A very easy trap to fall into as a GM is prepping the PCs’ actions: “When the PCs do X, this is what will happen.”

It’s easy because this is largely what an actual RPG session will look like: The PCs will do stuff and then other stuff will happen as a result of that. (Repeat.) It’s a trap because this only works if you’ve guessed exactly what the PCs will do.

That’s a problem because (a) you probably don’t have the gift of prescience and, therefore, (b) you almost certainly won’t guess correctly. (Or, at least, not a majority of the time.) At that point, your prep is going to start falling apart quickly and you’ll only have a few options:

1. Start railroading the players and force them to do the things you prepped for them to do. (This is awful. It’s antithetical to the entire reason we play roleplaying games in the first place and your players will hate it.)
2. Do lots and lots of contingency planning: Since the PCs might do lots of different things, you just need to make preparations for everything they might do! (Unfortunately, this will just result in a lot of wasted prep and the players are still likely to do something completely different.)
3. Throw out most or all of your prep and just start improvising like mad in a desperate attempt to keep up with your players!

None of these are particularly appealing options, but at least the third one is steering us in the right direction. Throwing everything out and flying by the seat of your pants, though, is an incredibly daunting prospect, and if we’re just going to end up throwing everything out anyway, shouldn’t we just abandon prep entirely? Maybe embrace a zero prep approach and hope for the best?

But I have good news. The only reason this is daunting is because you’re having to throw out all of your prep. And the only reason you’re having to throw out all your prep is because you prepped the wrong stuff. (Or, at the very least, you prepped it in the wrong way.)

There’s a better way.

Your prep can empower you rather than trapping you.

THE TRAP

The most extreme version of prepping the PCs’ actions is prepping a linear plot, with a specific structure of PCs do A → PCs do B → PCs do C, but it’s not the only one.

To show you what I mean, we’re going to take a look at “Out of the House of Ashes,” a scenario from The Zalozhniy Quartet, a Night’s Black Agents campaign by Gareth Hanrahan and Kenneth Hite.

SPOILERS FOR THE ZALOZHNIY QUARTET!

To be clear, this is a very good scenario in a very good campaign. I like this scenario quite a bit and recommend the campaign book. That’s why it makes such a good example.

The basic situation in “Out of the House of Ashes” is that an ex-KGB agent named Arkady Shevlenko has valuable information related to a vampiric conspiracy. Shevlenko is currently attending a trade conference in Vienna, where he is planning to defect to the CIA. The vampires, on the other hand, have very different plans: In an operation led by Sergei Rachov, they interrupt the CIA’s plan to extract Shevlenko, kill the CIA team, and convince Shevlenko to give them the information instead.

The PCs, of course, also want the information, and the designers consider a lot of different options for what the players might do and give the GM several contingency plans for likely variations of how events might play out.

But it’s nevertheless clear that the spine of the adventure is still built around a loose-but-intended plot (i.e., a series of specific actions the PCs will take):

1. The PCs become aware of Arkady Shevlenko and the information he has. (Several potential hooks are given, but one involves tracking an agent of the vampires named Sergei Rachov.)
2. The PCs arrive in Vienna and put Arkady under surveillance.
3. The PCs make contact with an MI-6 agent who chaperones them through a cut scene where they witness the vampires kill the CIA team.
4. The PCs contact Shevlenko.
5. The PCs extract Shevlenko from a performance of Marschner’s Der Vampyr at the Vienna State Opera.

And because the prep is structured around these specific PC actions, it all becomes surprisingly fragile. In other words, even through Hanrahan and Hite have included tons of useful options for the GM to use because they want the players to be free to approach the operation in any way that the players want, the fact that the material they’ve prepped is still organized around the plot (and presented via scenes triggered by the PCs’ actions) makes it incredibly difficult to actually use.

For example, let’s consider one deviation the PCs might make from the anticipated sequence: Instead of arriving in Vienna and then following Arkady Shevlenko, they instead put Sergei Rachov under surveillance to figure out what he’s doing.

This should be fairly straightforward, but what do I need from the book to pull this off in actual practice?

