This one’s gonna be short. It’s also gonna be weird. It’s not something any of you asked for. Your players will hate at least half of it, and you will hate at least a third of it.

But at least it will be short. Unless its not. And it wasn’t. Post revision and rewrite Angry is here to say that. It is not short.

The Scourge of Mapaholism

I am The Angry GM, and I am addicted to maps.

I made an aside in a recent rant that modern gaming has made it easier than ever to bring gorgeous maps and visual aids to your game table. They’re easier to make, print, and display. You don’t need to scrawl on a Chessex vinyl grid map anymore. There are poster maps, books of quick maps, wall projectors, Air Casting to a nearby flat-screen TV, or even just playing on a flat screen display like a table, and that’s assuming you’re playing in meatspace. If you’re playing in The Grid as Tron intended, you’re playing on a virtual tabletop, and like all video games nowadays, what matters most is graphics. The centerpiece of the virtual tabletop is the ability to display gorgeous maps of whatever space the players are exploring, with line of sight and lighting effects and fogs, so that the players just tap and drag their little pogs around and reveal the virtual space one room at a time.

I am not complaining. I love that shit. I know all y’all think I’m this crotchety old man yelling at clouds because back in my day we had to walk fifteen miles in the snow, up a hill, against the wind, barefoot to get to the game store, but we didn’t care, because we had discipline, and you could get a core rulebook, a chocolate maltshake, two tickets to the latest Clint Eastwood western, and a 1955 Ford Fairline for a nickle, because money went a lot further in those days, not that we had nickels. After all, times were hard, but we didn’t care because we had discipline. I’m not. I love living in the future. I love the fact that I can get groceries delivered, play roleplaying games with the friends I left 800 miles behind me, and that good game design was actually invented, and I no longer have to play any edition of D&D invented before the year 2000.

But every advancement is a tradeoff. You get benefits, you get costs. And sometimes, you don’t realize what your gains are costing you.

That’s the spirit in which I say you should use visuals. Use them, love them, marvel at the fact that such wonders can be, but don’t let them take too much from you either.

Roleplaying games are, at their heart, narrative games. They’re played by storytelling. The thing that makes roleplaying games unique is the sense of unconstrained freedom they provide. You can do anything that you can imagine, right? That’s the tagline. You’re not restricted to specific turn orders and specific actions, and moving a specific number of spaces on a piece of cardboard you’re not allowed to leave. You’re not stuck with just the buttons on the controller and the dialogue options the designers programmed in. If you can put it into words, you can do it, or you can try it, at least.

The only way to pull that off until we have actual Star Trek holodecks is to use language and imagination. Those are the most unconstrained media we have. As a Game Master, then, no matter what other tools you use, you must be able to use language and inspire imagination. Anything that lets you not do that is bad for you. It’s a shortcut that comes with constraints.

Visual aids can help you narrate, or they can replace your narration. One of those is a very good thing, but it is also an optional thing. The other is a very bad thing. The problem is that it’s very easy to slip from one to the other without noticing it, and that problem is compounded by the fact that very few people are willing to say that that’s a problem.

I am. But I also admit that you do have to use visual aids. Especially if you run a game online. If your game’s run by talking into a microphone while smiling into a camera — or whatever — you can’t not use visual aids in most modern roleplaying games, and you really shouldn’t in any game. Humans are visual creatures, and electronic communication is harder for the human brain to parse than in-person communication. Those are facts. They don’t mean online gaming is bad or wrong, or worse, they just mean online games have a communication handicap that has to be overcome because communication is too important to the gameplay.

Meanwhile, there’s no way to do execution challenges in roleplaying games. In video games and sports and even some board games, you can test the players’ abilities to react quickly or move precisely or throw or catch or jump or whatever. In roleplaying games, that’s all wrapped up in dice rolling, and dice rolling isn’t a challenge. It’s the decisions that come before or after the dice are rolled or the decisions that happen without any dice ever being rolled that provide the actual gameplay challenge. The challenge in combat is not hitting and dealing damage; it’s deciding who to hit with what and when and how to make that possible.

