When I began playing D&D in the 80s the only method of play available to my group was “theater of the mind.” Sure we had a friend with an older brother who painted miniatures but for various reasons using them was a rare experience. So it was that someone was assigned the duty of mapping while I did my solid best to describe rooms accurately.

After a long hiatus from RPGs I returned to the D&D hobby in 2014 with the release of 5E. “Theater of the mind” was out and battle-maps were in. I was initially quite keen on battle-maps since they alleviated a lot of the miscommunication we once had, but they’re not without drawbacks. Battle-maps take a long time to prepare, they’re single use items and they seem to undermine exploration.

To be fair battle-maps may be at the scene of the crime rather than directly undermining exploration. But it’s certainly difficult to deploy traps and secret doors when the players can see the whole map and move about it at will.

When the pandemic started I shifted from playing in person to playing online with Fantasy Grounds. Over time I had the opportunity to reveal maps using both masking and dynamic lighting.

Masking is an improvement over revealing a 5′ x 3′ map room by room at the table but also distracting when juggling other DM responsibilities. Dynamic lighting is fantastic for me but the players had grown so used to getting a view of the whole room in a chunk that it led to some distracting token movements as my players cheated the lighting.

At the beginning of the year I shifted yet again to running an AD&D game online without a VTT. My players are mapping the traditional way which hasn’t seemed to impact combat but the greater difficulty of sharing maps remotely has diminished the player experience.

Problems With Map Revealing

The map is a maze, not a game board. Whenever I think about maps I think about the article “D&D is not a game. It’s games.” and of critiques often leveled at Gygaxian dungeons. I agree humans wouldn’t build dungeons like that. But the dungeon isn’t an architectural drawing it’s a maze designed to confound you. Revealing the map spoils the maze.

You’re characters are potentially lost. If I dropped any group off in front of a large cavern with equipment similar to their characters and promises of cash and prizes below, what would happen? Could they find the loot? Could they return to the surface before they ran out of food? Would someone come in behind them and change all of their markings? Would a bear cause them to run and get hopelessly turned around? Would they lose all sense of time and direction? Ultimately there are a lot of real practical dangers to exploring a dark unfamiliar place that the characters would experience all over again with each new dungeon.

The character’s perspective is flawed. Every group I’ve played with over the years seems to feel that the player map should be a replica of the DM map. They reason that because I am looking down at a map and they are looking down at a map the two should be the same. I understand but disagree. The players are not making the map. The characters are making the map. The characters are wandering through dark unfamiliar places with uncertain measurements, poor light sources, under the constant threat of attack. Their maps should reflect that pressure.

These are not excuses to be pedantically simulationist but I do believe that player mapping simulates the uncertainty the characters would be feeling in the game world. Simply revealing the map removes that uncertainty.

The DM doesn’t need a map. Players believe the DM is always looking at a map. This may not be so. The DM‘s job is to create the illusion of a complete world but we’re often making it up as we go. We may at times generate maps on the fly. Sometimes the only copy of a map is the one the players are making as the game progresses.

The DM needs two maps. Obviously you can’t show the players the map with the secret doors and traps marked on it. If you’re running a published module you may be lucky enough to have digital or physical player maps. But if you’re running your own game you need two maps and that costs preparation time that could be spent elsewhere.

Maps might not be the DM‘s thing. All DMs are attracted to different aspects of the game and engage with them in different measure. Drawing two copies of a map or horsing around in Photoshop to revise one might just not be your DM‘s thing.

If the DM is required to have a map for every place the players may go there’s a cost to be paid. That cost may be preparing maps the players never explore, re-using maps the players are far too familiar with or just limiting the players options to what the DM has prepared.

Ultimately the DM must balance three factors; their practical needs, simulating the character experience and communicating the environment to the players.

Better Collaborative Mapping

I didn’t stubbornly ignore my player’s needs about mapping. Instead I went back to Fantasy Grounds to review the features. I knew just revealing the map wasn’t satisfactory but had hoped dynamic lighting would offer a decent compromise. It does but only sort of.

The dynamic lighting feature reveals clearly the area the character is in, lights very dimly the area’s the character has been and hides the areas the character has not been yet. Awesome, but the map revealing is on a per players basis¹. Which means each player can only see what their character has explored. Under normal circumstances this is terrific. But in my circumstance it’s not quite what I’m looking for.

A better experience as far as I’m concerned would be one in which a single player leads the exploration but the map is revealed as above to all of the players. A kind of hybrid between dynamic lighting and map revealing.²

This is not my ideal but I think it’s a very good compromise. My ideal has two divergent paths.

We’ve tried a few collaborative drawing tools. Some were generic, others with clear tools for drawing dungeons. All fell short for various technical reasons but a combination of them to produce something like a collaborative Dungeon Scrawl would be very cool.

On the other hand. When I consider my experiences with video games and imagine a mapping system designed from the ground up to meet my needs I’d do it very differently. I imagine a system where the DM can draw like Dungeon Scrawl. Share the map with a fog of war like Warcraft 2. Place the players in a marching order for exploration which could be led by a single player and break them apart again for individual movement in combat. And combat would revolve around the AD&D initiative system!

But this places us solidly in the territory of, “should I roll my own VTT?” Another question for another time.

To my players, I hear you and I understand. I hope I’ve made my thoughts clear. Know that for me this isn’t a hard and fast position but a step in the evolution of how I think about games and how I’d like to run them.

Foot Notes

1. Maybe there’s a setting I haven’t found to remedy this?
2. There’s probably a longer discussion about moving fully back into Fantasy Grounds to be had here but that’s something to discuss elsewhere.