Whose Map Is It Anyway?
A Bandwagon post about Maps
Who are TTRPG maps for? Because there are so many game styles, I imagine there's no single answer to this question, which is to hedge with the old “it depends”. But what this really comes down to is that different maps have different purposes depending on who is using them.
In many old-school hex crawl games, the DM might have two maps while the players have one. The DM's maps are “where everything is” and “where the PCs actually are”, while the player map is “where the players think the PCs are”. In a dungeon, the DM need have only one map unless they're running a maze, which tends to be un-fun* for most tables. The hex crawl map setup is an acknowledgement of and attempt at modeling getting lost or losing direction in the wild.
As for the player map, there are a few basic options to account for its existence. The first, and perhaps** oldest is to have the players make their own map, presumably by electing someone to the role. For dungeon maps, the idea is that the players will end up with something that looks roughly like what the DM is looking at, but marked up according to the players' priorities. The second is to swing the other way entirely and provide the map for the players. This can make sense when the PCs should know something about the place they are/are going. And the third is a hybrid of these, where some portion of the map is provided, but with blank spaces for the players to fill in as they discover things.
In my most recently published (well, my only published) adventure, I considered carefully what purpose the map should serve. I'm a longtime listener of Between Two Cairns, and I take to heart the notes Brad and Yochai have about the maps that accompany adventures. I especially took note when they reviewed Bakto's Terrifying Cuisine, which I've run now three times, and on whose structure I based Dead I Am the Rat.
The idea for Dead I Am the Rat ruminated for a while, but when I finally got around to finishing the writing and laying things out, I had a provisional map:
By the time I started work on earnest, I had already listened to the Between Two Cairns review of Bakto's, and I knew I wanted to give my players the map. But all I had was this map. I was dissatisfied with the map because it lacked the polish I wanted to present in my published module. It's perfectly fine for use at the table, however! Well, except for one problem that turned out to have a sizable impact during my first playtest!
So I sat down during my Christmas leave and started drawing. My goal was to draw one image for each point on my map, something that was roughly indicative of what was there. Also, of course, to correct the mistake I had made on the map and to adjust for my playtest notes. And since this is a player-facing map, it omits any secret pathways.
This was my first experience drawing something that would be scaled down like this, and while it does what it's supposed to do, I've learned a bit about how I'd want to approach it if I did it again. This is, however, my final version, so this one is what it will be.
I'll note again that this is a player facing map. The player rats in my adventure hail from the region and would know its rough layout. There's no reason to hide the region map from them. At the same time, there is no separate DM map, because I didn't see the necessity of it.
Anyway that's all I have for now on this. As I continue development of a handful more adventures, I'm sure I'll revisit this topic or one adjacent to it.
* You may be interested in a set of maze mechanics that I distilled from a Reddit post and decanted into more specific cave crawling procedures. You can easily reverse engineer the mechanics if you like, but part of my argument was that generic mechanics were insufficient.
** I've been playing TTRPGs for more than 30 years, and I can't remember all the ways I've played them, including how players mapped or didn't map. It's probable that as a teenager I and my friends less concerned about precise positioning and more concerned about what shenanigans we could pull. But by the time I had gotten to the hobby, play practices had already been changing anyway.
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