That’s why a locked door is not a challenge to a thief if the rules are just: “Roll Open Lock to open the lock.” There’s no decision to make.

Why do I bring that up? I bring it up because there are certain kinds of very fun challenges that tabletop roleplaying games are uniquely equipped to provide and that an overeliance on visual aids can ruin. The big one? Anything to do with site exploration.

One of the things that makes exploring indoor and underground spaces exciting and challenging and tense all at the same time is the fact that your senses, your awareness of the space, is so constrained. There’s a sense of wonder that comes from entering a cave or wandering down a flight of stairs and seeing one tunnel or hallway stretching away into the darkness and having no idea how far this space goes in any direction. Hell, it doesn’t even have to be underground. Once you go inside a building, your sense of the size and shape of the building sucks.

I remember once I found one of those old, used bookstores on a side street in Chicago. It was built into an old residential flat or brownstone or whatever. It was the sort of place you end up finding the Necronomicon or the Neverending Story or some shit like that. It was divided into about a million rooms, each cramped with shelves and tables and books and maps and magazines and everything, and every time you went through a doorway or up the creaking stairs, there were at least two more doorways leading in two other directions. It was the kind of place you get lost in immediately. In reality, it wasn’t a sprawling, extradimensional bookshop staffed by a demon in human form; it was just an old, cramped house with probably no more than ten rooms spread over two floors, but it might as well have been the Minoan Labyrinth to me.

That’s how a dungeon should feel. You should feel disoriented and lost as you wander through the space. Moreover, because your life might depend on you finding the way out, you desperately need to keep a mental map. You need to understand how the space is laid out, how things are connected, and what leads back to where. That’s the core of a navigational challenge, and it should be present in every dungeon.

The less the players have to rely on their internal, mental maps or their ability to keep notes or draw a basic diagram, the less they’re actually playing a navigational challenge. This is a problem if you lay out the map of the entire dungeon where the players can see it, even if you conceal it initially under fog, and especially if the map remains visible, even hazily, after the players have moved out of a space. But even things like the edges of the map being visible and the positions of the tokens relative to the edges of the map provide orientation clues that sap the wonder and mystery inherent in exploration.

Ideally, you don’t want to show the players any information about anything that their characters can’t currently perceive. When they move out of a room, the room should vanish. Completely and totally. Out of sight, out of table. Otherwise, there’s no challenge to navigation at all. Worse still, your explorable spaces feel smaller and less mysterious and less disorienting and less oppressive.

Speaking of gamefeel…

Roleplaying games are conversational games of call-and-response with dice rolls thrown in to adjudicate the actions. The Game Master describes the scene, the players declare their actions, the Game Master determines the result and communicates it.

What I’m about to say may seem like a really small thing, but like a shard of broken glass in your coffee, small things can cause big problems.

When actions aren’t passed through the Game Master, they undermine the game’s core gameplay loop, often in detrimental ways.

Take, for example, moving in combat. At most tables, the players don’t describe their movement to the Game Master; they just move their token on the grid and say, “I move like so and then attack.” That leads to the practice of square-counting, which, I gotta tell ya, I could totally live without. I would happily accept the risk that I might sometimes allow characters or monsters to move one square too many or accidentally restrict their move to one square too few if I never had to count squares again. Or watch the players count squares. Likewise, I would kill or die to get back the hours of my life wasted going back and forth on whether this square is a clear line of sight and whether I can move over there or if I move this way, do I provoke an attack of opportunity from that, but maybe if I move that way, I’ll take an opportunity attack from this, and, seriously, is there anywhere I can move to get a clear line, let me get my ruler.

The problem isn’t the mechanics. Lines of sight, cover, opportunity attacks, movement speed limits, and the like all do important stuff if you like strategic and tactical combat, and I do, because it’s awesome. The problem isn’t even that this shit needs to be adjudicated. The problem is, when you make it about moving minis on a grid without just interacting with the Game Master, the players are playing a board game, not a roleplaying game in which anything is possible.

