Interesting. This is the first I heard of old-school gamers criticizing the GaryCon experience.

Most criticism comes from the dilution.  Those who've been going to GaryCon for many years have seen it go from a con about the games Gary wrote, to a con with a larger than normal old school presence.  But the explosive growth in the past few years isn't coming from old schoolers, but instead the adventure league, so each year the je ne sais quoi which distinguished it from other cons dilutes just a bit more and the atmosphere changes slightly.

That said, I (and many others I suspect) have our fill of old school games and people we see every year.  So long as that doesn't change, the rest is can be ignored - except for stuff like LARPers that insist on banging drums while 20 tables around them are trying to run a game; if that sort of growth continues then it will be harder to ignore.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1030963Interesting. This is the first I heard of old-school gamers criticizing the GaryCon experience.

Note carefully that the critics weren't actually there.

Gronan, do you disagree with EOTB's assessment?

I've only been to one GaryCon and I thought it was very old school, but also with the newer games that cloned the older games (such as OSRIC) or tried to present older style (like DCC). I got to play Metamorphosis Alpha at Jim Ward's table. I got to play some OD&D with a group other than my regulars. I got to chat about gaming with Earnie Gygax, Rob Kuntz, and some others. It was a great experience.

It's been a few years, but I don't recall much of a 5E presence there. I want to go back one of these days and will be really bummed if the atmosphere has changed.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1030026Back in the day, when we played D&D (From now on here I mean OD&D, okay) we were all of us focused on the map.  The map gives vital clues to the treasure hunt that is dungeon exploration.  "Hey, what's over there?"  or maybe "Hey, notice this stub corridor, if there were a secret door right here..."

And this keeps up in some circles; after running a game in NYC for the Blog of Holding folks, I've remarked several times, including hereabouts, that by the end of the campaign, everybody was focused on the maps just like Ye Oldie Dayse.

At GaryCon nobody's looking at the damn map.  I think that's why the games have been so unsuccessful; people don't realize that an old man will not walk up to them in an inn and hand them a quest coupon.  D&D in its earliest incarnation is a game of exploration and treasure hunting, and to explore you have to cover ground.

This year I finally lost my temper a bit and gave them a "All Right you Primitive Screwheads, Listen Up!" speech.  And yes, I did use just those words.

Because we'd been playing for over 2 hours, and all that had happened is they'd traversed 100 feet of corridor, once in each direction.

The map.  It's all about the map.

Your thread titles are making me hungry Gronan.

What was the reaction to the screwheads speech?

Thing is, I still don't buy the mapping thing. If you were exploring an occupied, dangerous, treasure-filled (hopefully!) cave system "for real", you might spend some time making subtle marks on corners, so you could retreat safely in a hurry later if necessary. But spending time doing careful, accurate maps, is a dangerous diversion of a precious resource (time). Having cleared the place, maybe then I would bring a survey team down.

It's also hard to translate a 3D visual experience to an audible 2D one. "We turned left at the corner where the pink mold is on the sticky-out rock two feet below the roof."

Finally there is risk vs reward. Why doesn't the gang ever decide a magic number before they go in?

"Our current income is 1gp per day. If we find enough treasure so that we each have 500gp each, we'll leave".


At the end of the day, it's all social contract. We wanna have fun, we wanna have adventure. We'll agree to act non-logically, if you present us with challenges that adequately entertain us. Deal?

But I don't see that that automatically leads to "As players we must draw accurate maps as we go along". Sounds like the players are doing the DM's job for him.

If you think mapping is dumb, try playing a complicated dungeon or cave with a DM who doesn't hold your hand when its time to find your way out. If a DM only describes what you can see and hear at any given time, without talking like your players have a compass in their heads, eidetic memory and see in the dark, then the PC's are going to get badly lost very quickly. This is why real cavers spend a lot of time and effort to map!

Quote from: Larsdangly;1031001If you think mapping is dumb, try playing a complicated dungeon or cave with a DM who doesn't hold your hand when its time to find your way out. If a DM only describes what you can see and hear at any given time, without talking like your players have a compass in their heads, eidetic memory and see in the dark, then the PC's are going to get badly lost very quickly. This is why real cavers spend a lot of time and effort to map!

Right, but real cavers are primarily there to map (explore).

D&D adventurers are not there primarily to do that, it's like third on the list.

Quote from: Motorskills;1031002Right, but real cavers are primarily there to map (explore).

D&D adventurers are not there primarily to do that, it's like third on the list.

Real D&D players are.  You just suck, that's all.

Quote from: Spinachcat;1030973Gronan, do you disagree with EOTB's assessment?

Adventurer's League is all stuffed into one room so they don't get any of it on anybody else.  And he was stating that there is some new stuff there, not that the old school has disappeared, which rumor is running around, spread by people not there.

In mapping locations such as a dungeon, I consider that there are at different types of information about a place that characters may have: immediate observation, memory, and physical maps that they or others may have actually put on paper.

* Characters visiting a location can see it (depending on how well-lit and unobstructed it is), and should be able to immediately (in game time, anyway) be able to get that level of information about a place.

* Characters who have visited a location should have some memory of being in that place.

* Characters who have made a map of a place will also have that physical object and some memory of which place on the map relates to which place they have a memory of.

