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!
Last time I ran a expedition-style dungeon crawl in a VTT, my players independently decided to start mapping it without prompting – and all I did was just reset the fog of war between sessions! I think that really speaks to that primary value of player mapping. Getting to know were you’re going ahead of time is very valuable, much more so than knowing where you’ve been.
Thank you so much for this three part series. It’s incredibly timely as I just started a mega dungeon on Thursday and already started to encounter some of the hiccups you described with mapper interactions. The suggestions in part 2 should go a long way towards alleviating some of these pain points!
Great articles with good advice on the DM side!
Running a certain self looping dungeon from trilema adventure on VTT, I created a map that I could then copy and paste so it would align with itself. I then created a grid of 3×3 copies of the map and then run in with fog. The players only realized it was a looping map when they encountered the same room for a second time! It was worth the effort.
If you want to see how player mapping can be done with online play for very träd megadungeon crawling 3d6 down the line have made a very good video, linked below:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=l6MfLQWYuQg
One major limitation on mapping I’ve found with Roll20 in particular is that players don’t have the ability to select which “page” they are on or view multiple pages simultaneously. This makes the in person experience of being able to reference “the dungeon map” between sessions or while “the battle map” is visible totally impossible without a 3rd-party app for shared whiteboards.
That and the lack of screen real estate compared to just holding a paper map really cut into my ability to map (and as DM support player mapping).
@ 4 rampaging-poet
Don’t let yourself get stuck thinking that the players and DM need to be on the same page in Roll20, except when exact positioning is important (e.g. combat).
The DM can track the PCs’ current position from their dungeon map page, where they have all of the information they need, while the players are on another blank page drawing their own map. When their exact positioning becomes important, you can move the players over to the dungeon map (where you’ve already positioned their tokens) and leave everything outside of the current room obscured through dynamic lighting, fog of war, etc.
The major hiccup with this approach is that Roll20 doesn’t let players erase their own drawings, so the DM has to move to the players’ map page when they want to make corrections. Still, this approach has become quite appealing to me, as I have a few players who consistently move their tokens on the map without describing what their characters are doing. Part of it is that we use Dynamic Lighting and they want to see more of the room, but they haven’t internalized how important their descriptions are to the narrative flow of the game. I think it will get them more into the habit of describing their characters’ actions, and better focused on my descriptions too, if they don’t have tokens or a heavily detailed map to distract them.