• Page 57 & 67: Rachov visits Dr. Ingolf, Shevlenko’s heart doctor. (Page 69: This includes giving him a vial of blood.)
• Page 73: He goes to a safe house on Veronikagasse.
• Page 68: He checks a dead drop where Dr. Ingolf leaves information for him.
• Page 63: On the evening of the next day, Rachov is at a reception at the Hotel Europe.
• Page 71: Rachov meets with a vampire named Simon Thonradel.
• Page 66: Rachov is at the Russian Embassy, meeting with Shevlenko.
• Page 76: Rachov attends Der Vampyr with Simon Thonradel. (Page 77: If the PCs don’t stop him, he extracts Shevlenko and takes him to a graveyard to interrogate him.)

Notice how the page numbers are jumping back and forth, and at almost every step, of course, I’m trying to tease information — particularly about the timing of events — out of a close reading of the text.

Imagine trying to do this in the middle of a session. It is, in fact, a daunting prospect. With an electronic copy of the book and a search function, it’s just barely imaginable that you could pull it off. If you only had a physical copy of the book, though? It’s almost certainly impossible.

But what’s the alternative? The players did something unexpected and charted a completely unique course through the adventure. Obviously you’d be left scrambling through your notes trying to stay one step ahead of them!

EMPOWER YOUR PREP

The situation I’m describing here is not, in fact, a hypothetical one: This is exactly what the players in my campaign did.

I was not, however, left scrambling.

Instead, I had this in my prep notes:

SERGEI RACHOV’S TIMELINE

Staying at the Lisky building on Veronikagasse.

DAY 0: Meets with Dr. Ingolf (ZQ, p. 67). Gives him the blood sample (ZQ, p. 69) and threatens him.

DAY 1 – 3 PM: Meets with Dr. Ingolf (ZQ, p. 68), who tells him about the CIA’s extraction plans at Hotel Europe.

DAY 1 – 8 PM: Hotel Europe Reception (ZQ, p. 62-64).

DAY 2: Rachov and Thonradel visit Russian Embassy. Their agent, Zhenya Mikaylou, gets them access to Shevlenko. (ZQ, p. 66)

DAY 3: Meets with Zhenya Mikaylou at the Veronikagasse building.

• Zhenya briefs him on anything she knows about Arkady’s activities.
• If Zhenya’s meeting with Lynne Feinberg happened, she’ll also be delivering Anna Shevlenko.

DAY 4: Attends Der Vampyr at Vienna State Opera with Thonradel.

• If they have Anna Shevlenko, she’s also in their private box opposite Arkady’s. (ZQ, p. 76)

So when one of my PCs trailed Rachov to the airport, saw him board a flight to Vienna, and then created a contact who could meet his plane in Vienna and follow him, all I had to do was look at my notes and know that he would be headed to the Veronikagasse apartment building. When the PCs arrived in Vienna a few hours later and took over the surveillance, I similarly had no difficulty keeping them up to date on where Rachov was and what he was doing.

(Until they killed him on Day 2. Then his whereabouts were significantly less important.)

You can see how simple, straightforward, and short these notes are. But why did I have them prepared? Had I successfully guessed that the PCs would be following Rachov?

Not at all.

Instead, after reading “Out of the House of Ashes,” I had immediately ignored the plot and the scene structure based on PC actions, and instead focused entirely on the situation:

An ex-KGB agent named Arkady Shevlenko has valuable information related to a vampiric conspiracy. Shevlenko is currently attending a trade conference in Vienna, where he is planning to defect to the CIA. The vampires, on the other hand, have very different plans: In an operation led by Sergei Rachov, they interrupt the CIA’s plan to extract Shevlenko, kill the CIA team, and convince Shevlenko to give them the information instead.

Looking at this situation I could easily see that it was being driven by three major players, each with a plan of action:

• Arkady Shevlenko
• Vampires / Sergei Rachov
• CIA Team

So I simply prepped a timeline for each of them, with each timeline fitting conveniently on a single page.