Also, the GM may provide various information to players which can represent some or all of those things, and may be more or less accurate than would make sense for each of those levels. For example, a verbal description may take a lot of time and not be very effective at communicating some kinds of details (e.g. irregular room shape) but may be more accurate than it would be for the characters (e.g. accurate distances or artificial measures such as map squares or hexes).

Often there is some conflict and/or confusion about the differences between those things, and without going LARP, some of that's unavoidable because the player's experience is a different sort from the PC's. On the one hand, the players need enough information to be able to make the decisions needed for play, but on the other hand, that doesn't mean that the PCs would end up having an accurate physical map of where they've been, especially if it's a perceptually confusing place to be in and they haven't taken any game-time to map it, or don't have any mapping skills or equipment, or various things happened to them that would have damaged the map, etc.

The system I started with in 1980 (The Fantasy Trip - In The Labyrinth has a detailed section on adventuring in detailed locations and mapping them, and some nice suggestions about how to relate what happens in play to the ability to notice details and to make a map. A map is important too in TFT because you really want to zoom in to 1.3-meter hexes for tactical combat, so when there's a fight someplace, the GM will lay out an accurate map at least showing the shape of the space where the fight takes place, and there's a handy conversion of location-map hexes to megahexes (groups of 7 small-scale combat hexes) for that purpose. I used that for several years and we enjoyed it a lot and were into exploring and mapping places. However we started to notice some artificialities of the world being organized into a nice grid (even a nice hex-grid). Eventually we started adding more natural shapes for caverns and having man-made buildings also be often drawn without conforming to the grid, which at that point for us we liked better even though (and/or because it was harder to map accurately).

That is, we understood that for the characters having actual physical maps, those should be inaccurate, unless the character has suverying skills and equipment and has and takes the time to use it. Try mapping places by holding pen and paper sometime (never mind parchment-scroll and quill) - it takes time and generally involves quite a few inaccuracies and/or mistakes, especially without measurements.

On the other hand, there is a perhaps-more-important need for the other two levels of place information. First, the players do need to be able to understand the place they are in as quickly as possible so they can play the situation. For this, I like to either lay out the outline on the table (and have players place their figures to show where they go), or to show them a sketch of what they see (but I like to avoid showing the "actual" map so they don't know what details might be there that their characters don't know). Second, the players need to be able to relate to the place they have been through with an appropriate level of ability to not get lost and have an idea how things are laid out, and that is a challenge because the players have not been to the space (unless you've laid it out on the table), so if I feel that level is lacking (i.e. the characters would have a sense of layout that the players don't have) then I give that to the players with additional diagrams or verbal interpretations that represent that understanding.

Example of such a verbal interpretation:

Player: "Wait, I'm confused - where did we find that goblin corpse?"
GM: "In the room with the spiral pillars. Your character remembers how to get back there - it was three rooms ago. Do you want to go back there? Ok that should be easy to find."

On the other hand, the need for immediate information about the place the PCs are in, and the need to let PCs have an effective-enough memory and understanding of where they've been, is not the same thing as needing to have an accurate paper map, and certainly not the same one showing all the details that the GM has. Accurate paper maps can subtly give out more information about what is or is not in a place and how it's arranged than the characters would really have, and can lead to a premature and diminishing sense of "well, we know everything there is to know about that place because we [artificially are sure that we] have seen the whole map".

Of course you can easily skip most of that complexity by just showing them part of the "real" map, but unless they're imperfect sketches representing the PCs' impressions/experience, it can also leave out some distinctions that can be fun an interesting to have in play. The most obvious of course is when the "real" map shows things that are not at all visible from where the PCs have been yet, such as nearby rooms, places around corners, behind doors, etc., but also hidden things.

This doesn't need a wall of text to understand; if the DM only volunteers or answers clear questions about immediate sensory information, then the players can figure out on their own whether they remember where goblin corpse is or whether they went left or right at the fork. Good players will remember or have made clear notes; bad players will get lost and eaten by one of those things worse than orcs that live in the deep dark places of the earth.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1031003Real D&D players are.  You just suck, that's all.

Actually, if mapping an enemy-occupied area was that critical, the party should clear several rooms, find a defensible position, then spend an hour mapping.

The mapping idea is also pretty ludicrous, except for making return trips to the [cave system] viable.

When I was young and keen, I spent hundreds of hours doing LARP in this place. I guarantee you that even without people chasing you down and trying to kill you, navigation was a frigging nightmare. It all looks the same, and there's only the barest illumination.

After many, many, repeat adventures, I knew the place pretty well. I could draw a map that would be useful to later groups.

But on a first trip down? With active enemies in the area? It's a totally different prospect.

I'm not making detailed maps unless someone is paying me to. I am spending considerable effort in working out how to get back to the entrance - a combination of notes, markings (etc) on the walls, and hopefully some navigation magic if such is available.

But above all, memory. I want to be able to run out of the place. I can't afford to spend five minutes resolving a dungeon map when I have the BBEG trying to hunt me down.


Now where mapping does have its place is in a large wilderness adventure (see Tomb of Annihilation for a recent example, the latest iteration ofThe Isle of Dread I believe).


Don't get me wrong, I love seeing the adventure unfold, I love seeing the cave system / castle / city take shape and come to life. But don't make mapping a chore.