Quote from: Skarg;925135TFT's main campaign book presents detailed hex maps for regions and towns with rules for terrain, travel, getting lost, etc. My first campaign started using their sample map and extending from there. That was the last map the players had access to, and I soon realized that it was no good having players have access to the "real" map of anything because it was far more accurate/detailed info than their PCs would ever have in-character. I soon re-did the original map and the map in the book became a specific map in the game world, no longer entirely accurate.

The problem with that approach is that is you are limiting yourself to the bandwidth the human voice. In real life as you travel on foot (or mount) there are all kinds of things you can observe to help you place yourself within a reasonable level of accuracy. I happily slap down hex gridded regional maps of where the players because it convey a lot of information in visual form which I don't have to convey in voice.

For example is what my players would see

[ATTACH=CONFIG]461[/ATTACH]

This is what in that giant green blob of a forest

[ATTACH=CONFIG]462[/ATTACH]

The first map doesn't "give" anything away and has no more information than what somebody would know about that region. The same with this local level map

[ATTACH=CONFIG]463[/ATTACH]

Or this map of a town

[ATTACH=CONFIG]464[/ATTACH]

People in life don't sit down and sketch maps to get around. Instead they build up a mental picture of the landscape based on what they learned and what they are told. This was driven home to me after watching people explore the area around the main camp of a LARP. Slapping down a map with a scale is the most efficient way I found to translate this to when we are sitting around a table and roleplaying.

For area with restricted views (like a dungeon) I don't plan to draw or build out (when I use Dwarven Forge) the entire dungeon. Instead I use a big enough area that I feel would represent the spatial memory of the players. When the size of the layout or drawing exceeds that I will tear out or erase the oldest section and draw or build the new. In MOST cases the players don't both mapping because the place is ultimately small enough that they remember. But there are time when one players will say "Hey we need to stop and let me draw this or we will get lost."  For Roll20 I use the fog of war and lighting feature every chance I get.

I view the "ideal" of verbally describing everything and people expecting to map from that to be very gamey and not at all realistic. It is a unrealistic complication in all but a handful of situation.

I strongly recommend using maps that have "just enough" information and save your verbal bandwidth/time for the more interesting things of the campaign.

"The map is not the territory"

Because it is impossible for me to accurately describe everything in a location, or to know everything there is to know about the village where the characters have spent their whole lives, I allow my plays a high degree of authorial control over the setting. I encourage them to add NPCs, buildings, objects, etc. I retain veto power if something they suggest really doesn't fit with my plans, or is just too unlikely to be at all plausible.

I do keep notes of what has been added, whether by me or by a player. I like the world to remain consistent, unless some force acts to change it.

A dumpster to duck behind for cover in a back alley gunfight is reasonable. Reaching under that dumpster and grabbing a bundle of RPGs that "just happened" to have been left ther is not reasonable. That's Rocket Propelled Grenades, not Role Playing Games in case there is any confusion.

Quote from: DavetheLost;925151"The map is not the territory"

Because it is impossible for me to accurately describe everything in a location, or to know everything there is to know about the village where the characters have spent their whole lives, I allow my plays a high degree of authorial control over the setting. I encourage them to add NPCs, buildings, objects, etc. I retain veto power if something they suggest really doesn't fit with my plans, or is just too unlikely to be at all plausible.

I do keep notes of what has been added, whether by me or by a player. I like the world to remain consistent, unless some force acts to change it.

A dumpster to duck behind for cover in a back alley gunfight is reasonable. Reaching under that dumpster and grabbing a bundle of RPGs that "just happened" to have been left ther is not reasonable. That's Rocket Propelled Grenades, not Role Playing Games in case there is any confusion.

Well this just opened up another can of worms.

It might have...

I for one don't mind if a player sticks a dumpster in an alley, a well in a village or a fireplace in a tavern. If they start sticking businesses in towns, NPCs in the scene and seriously adding to the world Im presenting I draw a line. Their characters are theirs, the world is mine.

Quote from: Omega;924741This is one of the pitfalls of high to medium prep and I've heard it as an excuse way too often. "Well I worked on the wizards tower and it would be a waste if the players choice made them miss it. So I'll just move it over here in their path and they'll never know."