The timelines then indicated significant locations (the Russian embassy, the Veronikagasse apartment building, etc.) and major events (the CIA’s failed extraction of Shevlenko, the Der Vampyr opera operation, etc.). Each of these also got one- or two-page write-ups (which could be cross-referenced from the timelines to keep everything streamlined, focused, and easy to use).

Because these notes were now organized around describing the situation — the people, places, and events — rather than the PCs’ actions, I was able to respond to anything the PCs might do by simply reaching out, grabbing the appropriate part of the situation, and then using it to actively play with the group: What would Shevlenko do? What would Rachov do? When Rachov is killed, how do the vampires react to that?

CONCLUSION: PREP TO PLAY

The important thing isn’t the specific structure of the ops timeline I used for this adventure. (The scenario you’re prepping will determine what structure is the most appropriate.) The point is that you’re organizing your notes into specific toys (or, if you prefer, tools) that you can easily grab and start playing with.

Call it the Rachov Principle: Instead of prepping a bunch of contingencies featuring Rachov (and scattered across a dozen different pages), you are instead prepping Rachov himself — a toy you can play in myriad ways and a tool that you can use to solve an infinite variety of problems.

in myriad ways and a tool that you can use to solve an infinite variety of problems.

This is also, obviously, not dependent on adapting a published adventure. You can — and should! — prep to play when designing original scenarios, too. (And, in fact, it’s much easier to organize your notes like this when you’re not having to first deconstruct poorly organized material.)

Either way, with your scenario notes organized into the toys and tools you want to use at the table (instead of into scripts based on guessing the PCs’ actions), you’ll be empowered to actively play with your players, flexibly responding to whatever they choose to do!

FURTHER READING
Don’t Prep Plots
Don’t Prep Plots: Prepping Scenario Timelines
Don’t Prep Plots: Tools, Not Contingencies
How to Prep a Module
Gamemastery 101

Review: Night’s Black Agents
Review: The Zalozhniy Quartet

Many moons ago there was a tile-based RPG mapping program called Dundjinni. It had a lot of cool features, but one of the best was the Old School Mapping Pack, which was a tileset that would let you easily replicate old-school style dungeon maps. I really liked it because, unlike a lot of other mapping programs, it was the only one that I could create a map in almost as easily and quickly as sketching it by hand.

Over the years, in addition to using it for my home campaign (as seen in Running the Campaign: The Adventure Not Taken and the map shown above), I used it for a number of projects here at the Alexandrian, including:

The Halls of the Mad Mage

The Strange: Violet Spiral Gambit

The Ruined Temple of Illhan

Better Dungeon Maps

Remixing Keep on the Shadowfell

Xandering the Dungeon

The developers for Dundjinni, unfortunately, vanished into the mists of the internet and the Java-based program slowly started deteriorating. One of the first things to break were the official tilesets, including the Old School Mapping Pack. (If I recall correctly, as an anti-piracy measure, the program would verify the tilesets before loading them, and the website would no longer verify the tileset.) Fortunately, you could still load custom tiles, and so I ended up custom-crafting my own set of old school tiles so that I could continue using the program.

Several years ago, however, the program itself finally stopped working on modern operating systems, and that was it. Fortunately there are newer options like Dungeon Scrawl and Dungeondraft which have picked up the ball Dundjinni dropped and run with it. (And you’ve seen maps from those programs on newer projects here at the Alexandrian.)

A patron of the Alexandrian, however, recently asked if they could get copies of some of my custom old school Dundjinni tiles. I’ve tracked down my old files, packaged them, and you can download the full set at the link below.

The set includes stuff like these custom chairs:

Or, as another example, this sarcophagus, catapult, and cart:

The set also includes the custom symbols I designed for the Better Dungeon Maps series:

 And there are many more!

If you still have some old machine running Dundjinni, these tiles are still set up so that you can easily load them as a custom tileset, but you are more likely to find them useful in other mapping and imaging programs. Permission is granted for commercial and non-commercial use (see the included readme file), and if you do find some use for them, I encourage you to come back and share your creations with us, either in the comments here or on the Alexandrian Discord!

