Game Master Guidance: A Map to Adventure or a Road to Nowhere?

Maps are just one of the many points of contention in the RPG community. Depending on who you ask, they’re either vital, a hindrance, or anything in between. Like most things discussed in this column, it really comes down to your personal approach. That being said, I question how necessary maps actually are. Most aspects of roleplaying happen in the minds of the GM and players anyway, so why even bother with them at all? One of my major issues with maps is that they end up being too distracting. They slowly pull the game away from the player’s imagination and trap it within the more easily quantifiable, less exciting confines of the map. I’ve also found that they just complicate combat, as it makes the player analyze the situation a little more than they should. There’s a reason one of the major points of criticism directed at Dungeons & Dragons 4^th edition stems from its perceived overreliance on maps. I just don’t think maps are a good fit with RPGs. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have their place.

The games I run end up prioritizing the narrative and social elements over the mechanics of the system. But I acknowledge every GM runs their game differently and it depends a lot on the system used. Even if I find maps to be cumbersome, a more gameplay minded groups might find them to be a necessity. They might end up needing the rigid, easily identified boundaries offered by a map. Admittedly, I find my players frequently asking for maps.
A complex area will be impressive to describe but every player at your table is going to have a different idea of what it looks like. In the end, I’ll do a quick sketch with my limited artistic ability, maybe adding dots and crosses to represent the party and whoever they’re up against. But even these aren’t comparable to the carefully made, grid based maps that populate many tables.

On that note, actually getting maps is another issue. Having to map the site of every fight and battle can be exhausting, adding another burden to the game master’s shoulder. That’s especially an issue if you lack artistic ability. Even if you have that in spades, it will hamper your ability to come up with an encounter on the spot. That’s especially an issue if you lack artistic ability. There will also be problems if you have a modular approach like I do, where you end up switching locations, encounters, and enemies around for the sake of pacing and the narrative structure. Some systems, like the aforementioned D&D 4^th edition, are built around the usage maps. I avoid those systems or just abstract the rules as much as I can, but this might not be enough. Prewritten adventures often provide premade maps for their stories but that’ll be little help for your own stories. Premade maps are floating out there but you’ll end up either recycling them or restricting the stories you tell to the maps you can get your hands on.

Mapping out non-combat related elements is a whole other, if closely related issue. Up until the later parts of his Discworld series, Terry Pratchett refused to provide a map for its locales, saying that quantifying such a magical place would end up limiting the stories he could tell or otherwise interfere with the atmosphere he aimed to create. Game masters might find themselves in a similar position. I have a general idea of how all a campaign’s areas are laid out in my head but I’ll only illustrate them if that’s absolutely necessary. That also circles back to the issue of artistic ability. A good artist can create something compelling but most of us can only muster a crude sketch. There are plenty of RPG map making tools floating out there but they feel a little too limited and artificial to me. It really does take something out of your carefully constructed world to reduce it to an unimpressive sketch or PDF. Storytelling driven games like Durance won’t even have any of these problems, as the mechanics are just subordinate to the story. But otherwise, a game master has to be careful with how they use maps, as it can easily become a burden, for themselves as well as the group.