Patience is a virtue.  It's been over 35 years since a group of players last encountered the Hall of Chiming Skulls, and they decided not to enter.

The Hall waits...

Quote from: rgrove0172;925047Whats really amazing is that so many here seem to feel that the occasional 'rigging' if you want to call it that during a game somehow eliminates all the reward the players get in playing. Its not as if the whole damn game is 'rigged'. Ive said this so many times it makes me wonder what some of you guys are drinking! Its an OCCASIONAL approach when the crux of a scenario or session is obviously geared in one direction, more than likely completely understood by the players.

If it's a fantasy game, I don't WANT a scenario with a crux to it in the first damn place.  If I turn west at the crossroads and miss the Tower of the North Wizard, then SO FUCKING BE IT!

And if we're playing Superheroes and the Human Windshield Wiper is robbing Scrooge McDuck's Money Bin no. 1, then yeah, I want to know where the fucking money bin is.  Same as if we're playing a Federation Starship and we've been ordered to Rigel XII... our navigator should sure as shit know how to get to Rigel XII.

Quote from: estar;925149People in life don't sit down and sketch maps to get around. Instead they build up a mental picture of the landscape based on what they learned and what they are told. This was driven home to me after watching people explore the area around the main camp of a LARP. Slapping down a map with a scale is the most efficient way I found to translate this to when we are sitting around a table and roleplaying.

I've made maps to get around places before. Once while lost biking first time in a city. Helped figure out where I was and how to get back. Other time a convention hotel in MN. The place was a maze spread out and got lost a few times so started mapping the branches. (10 acres covered???) Wryly appropriate as the con was hosting a huge Deep Space 9 LARP. Sadly its been bought out and torn down. I've seen folk use maps at outdoor LARPs when the area covered was large. Not as often with smaller sites or places with well marked paths.

Yay for massive amounts of pregame prep.

Quote from: rgrove0172;925108Oh I would never argue that someone wouldnt possibly object to it. There are all kinds of gamers for sure. The new guy at are table is a clear example. But his response doesn't somehow make what all the others enjoyed invalid.

See, I'm trying hard to avoid value judgements (and I always decide to fail when you start making the opposite value judgement).
But no, it doesn't invalidate that your players, and others* who haven't played with you, like your style.
At the same time, them liking it doesn't invalidate the hate others, like the player in question, felt towards the same style.
You just have to be fair to both people.

What I was saying is that it pays to deliver a warning what your style entails, so as to avoid drama. Saving people's time is also polite - and that goes double when you are one of the people whose time is being saved. (As in, you don't need to deal with people who aren't going to stick around).

*I've had people refuse to join my group because the guy wanted...your style, basically. "The heroes shouldn't just die or fail like morons just because of dice or the player making a mistake, that's why they're heroes" was, I believe, the crux of his argument. I shrugged and told him he's looking for a different type of GM.
The difference? There was no drama involved. He even played a one-shot with me to give it a try, but at the end decided it's not worth it. However, since he knew he might not like the one-shot, he didn't rant. He just presented what he didn't like, and went off after I told him that what he dislikes is that way for a reason, and not really subject to change.
Compare and contrast with your result in the Star Wars game...as I'm sure you've done already - and you'll see my point.

QuoteThat's why I said the beer analogy wasn't a good one. It's safe to say nobody wants beer with piss in it. Call it lime instead and I'm with you. Some will spit it out, others will order another.

A short visit on relevant sites would disabuse you of this notion, I'm afraid...
Let's just leave it at that.

Quote from: Skarg;925135Oh, no, the accurate maps are for GM eyes only, representing the actual game world. Players only have maps that represent actual maps in the game world, with all sorts of limitations, if they even have a map.

OK, no differences to speak of, then.

QuoteYep. The accumulation of actual decent maps and access to actual scholars and cartographers who can add to the players' map collection has often been more valued by players than gold or magic. Many adventures and decisions on where to go in the worlds have been mainly about exploration.