ALEXANDRIAN OLD SCHOOL TILESET
(zip file)

Go to Part 1

MAPPING & VTTs

Player mapping doesn’t require running a dungeon strictly in the theater of the mind.

There are a few different ways that you can present players a map on your virtual tabletop (VTT), and each will have its own impact on player mapping.

(Although I’m going to focus on virtual tabletops, a lot of this advice will also apply to dry-erase battlemaps, Dwarven Forge terrain, and similar tabletop techniques. Of course, you could also eschew the mapping capabilities of the VTT entirely and run everything — combat and exploration alike — using the theater of the mind via voice chat.)

First, you might have a dungeon map which remains completely visible as the PCs explore it. If players have access to the entire map, of course, it obviates the need for mapping. (Depending on your platform, and how you have your campaign configured, they may even be able to access the map between sessions.) You’ll obviously lose some of the value of player mapping here, but the arguably primary value of providing navigational information so that the players can make meaningful choices in their exploration obviously remains.

One interesting thing to note, however, is that it’s still possible to treat the VTT map as a physical artifact in the game world. In other words, the players till need to designate a PC as the “mapper” and if something were to happen to the map — stolen, damaged, left behind when the mapper dies — the GM can simply re-establish the fog of war and leave the PCs lost in the middle of the dungeon.

(This will be most effective if you don’t treat it as a “gotcha,” though. Establish who the mapper is and what that means ahead of time.)

Alternatively, you can preserve player mapping by setting up your fog of war so that the players can only see the section of the map that their PCs are currently looking at. If you want anything more than that, then you, just like your character, will need to draw a map.

Another way of keeping player mapping while using a VTT is to only show the map during battles. Effectively you’re “zooming in” on the various battlemaps, but the connections between those battle sites are still something that the mapper will need to keep track of.

For something completely different, you might present no map at all and instead have the player mapper draw their map directly in the VTT as the “official” map that everyone is interacting with. (Your VTT platform might support this, or you might accomplish it by screensharing something like Dungeon Scrawl or Mipui.)

This creates an interesting and collaborative spirit when it comes to the player mapping of the dungeon, since everyone, to at least a certain extent, “owns” the map and is directly interacting with its creation. There is also a unity of experience, with all the players interacting directly with and thinking about the map.

The trick to making this work, however, is that the whole group really has to be onboard with the idea that “the map is not the territory,” particularly when it comes to combat. Remember that, just like other player maps, this player map will not be hyper-precise. So if they draw the room as twenty feet wide, but it’s “actually” thirty feet wide… what happens when you start moving miniatures around that space?

One option is to just accept that the battlemap is always abstracted and as long as the player map isn’t radically wrong, you can just roll with it. Another is for the GM to keep track of what’s “really” going on in terms of spatial relationships, but that can get pretty tripped and dissociated very easily.

An alternative would be to swap to a “zoomed in” battlemap, as described above, whenever combat breaks out. But it’s important to recognize that, although these problems are probably most egregious during combat, they can be omnipresent if the players aren’t onboard with what’s going on.

The common conceit of the VTT is that the map IS the territory: What you’re seeing on the screen, like what you see when playing a video game, is what’s “really” happening in the game. But if we’re using a player map and the player map isn’t necessarily reliable, it can create cognitive dissonance.

For example, what if the players get turned around and start looping through hallways they’ve already been in without realizing they’ve already been there? On this unreliable VTT they’re going to see what their characters THINK they’re seeing, and that can be incredibly immersive! But it can also feel like a cheat or a betrayal or some kind of cheap shot if the players haven’t embraced the unusual conceit.

One of the interesting things about VTTs is that they’re still an incredibly new tool, and we’ve really only scratched the surface of all the things they’re capable of. In particular, most VTTs are still just trying to mimic the tabletop experience as accurately as possible, which means there’s been barely any exploration of the unique styles and modes of play they might make possible.

That’s incredibly exciting! But if you want to take your players with you into uncharted waters, it’s a good idea to make sure they all want to embark on the journey!

