noticed that my players never seem to get distracted with their phones during combat when there isn’t a f$&%ing boardgame to ignore and their survival depends on them listening and remembering what few details I actually built into the minor fight.
Hi. My name is The Angry GM. And I’m a mapaholic.
I started gm’ing just this summer and I’m still running the d&d starter set.
So far I have drawn at the table but used single setting+tactical maps on grid paper for dungeons and simple ones on plain paper for minor fights. Looking back it seems ridiculous but it has worked.
I agree with your arguments though and will use fewer maps next session.
I’ve started to notice this.
I have issues setting up a room right, and as a result I’ve been focussing on imaging just random rooms in cities and environments and ask myself “what would catch my eye”.
It’s a good exercise, but the real test is applying it. Only recently got around to really using the ‘advance warning’ trick.
I’ve been having this EXACT experience. Noticing my players losing their attention, noticing my narration getting weaker, etc. I’ve been using Roll20 for a few years and all my revelations are coming as I try to run my first map-less game since about 5 years ago. (Only 1 remote player, and his internet can’t keep up with voice chat and a VTT) And you’re right – you really don’t see the full extent of the damage until you run a game without a map. It’s painful, and I’m determined to get better.
Hi. My name is Josh. And I’m a mapaholic. (Now 2 game sessions map-free!)
Hi I’m Sapphire and I’m a Mapaholic.
Planning to begin the healing process tomorrow with my next session.
The most effective exploration map I’ve ever used was just a flow chart showing how each room connected to its neighbors, the players never saw this map, they just went from the Mine entrance to the Assayers Office to the Carrion Crawlers Warren, to the waterfall etc. Effectively the dungeon was just a point crawl.
I’ve also found some luck with randomly placing some scatter terrain I made (trees to hide behind, hedges to block line of sight, small hills, etc) on my Chessex battle map when I need a quick encounter map. The players then are tasked with randomly moving everything before the next small encounter, far faster than drawing, but I did have to build the terrain and store it so far from a universal solution.. But I enjoyed the process of creating the scatter terrain so the effort was fun and all the pieces were purposely generic to allow for fast random encounters. I seem to remember you writing a piece about battle map design and talking about how stairs and platforms effectively create longer paths, while terrain like ponds or pits reward some play styles (e.g. ranged & casters) and not others. Seems like that would be a good list of terrain pieces if I make more.
Huh. As always, you’re right. I play 4e online, so no-map encounters is probably not a possibility. But I will definitely be removing the exploration maps and giving that a try.
As for my in-person 5e group, I’ll try to migrate more encounters to theater of the mind. I had a big dragon battle planned, but the locale will depend on their choices, and it might not have any terrain features of note.
In that case, all that is really relevant is who is close to whom, who is adjacent to the dragon, and who is in front of the dragon. A map probably isn’t going to add much to that.
In the past i had a similar idea to divide regular mapless encounters from climatic mapped ones.
The paradox i experienced was that the climatic encounters were the one where i really want my players to be eganged, and the presence of the map made it simply more difficult, like you describe in your article.
Now i use dice and scratch to just give a loose sense of position and sign the presence of point of interest, movements is described in zones and when a player starts his turn i briefly describe the scene to helping him visualize it from a personal point of view.
I take inspiration from a videogame called valkyria chronicles, where there is a tactical map but the moment you take turn, the action changes to 3rd person view.
What if as the DM you keep a combat map, but it remains behind the DM screen?
Obviously this is more doable for online encounters where you can hide anything out of the camera’s sight, but if you know precisely where everyone is, it makes it easy for you to describe what’s happening, but the players don’t lose their immersion?
I was just about to comment this. The biggest struggle I have as a GM trying to narrate combats IN GENERAL, is in maintaining a clear image in my own head about what’s happening. Without a map on the table, I find myself forgetting to mention terrain details, letting the details murk up, and forgetting all sorts of other valuable info. Keeping an ugly, 5 second map on my side of the screen could help me keep it in my head without letting the players stop using their visual imagination.
Isn’t that part of what he means with atrophying skills though?
It sure is! I’m not suggesting we scribble down a GM-only map for every encounter. I AM saying that it would be quicker than making a player-facing one, and would also solve the player engagement problem. As an intermediary step between very simple scenarios that are definitely NOT mapped and über-complex ones where the players deserve to see exactly what’s going on.
Now I’m interested in running battles without a tactical map as well, but I wonder how you deal with area of effect spells or similar mechanics requiring the GM and the players to determine the number of potentially effected creatures without visual aid.