Seriously? What breaks if I, in my infinite judgment, let the player skootch an extra square to finish a charge? Nothing. Would it ruin the game if I just assume a character can move laterally to get a clear enough line of sight to shoot? Especially if I have been instructed in the proper mindset? Absolutely not.

In fact, that’s how it should work. A combat turn should sound the same whether you have a map or not. A player should say, “I move off to my right to get a clear shot at the orc warfighter and then shoot an arrow from my longbow at him.” Then I say, “Cool, roll your attack.”

Remember what I said above about you letting the visual aids replace your narration? What do you think happens if the players can just move their little pogs around to explore the space or take movement and combat actions? I’ll tell you what happens because I’ve watched it happen for years. The players lose their ability to clearly and concisely declare actions. That’s what happens.

Funnily enough, when you force your players to use only words to convey their actions, and they’re forced to identify a creature unambiguously without being able to point at it, their situational awareness increases drastically. When players have to say, “I attack the orc attacking Danae,” or “I attack the archer hiding behind the trees on the right,” “I attack the skeleton with the sword instead of the ones with the spears,” they’re forced to keep track of descriptive details and the interactional relationships between creatures and objects.

You lose all of this when you let the map be your intermediary. Your job, as a Game Master, is to describe the situation, decide what actions are possible and what actions are not, and then resolve them clearly. If you’re letting the map tell you what’s possible, you’re giving it authority over you, and the map is actually way crappier at the job than it seems. Because the map is an abstract representation that’s too precise and too constrained and too static compared to the imaginary reality it’s supposed to represent to be good at action adjudication.

Pathfinding, for example, is technically a challenge, but it’s a boring challenge. It’s either down to algorithm or trial-and-error. What do I mean? Imagine a player wants to move their character at a full run across the battlefield, avoiding opportunity attacks on the way. If we’re doing the standard, “Okay, move your miniature along the route and we’ll see if you get whacked” gameplay — which is bullshit by the way — then how does the player find the route? They just start poking their finger at squares and counting and then poking different squares and starting again, and it’s like watching someone play Minesweeper. Pathfinding is basically a trial-and-error math puzzle. It’s not a good gameplay challenge. It’s not fun, it’s not engaging, and it’s really just down to brute force.

The problem is that you’re asking the wrong question in your adjudication. The question isn’t “Which route will let the player safely cross the battlefield within their movement speed,” but rather, “Does there exist any route that would allow the character to get from here to there in roughly six seconds?” You don’t need to know the route, you just need to know there is one. That’s a much easier question to answer. Especially if you’re properly trained as a Game Master to recognize that, unless the answer is unambiguously, firmly, sharply, clearly, beyond a doubt “no,” then you should assume the answer is yes. If there exists any possibility that the route might exist, assume it does.

Can you seriously not look down at a bunch of miniatures on the table, unfocus your eyes until you can’t see the grid, and then say something like, “Eh, it looks like there’s enough space between those two dudes that someone could slip through without being stabbed?” Because if you can’t, get the hell out from behind the screen. You have to deal with way harder shit than that as a Game Master.

Now, you and your players may disagree, and so you may end up occasionally in dispute. Or you may occasionally end up in what is derogatorily called “GM May I” play. That’s a completely horseshit term that is used to deride the fact that sometimes the players might ask the Game Master if something that seems possible actually is. Anyone who thinks that’s a problem needs to have their Game Mastering license revoked. But also, if you, as a Game Master, are frequently asked what is possible, you’re also fucking up your concise, clear presentation. It shouldn’t happen that often.

Which brings me to the map. The map exists not to determine positions or adjudicate actions. The map exists so that you, the Game Master, can clearly show the players what the situation they are in actually looks like. If you ever look down at the map and it isn’t showing what you think it should, you should change the map. Nudge the miniatures. Say to the players, “Hold on, this isn’t clear, these guys are way farther apart, this line is clear, sorry.”