Go to Part 1

DUNGEON MASTER BEST PRACTICES

I gave up on player mapping — particularly player mapping from theater of the mind — in the ‘90s, for all the reasons we’ve discussed: The pace-killing metagame complexity of clearly communicating oddly-shaped rooms and passages, which in turn encourages the design of “standard” floorplans (simple, rectangular rooms and straight corridors aligned to the compass points) which ironically undermine the very type of gameplay that player mapping is supposed to be leveraging.

Around 2009, however, I came back to player mapping. The best practices I describe below are not necessarily a “one true way” for handling player mapping (and you should feel encouraged to experiment and find what works for you and your group), but over the past decade and a half while running games for dozens of different groups, they’re not only what I’ve found makes player mapping work; they’re what I’ve found makes player mapping thrive as a unique and valuable part of the game.

First, if they choose not to map, that’s OK. It’s their choice. You’re not their nanny.

What’s important is that, if they choose not to make map, you don’t help them out. Don’t say stuff like, “Well, you can easily find your way back to the chamber with the giant ankh.” Instead, say, “Okay, you want to go back to the chamber with the giant ankh… which way do you go?”

In other words, if you want navigational information (in the form of the map) to have value, you need to actually let them navigate.

After they get lost trying to backtrack a couple times, they’ll figure it out. Or they’ll come up with some other scheme, like marking the walls with chalk or trying to leave a breadcrumb trail. Or maybe it’ll turn out one of them is a savant who can memorize the whole dungeon without a map at all. That’s all great: The point of player mapping isn’t producing the physical artifact; it’s to have the players engage deeply with a scenario by making interesting navigational choices.

With that being said, there are ways to prompt the idea of mapping to players who may not realize that it’s an option:

• The 1974 edition of D&D does it by including mapping equipment in the equipment list and having mechanical structures for mapping (e.g., a rule that you can’t map when fleeing from combat).
• Put a pad of graph paper on the table next to the pencils and dice as a resource for the players to use.
• Give the players a partial map of the dungeon as a prop. For example, they might find the map in the pack of a dead adventurer, thus (a) establishing that mapping is something adventurers do, (b) showing that the information on the map is useful, and (c) giving them the opportunity to begin mapping by just continuing to draw on the partial map.
• Just tell the new players, “Mapping the dungeon is something a lot of adventurers do.”

Everything else is about how you can clearly and effectively communicate the dungeon environment to the players. (This is, of course, good praxis even if the players aren’t mapping: The players have to be able to understand the game world and what’s happening around their characters if they’re going to roleplay.)

Describe things from the character’s POV. So rather than using compass directions, for example, I’ll say things like, “straight ahead,” “the door on the left,” or “the corridor angles to the right.” In my experience, this is more immersive for the players (since it encourages them to visualize the world from the perspective of their characters instead of some sort of “top-down” GPS signal) and also creates a challenge for the mapper, who will need to maintain proper orientation. (Or invest in a tool like a compass to help them do so.)

Use imprecise measurements when describing the dungeon. Instead of “the hallway is thirty feet long,” I’ll say stuff like:

• “You go twenty or thirty feet down the corridor.”
• “The hall goes for thirty, maybe thirty-five feet before ending in a stairway down.”

The same thing goes for rooms: It’s a chamber a couple dozen feet across or a room that’s about twenty feet wide and a little longer than that.

You might even drop measurements entirely; for example, “You go down the corridor a bit and then…” In my experience, though, this almost always prompts the mapper to ask, “How far is a bit?” and you’ll end up defaulting back to, “Maybe twenty or thirty feet.” This back-and-forth is a time-waster, so you’re probably better off cutting to the chase. (But your mileage may vary.)

By featuring imprecision in your descriptions, the players implicitly get the message that they shouldn’t sweat the details of the map: They don’t need to worry about making the map perfect because they CAN’T make the map perfect… unless they need to make the map perfect.

If the players want something more precise than a rough estimate of distance, then they will need to seek precision in character. If they want to know exactly how long a hallway is, then they need to explain how their character is taking that measurement.