I just ran a session where the PCs had to infiltrate a noble villa and steal a thing. Along the way they ran into guards and minions and hazardous flora. During the four or five fights they had I didn’t bust out the battlemat once.
The party has flanking, area effects, ranged attacks, and lots of mobility (since this is PF2). You would think there would be a ton to pay attention to, but since the combats were often pretty quick and in simple areas it was pretty easy to figure out who could hit what.
“The rogue and two animal companions are fighting that guy, so he’s got cover and you can’t hit him with burning hands. But he is up against the railing, so the big pig could try to shove him off.”
“They’re darting in and out of the collonade, so they’re tricky to get a bead on. You’ll have to go further towards them to get a clean shot.”
“The rat swarm comes pouring out from the noble’s bed, quickly surrounding you. Half the party is currently engulfed in rats, and you’re in a room full of expensive and flammable materials. Good luck.”
Like Angry, I started gaming decades ago so abstract/minimal/non-existent maps are something I grew up with, but got out of it because I really enjoyed the combat chess. Starting a couple years ago I really tried to dial it back, and running 13th Age and Dungeon World really helped strengthen and reinvigorate my narrative combat skills.
Anyway, I’m MeridiaCreative and I’m a mapaholic too.
I’m a pretty new GM (and player) so most of my ‘experience’ has come from listening to actual play podcasts. It’s been apparent to me for a while just how easy it is to pick out the ones that use maps to the ones that don’t. As a listener I’m always so much more immersed in the ones that don’t use maps.
I hadn’t been able to put my finger on exactly why I’d had such resistance to use maps that the players can see at my own games, I love maps! Having you put voice and logic to my feeling has been really useful. Thanks Angry.
“Having you put voice and logic to my feeling has been really useful. ”
Yeah, he’s really good at that. I mean really, really good!
I always lusted after them, but since I could never afford a VTT or Campaign Cartographer or any of that, and most of my experience predates them, I never got that bad. I create maps for my personal reference, mostly, but also for fun, more than anything else. Mostly, they haven’t been used at the table. Battle-mat for the big, complex fights marked up with dry erase, maybe some improvised terrain markers. Sometimes a quick sketch for establishing positions on smaller fights.
But if i hadn’t read this…? Yeah, I’da gone the over-map route with the modern tools. They are definitely cool, but Angry’s right (I sure say that a lot!): they not only miss the point, they blunt it.
Hi, I’m qix and I’m a mapaholic
My name’s Pondscum and I’m a mapaholic.
I don’t totally agree what Angry says about exploration maps. I think his argument is valid but there are uses for a map like that.
I’m creating a map of the megadungeon I’m running (who knows where I got that idea, eh?) I dont draw as I go, but I update itbetween sessions for my players. The players turn up the next session and I present them with a scaled map on graph paper of what they explored last session (each of the smallest squares is a foot, meaning the whole party of four fits into one of the big squares, conveniently) They also get a small XP reward for completing a zone/page, which encourages them to get as much of my prepared content as they can, which is generally desirable for GM’s, no?
It’s not intensely detailed but it functions as a great reference for past sessions. It gives them an advantage when they want to revisit locations later on (I’ve built the campaign in such a way that they have to at some points.) That’s not a bad thing in my opinion; I don’t mind supposing that the PC’s have become familiar with a location during or after fighting for their lives in it.
TL;DR: Exploration/territory maps are a good tool for players, but you should discourage them for relying on them.
Great article as always.
This is actually a great idea. In this way, you’re not bound by what you scribble down in front of your players at the session, and there’s no wasted drawing prep time. By presenting a map to the players alongside their accomplishments, XP and the rest of the pre-session stuff, they can learn the dungeon layout without letting it affect their in-session engagement.
The problem I always run into tactically is that it seems like maps pretty much always matter. Sure there’s that one real simple edge case of the lone stationary monster that doesn’t do anything interesting but constantly slug the guy in front of him. But the moment you start adding some extra monsters, or the monsters start using tactics, pretty much you need the map. If you have a dragon that flies in and out of combat, recharging its breath weapon, or a group of archers that fire on the move, whatever you’re going to need that map. The reason for that is pretty much spells. You’ve got specific spell ranges, specific spell areas, and the difference between being able to shatter three things or only two things can be a deciding factor in if you cast the spell. Unless your group is all fighters with no area attacks, you pretty much need to know more information than just who is engaged with who.
And while I generally applaud attempts to reduce the square nature of D&D to more abstract terms, like Fate’s tactical zones, unless you want to do a major conversion you’re kind of stuck with what D&D gives you, which is all ranges in feet.