Now, that probably sounds bonkers. Because you know everything is in the position it’s in because squares were counted and ranges were considered and speeds limited movement and all that shit, so the map can’t possibly be inaccurate. It evolved according to deterministic rules of game world physics. Your imagination is less precise and therefore shouldn’t have the authority.

The problem is that the game world is not a world of spherical chickens in a vacuum, and making it so diminishes it. Yes, the map is precise and deterministic. You know what isn’t? Reality. Or imaginary reality. No one is standing totally still in combat for twenty-four out of every thirty seconds and then only moving in five-foot increments. No one fills a five-foot square. No one actually moves the same, exact, precise speed in perfect straight lines every time they move.

That goes back to what I’m saying about invisible constraints. The map is too precise. It’s too deterministic. If you give it authority, your combats are constrained board games, and all your players can do is count squares and push the attack button, and they don’t even have to pay attention to what the tokens really represent or what is happening in the movie that is playing on the screen about the imaginary epic battle taking place.

You know, if I were making a roleplaying game engine — wink, wink, cough, cough, Slapdash: Forged In Fire: Call to Adventure — I’d find a way to get all the features of gridded combat onto a gridless space without any of that range band bullshit and I’d teach the Game Master how to use the map as a representation of the battle instead of an authority of the precise longitude, latitude, and velocity of every combatant.

But that’s a story for other times and other channels for the secret cabal of folks in the know.

Meanwhile, I’m not going to tell you to throw away the grid and stop fighting on maps. That shit’s awesome. I love it. You should too. But what I am going to leave you with are three suggestions that will help you change your relationship with your maps for the betterment of your games.

Only Put Tokens on the Map When Your Description Isn’t Sufficient

First rule is that you never, ever put the characters’ miniatures or tokens anywhere on the map unless you actually need to show their precise position to the square, and there is no way you can describe and envision a reasonable approximation of their position that’s good enough.

I’m not saying not to use maps. If the players enter a library and there are bookshelves and a chest and a reading stand and a display case with an ornate helmet, by all means draw that shit out. Go ahead and set the mood lighting and all the fancy special effects, even. But there’s no reason to put the players’ tokens on the map at all. You’re just showing them a room so they can envision the room their characters see. You don’t need to fuck around with precise positions.

If one player moves to the display case, and some are rooting through the books, and one is fiddling with the chest, that’s sufficient to know approximately where they are. You don’t need to know more than, “Ardrick is by the display case, Cabe is kneeling by the chest, and Beryllia and Danae are walking along the bookshelves examining the books.” You can describe that clearly; you can resolve that shit. If you’re desperately forgetful, then it’s okay to take tokens and drop them on the items where the players are interacting. You say, “Okay, Ardrick crosses to the display case,” and then plunk down the Ardrick token on the display case. That’s just to help you keep track of who is interacting with what. And note that it’s not positional, it’s relational. It’s not that Ardrick is at the specifically depicted X, Y, and Z coordinates, it’s that Ardrick is engaged with the display case.

What about things like traps in a room? Or green slime hidden on the ceiling? Well, assuming the characters didn’t spot that shit, unless they purposely say, “I’m skirting the wall because maybe there might be green slime,” they take the most direct routes across the room. If that triggers a trap or green slime, that’s what happens. If the players do see the trap or the green slime, tell them where it is, but you still don’t need to be super precise. “In the center of the ceiling, you see green slime glistening.” Adam can now say, “Ardrick is going to check out the display case, but I am not walking under the slime.” Done and done.

Really, unless and until a combat or other tactical situation starts, you don’t need tokens on the room map. You don’t need miniatures. And do not put them down in anticipation of a tactical situation starting several rounds later. Put them down to say, “Okay, let’s mark everyone’s position and roll initiative.”

Likewise, if the characters are exploring the dungeon and you’ve decided to use a big-ass dungeon map that you can reveal, you don’t need tokens on the map. At most, to enable line of sight features, fog of war, and dynamic lighting, you need one token, and it only needs to mark the whole party’s position with reasonable accuracy.

And the players shouldn’t touch it.