In a dungeon environment, this should almost always come with a cost, usually either in equipment (e.g., expensive surveying equipment that also chews up encumbrance slots), time (e.g., in the form of additional random encounter checks or a progress clock being ticked), or both. The important dynamic here is that if the players want more precision in their map (for whatever reason), then they need to choose to pay the cost and have their characters actually perform the required actions. It turns a metagame distraction into a meaningful part of the narrative, while also making sure that this additional focus and time is generally only expended when there’s a reason to do it and also heightened player interest in the results.

You will likely find it useful to have a formal procedure for this (e.g., getting precise measurements for a single room or a 60-foot length of corridor requires one dungeon turn; or twice that if they don’t have the proper tools). It might involve a skill check, but that’s probably not necessary. You can, of course, adjust this procedure depending on exactly what resources and methods the PCs bring to bear on the problem.

Note: Just like when you’re running traps, there’ll be situations where there is no meaningful cost (and the PCs know it). For example, maybe the PCs have cleared out all the monsters in the dungeon and now they want to take their time double-checking everything. When that happens, it’s okay to sort of “zoom out” and rapidly resolve their survey at a broad scale. (What you have here is an example of empty time — a period devoid of meaningful choices — and you want to resolve it quickly and move forward to the next set of interesting choices.)

Of course, if the PCs only THINK they’ve cleared out all the monsters, you can just apply the normal cost while they’re blithely whittering their way around the dungeon.

When the players take precise measurements, don’t hesitate to just draw out the area for them. I’ll sometimes keep a pad of graph paper on hand specifically for this. In other cases, I’ll just draw it directly on their map. No need to fuss about here: They put in the work to get precision, so give it to them in whatever way works best.

Even during normal exploration, if the players are struggling with a weird-shaped room or anything of that ilk, you can quickly clarify things with a quick sketch of the room shape and hand it to them. When I was running Dave Arneson’s Castle Blackmoor, for example, the primary entry chamber was so gloriously byzantine in its design that I had a small sketch of the room’s shape paperclipped to my maps:

Whenever a new set of players would venture into the dungeon, I would just hold up the sketch.

On the other hand, don’t feel like every inaccuracy you see on the players’ map is a problem you need to solve for them. My general rule of thumb is that, as long as it’s a mistake that a character standing there could make, I’m not going to intervene. But if they are making an error that their characters definitely wouldn’t make, just use a visual reference to clear it up. The goal here is not some sort of stringent purity test where you adamantly refuse to use any sort of visual reference.

To help avoid confusion in the first place, make room dimensions the first thing you describe. These can be general (“it’s a wide, long hall with a vaulted ceiling” or “beyond the door is a small office”) or numeric (“you see a square room about twenty-five or thirty feet across ”), but by leading with the room dimensions and shape you’re creating a “canvas” that both the mapper and the other players can “paint” the rest of the room description on.

Note: As noted above, if you don’t give numeric dimensions, you may find that the mapper is always going to ask for them. I tend to default to just including them, but this can vary quite a bit on your group and your mapper.

After establishing the “canvas” of the room, make exits/entrances either the first thing or the last thing in the room description. This essential navigational information is the backbone of the dungeon adventure, and by making them essentially the first or last thing in the room description you make it much less likely that the players will lose track of where they can go. (Remember that the structure of a dungeoncrawl ultimately boils down to: Do stuff in a room until you run out of stuff to do, then pick an exit and go through it to find another room.)

Finally, pay attention to common descriptive phrases that confuse your players and then figure out a way to describe those things in a way that ISN’T confusing.

For example, I’ve found that “there’s a thirty-foot hallway with two doors at the end of it” creates confusion, so I make a point of saying either, “There’s a thirty-foot hallway with two doors facing you at the end of it,” or, “There’s a thirty-foot hallway with two doors facing each other at the end of it.”

Which phrases are common will depend on your own descriptive habits, and which ones are confusing (or clear!) will depend on your group. Which is why this ultimately boils down to being aware of when things go awry, and then making a mental note of how you can avoid that friction in the future.