Had this article not come around I definitely would’ve been on the path to mapaholism, and minimizing map use to train other skills is a great takeaway.
Now that I’m thinking of it, a more experienced DM I often play with used super minimalist approaches for the best of both worlds. For example we were chased by a pack of demon hounds (with srong backup a few rounds away, so we couldn’t just stand and fight), and we just put all our characters on a line with roughly 10 feet distances. If someone fell behind, their piece would move down the line. If someone caught up, they would come side by side. All the while the DM was painting the landscape with twists and turns across fields, past perilous cliffs next to a wild sea and finally into a dark cavern. The terrain was a lot more evocative than if he had he just drawn a path to walk across with our minis, and the transitions were a lot smoother, but the minimalist distance tracker served well to keep tabs on who was in range of who, and what the effects of failing checks were.
I also really like the idea of letting players make their own maps. If the players then miss a (secret) room or dungeon section the DM could always reward players with a blueprint that reveals the location of undiscovered rooms when they overlay the blueprints with their map. Or maybe they can sell the map if it is of high enough quality, and you can actually get them to invest in equipment and tool proficiency. It also makes for a great way to come back to places that were previously dangerous just to traverse and realize the growth the characters have made.
I’m currently wrapping up a dungeon and during it I used a small whiteboard to draw out the layout as they explored and made their decisions. It’s a keep with like, 5 floors. Should I instead hand the whiteboard to the players and get them to draw it out?
I use Roll20 and I invest heavily in maps for tactical and exploration .
And I do mean *heavily*. Because – like most GMs – I can’t leave well enough alone.
A random bit of forest just won’t do. It has to be a “pine forest in winter, with a strange rune stone standing outside the entrance to a cave”.
So I lovingly create or buy wizard towers, vertical cave complexes, haunted graveyards – not to mention specialist items such as ‘boats stuck in trees’ or ‘smashed mirror-scapes representing your character’s shattered psyche”.
The map-assembly process gets easier every month, as more maps and map-building sets become available online.
And you develop real skills. Map-Creation is a muscle, just as Narration is a muscle.
But there are definitely costs from this ‘full-attack’ style of map-creation.
* It takes assembly time and a certain amount of money. Maybe the equivalent of 300 bucks a year for Roll20 hosting + investment in maps. (I use assets from the Roll20 market and from HeroicGames on Drivethru)
* you are tempted to let the map carry you, so your Narration and Scene presentation skills may suffer.
(Parenthetically – I’m really grateful to Angry for expertly presenting how GMs should handle Narration, Scene-setting & Transition. He’s offered us a disciplined framework that ought to be the last word on the subject).
* Most insidiously – you become loathe to let your players wander off-map. You stop thinking about how you can accomodate your players’ ideas, and start resenting them for trying to leave your network of beautiful maps :0(
First, I think as a GM, we should also learn to use different “mapping-level” for different tactical encounters. For example, theatre of the mind is fine for really simple encounters (like solo monster and one terrain features), but things can go burn more mental space with five PCs against equal sized force, especially when AoE abilities come in the mix. But if terrain in simple, i can be really easier to handle just by placing miniatures or tokens on a blank surface. And so on.
Also, I’ve found that grid gets in the way of quick mapping when complex encounters are involved. I find myself trying to get proportions right, getting rooms the right size, counting squares to make everything fit on a 24×24 inches surface… And that’s something making me regret every erasable mat of a reasonable size I find has a grid on it. Or that DnD gets everything down to single five feet squares.
Things would be simpler for GMs to draw and players would get less in chess-game mindset if the battlefield they are presented with wasn’t a grid to begin with.
I don’t like it, but after reading the Maps article and the appendix I have to admit that I, too, am a (tactical) mapaholic.
You are not planning a follow-up article to help recovering map-addicts to get their combat area narrative skills back into shape, by any chance? Something that works with dolphin style combat, perhaps?
Thank you for all your original content by the way. It has already helped me on the long way of becoming a less worse GM.
The game that I’m playing right now uses maps a lot, and I’ve found my fellow players are becoming increasingly tactical, and it frustrates me. In a recent battle, the HP of the monsters we were fighting was tracked by the players with notes written next to their miniatures. That, to me, breaks the game-it’s no longer roleplaying.
I’m DMing for the first time in the new year (really excited about it!), and I’ve told my players (they’re totally on board with this), that I want a game that really focuses on the narrative and role-playing. Hence, no maps. I have my own maps, but they won’t see them. I may give them town maps and things like that, but the maps would be created by people in the universe, so they’re not precise.