Don’t Let the Players Touch the Minis or the Map

This is one I’ve grown lax on at my own table, but it is a rule I’ve followed for years. The players don’t touch the map or the miniatures unless I tell them to. Which I rarely do. The players must describe their actions to me unambiguously, and then, as part of describing the outcome, I will update the map accordingly.

Adam: Ardrick charges at the orc.
Game Master: Which orc?
Adam: The one I’m pointing at.
Game Master: Ardrick is pointing at an orc? Which one?
Adam: I charge the big orc whose been doing all the talking in the middle of the line and stab him with my sword.
Game Master: Got it, okay, roll the attack with an extra die for charging or whatever the hell the rules of the system are in this hypothetical situation.
Adam: I rolled a double hit for a fierce injury plus bleed.
Game Master: Ardrick breaks away from his allies and charges directly at the orcish commander, and the hit is fierce and flavorful, but I don’t feel like making up imaginary fluff text right now.

Same with the players exploring, investigating rooms, poking, prodding, or whatever. Tell me what you do, and I’ll update the map if I’m even bothering with one right now.

Of course, this only works if you then fiddle with the map to make the situation clear whenever it’s ambiguous, as I explained above. Often, at the end of a round or periodically throughout the combat, I will describe the situation as it is, and I will futz with the miniatures a little bit to make it clear. I even purposely put miniatures slightly off the grid just to drive home the point and also to torque my one obsessive-compulsive player because she’s funny when she’s torqued.

That’s a joke. Don’t do that. Don’t be a dick.

Admittedly, players who are used to playing Dungeons and Dragons: The Tactical Adventure Boardgame do have some trouble adjusting to this shit, but adjust they do, and eventually, they come to appreciate it. Because they recognize that I am permissive and tend to assume more is possible than the grid says it is, and they can count on me to make things clear and to never let them blindly screw themselves. I never, ever say, “Ha, you stepped in the wrong space! Six opportunity attacks! For you! For your stupid face!” Instead, when a player says, “I want to run over there,” I say, “Are you aware that there is no way for you to dodge through the enemy line in that direction, and you will not stand a smurf’s chance in a blender when I start rolling opportunity attacks?”

No More Dungeon Maps

The final rule or tip or advice or whatever might be very difficult depending on your setup. Because I, frankly, think you should do it in the hardest, most prep-heavy way, but I also admit that I usually don’t do it that way because I’m lazy as hell, and so I really don’t have the high ground.

The rule is this: the players cannot see the map of any space the characters can’t currently see from where they are. Everything outside of the room they’re in is hidden behind the black.

At a physical table, this is easy. Most gridded maps, flipmaps, and shit don’t have enough space for a whole dungeon on them. If your module includes a poster map, don’t use it. Get a gridded mat or a flip map, or cut the poster map into one-room pieces and only put the piece you’re using on the table at any one time.

Virtual tabletops tend to display the already revealed map portions by default, often dimmed out. That means the players can always see the map of everywhere they’ve been. That ain’t what you want. Fortunately, many virtual tabletops let you change that behavior. Foundry and Roll20 have a specific fog-of-war setting called Exploration Mode or some shit like that. Flip it to the right position, and players can’t see what their characters can’t see, even if they previously could.

The better method, by far, is to split the dungeon or explorable space down into a dozen one-room — or one encounter space — maps, each as its own scene, graphic, or whatever, and each set with the right mood lighting and special effects. Is that a giant pain in the ass? Yes. Should you do it anyway? Absolutely. Do I do it? Hell no. I don’t have that kind of time in my life.

Actually, I do sometimes. It depends. And when I do, I don’t bother with maps of spaces that don’t need maps. Basic, bland, boring rooms and hallways and connections and shit? I handle that narratively. I only actually provide maps of the rooms that need maps.

But, more frequently, I just use the exploration mode setting on my VTT du jour of the day to keep the application from providing the players with a constantly updating dungeon map.

Because I want my players disoriented. If you feel oriented, are you even really dungeon crawling?