Next: Mapping and VTTs

A player scratching out a map of the dungeon on graph paper as their DM describes the winding corridors and strange labyrinths their character is exploring is a tradition which predates Dungeons & Dragons itself. It’s become almost habitual; passed down from one generation of gamer to the next: We’re entering the dungeon, so who’s going to be the mapper?

But like a lot of unexamined traditions, there comes a point where you stop and say, “Wait a minute. Why am I doing this?!”

Theater of the mind was supplemented by Chessex battlemaps and Dwarven Forge terrain, and now we live in an era of shiny virtual tabletops with infinite scrolling maps. Player mapping used to be fairly ubiquitous in video games, too, but it’s been almost entirely eliminated there: replaced with mini-maps, quest markers, and fast travel. Why not get rid of it in tabletop gaming, too?

There are can definitely be costs to player-mapping. In some campaigns, in fact, the cost can be quite substantial: The GM repeating room dimensions. The group waiting for the mapper to finish. Confused Q&A sessions between the GM and the mapper as they try to clarify exactly what an odd-shaped room looks like or the precise angle of a hallway. All of this drags down the pace of play and distracts the group from all the other cool stuff — combat, exploration, roleplaying — that’s happening in the dungeon.

So what are we doing here, exactly?

WHY PLAYER MAPPING?

The first thing to understand is that player mapping is only worthwhile if navigational knowledge has value.

In many modern D&D scenarios, it doesn’t: The dungeon isn’t dynamic, it’s overly linear, and/or the goal of the adventure is “kill all the bad guys.” Plus, the adventure is often balanced so that the PCs can wrap up the whole dungeon in a single long rest. So the PCs’ navigational choices don’t actually matter: Even if there are multiple meaningful paths through the dungeon, the choice of path is essentially irrelevant because the PCs ultimately need to kick down every door and clear every room.

Since their navigational choices don’t actually matter, why would the players waste time on making a map?

Maybe there’s some marginal value in “detecting a secret door leading to a bunch of a treasure we otherwise would have missed” (which is why this is so often discussed these days as the reason for player mapping), but it’s an extremely marginal value. Hard to justify all the rigamarole for that one time in twenty that you manage to suss out a secret room you otherwise would have missed.

(And, frankly, a lot of DMs are just going to fudge the Search check to find the secret door anyway. We wouldn’t want the players to miss any of our carefully crafted content, right?)

So when players say that mapping is pointless, that’s not really surprising. It’s quite possible they’ve literally never played a scenario where mapping provided a benefit.

Somewhere towards the other extreme, however, is the Arnesonian megadungeon: The PCs are going to be going down into the dungeon repeatedly and the layout of the dungeon is heavily xandered, so the navigational information from previous expeditions lets you plan your next expedition. The dungeon is also extremely dynamic, with monsters being restocked and aggressive, even punitive random encounter pacing. In that environment, navigational efficiency is of paramount importance: A good map is literally the difference between success and a failure; a big payday and abject failure; life and death.

(This is not to say that you need a megadungeon for mapping to be relevant. It’s just one example of a dungeon scenario in which the PCs will profit from having a good map.)

Furthermore, when mapping is motivated and rewarded, it turns out there are a few other benefits to player mapping.

First, it ensures a clarity of communication. While it’s possible for mapping to bog down play because the player is seeking an unnecessary amount of persnickety detail (more on that later), it’s much more likely in my experience for the map to become problematic because the player fundamentally doesn’t understand the GM’s description of the game world.

The key thing to understand here is that this needs to be fixed whether the player is mapping or not: If they can’t even figure out where the exits from a room are, for example, then there’s a fundamental mismatch between the GM’s understanding of the game world and the players’ understanding of the game world, and that’s going to cause problems no matter what. When this is happening, the player’s map actually provides valuable verification that the GM’s descriptions are being clearly understood and can help quickly clear up misunderstanding when they do arise.

Second, map-making is a form of note-taking, and like all note-taking it aids memory and understanding. It locks in the events of a session and provides a reference that the whole group can look back on in future sessions to remind themselves of what happened.

Finally, drawing a map can be a very immersive way of interacting with the game world. It’s like how a good horror movie will force the audience to engage in an act of closure by imagining the horrific things which the movie only suggests to them. Because the audience is creatively filling in the gaps for themselves, the result can be more vivid, personal, and emotionally engaging than if you just showed them the monster.

Getting the player to engage in a similar act of closure at the game table — where they, themselves, are ultimately completing the picture of the game world in their own mind — will similarly immerse them into the setting. Player mapping achieves this because it implicitly involves them thinking about what lies beyond the edge of their current map as they try to figure out where they should go next and how the different pieces of the dungeon might link together.

The excitement that generates is one part puzzle-solving, one part reward, and one part being drawn into the fictional reality of the game world. The example of realizing that there must be a secret chamber right here is just one very specific example of what this looks like.

PLAYER BEST PRACTICES

First: Do you need a map?

If you’re a dungeon delver, only make a map if you feel like you’re getting value from it. There are plenty of smaller dungeons and dungeon-like environments where you won’t need a map. (On the other hand, if you’re having fun making the map, then have fun! That’s reason enough.)

Second: Focus on functionality over trying to capture the precise measurements and angles of the dungeon.

In fact, in many cases, you don’t need measurements at all. You can get most or all of the benefits of mapping from a simple network map: Just draw a circle for each room and then draw lines showing how it connects to other rooms.

This doesn’t mean you need to give up on the graph paper entirely, of course. It just means recognizing that most of the time the difference between a hallway that’s twenty-five feet long and a hallway that’s thirty feet long just isn’t important.

Of course, there may be times when you actually need that type of precision. (For example, you might suspect that there’s a secret room hidden somewhere in the haunted house and you want to figure out where it might be.) When that happens, make a point of seeking that precision in character: What is your character actually doing to get the precise measurement that you want?

Third: Map in pencil.

You’re going to make mistakes. As you explore and revisit sections of the dungeon, your knowledge of how everything fits together will grow over time. You’ll want to be able to easily adjust your maps to make all the pieces fit together.

Fourth: Let the GM see your map.

If the GM can easily see your map — e.g., it’s sitting on the table in front of you — it will let them quickly notice errors and give you the necessary corrections.

Don’t expect the GM to fix all of your mistakes, of course. Just the ones that you wouldn’t have made if you were actually standing in the dungeon instead of just listening to a description of it.

Fifth: Make sure to actually USE the map.

This might seem obvious, but your goal is to not to produce an immaculate cartographical masterpiece. Take notes directly on the map, and make sure you’re sharing the map with the rest of the group as a reference and resource for decision-making: Where have we been? Where should we be going? What do we know? What do we want to find out?

Sixth: The map is an artifact that actually exists in the game world.

You’re mapping in the real world just like your character is mapping in the game world. Make sure your character has the supplies they need to actually make the map. Think about where and how the map is being stored.

These are small details, but you’ll find they make a big difference in letting the map literally draw you into your character.

Seventh: Try not to let your mapping disrupt or distract from the rest of the game.

Mapping is important, but you should be able to do most or all of it in the background while play continues to flow normally. If you find that you’re constantly having to interrupt the action to get the information you need to make the map, then something has probably gone wrong.

Most likely, you’re seeking a level of precision greater than you need. Try to figure out how to make your map from the details your DM is normally giving you. If you need more detail than that, as noted above, try to seek it out in character (so that it becomes part of what’s happening in the game world rather than a distraction from it).

Eighth: To wrap things up here are three practical tips.

• Learn and use some simple map key symbols. (These are easy to find online, and there’s also a set in So You Want To Be a Game Master.)
• You’re not making a battlemap. Mapping at a 10-foot scale (as opposed to a 5-foot scale) will let you get a lot more of a dungeon level on a single page, which will make understanding, using, and updating your map a lot easier.
• Be aware of elevation changes. Not every elevation change is a level change, but passages passing above or below other passages are an easy source of confusion that can either ruin or over-complicate your map.

Next: Dungeon Master Best Practices