Again, my players tend to resolve this by sticking to cities and building their power there.
And if they're successful, they can hire NPCs to do what your players would do. Think of the Spanish Crown financing Columbus: they generally want to play the nobles, not Columbus.

QuoteTFT's main campaign book presents detailed hex maps for regions and towns with rules for terrain, travel, getting lost, etc. My first campaign started using their sample map and extending from there. That was the last map the players had access to, and I soon realized that it was no good having players have access to the "real" map of anything because it was far more accurate/detailed info than their PCs would ever have in-character. I soon re-did the original map and the map in the book became a specific map in the game world, no longer entirely accurate.

Oh, I've seen similar rules. It just doesn't bother me that they'd have seen which hex contains what...

QuoteHehe! That's too bad. Even with my map-oriented players, it took a while to wean them off of having access to hex-based maps and being able to use gamey techniques and expectations to make an accurate map. That's when I realized I had to get more detailed on my own map than 12.5km hexes, at least for the places where the players where doing detailed first-hand exploration.

I didn't have to wean them off. Both players in my core group started in a former group of mine;).

QuoteSo, I should say that I (a GM who mostly prefers heavy prep) posted here in a thread about "zero prep" to point out that there are levels of cause & effect & consistent pre-plotted detail beyond the ones being talked about. And I've elaborated because you asked about interesting details. I'm not trying to argue there's a flaw with your GM'ing, especially for your players. IIRC you asked about where the effects were on play comparing what you wrote you do with mapless improv and relation maps, versus what I do with lots of map prep.

Right, let me make that clear:
I'm presenting it as an argument because...well, for clarity. And for the tradition of Internet arguments! And for democracy, too, can't forget the democracy! Though a hard-boiled egg wouldn't hurt, either. And maybe soup:D!

...But what I am actually doing is, I'm presenting it as an argument for the benefit of the readers/observers. Hope you're fine with that.

QuoteI have often run less mapped games and I've certainly played them. And much of my mapped play was at 12.5km hex scale, which is pretty rough and sometimes called for exactly what you always do, which is make up details during play. But I know that for my own brain, even though I also have fairly good mental maps of my worlds (even the 30-year-old ones), I really need the maps to allow the type of play I run, in many ways. I'm not exactly sure where Lesser Fumdum is, or where many of the rivers flow, and when I look at the maps I'm often surprised to remember some stuff, and certainly my brain can't remember anywhere near the level of data contained even on the oldest crudest campaign maps. Also some of the old campaigns are enormous, like 100 or so sheets of hex paper full of terrain and roads and place names and so on. Which is not to say you can't have great campaigns which feel close enough without even having much of a real map. I've enjoyed playing and even sometimes running those. I just enjoy and prefer to play with detailed maps.

OK, if you need them...
Though Lesser Fumdum is a name you can consider stolen:D!

QuoteSure. I'm wasn't trying to talk you out of doing no prep; I was just trying to answer what I thought the differences could be.

Same here - see above.

QuoteAs for published settings, those always bother me because I don't want the players to have OOC access to accurate maps! Harn is nice but I wouldn't run it for more than a one-off because I react, "But the players could look at the actual maps of stuff nooooo!"
It's probably one of the reasons I tend to avoid historical settings in centuries when people didn't have good maps.
And even in modern and sci fi settings I would always have my own maps at least to show the real details that people don't have. Though with things like satellite images, the unknown is more a matter of filtering and interpreting information rather than having actual unknown or wrong regions.

Well, I don't mind them having such maps. I just warn them that they should have good explanation if they start showing sudden IC knowledge.
And they know that metagaming leads to bad situations from my other campaigns:p.

QuoteLOL ya. Though as above, not my intention. I don't really seem to disagree with you on anything.

Neither do I.
As of now, it seems our approach to running games is about 80% similar (if we exclude the part where you are putting in more work:)).

QuoteDifferent groups.

Indeed.

QuoteIIRC you said you experimented with adding a wizard's tower inside your invention/event-horizon and your wife noticed right away.

You've mixed them up, sorry.
I said I experimented with illusionism to see whether players would catch me (so far the campaign has been an improv sandbox). The first one caught me in less than an hour, the experiment concluded.
There's no magic towers in the game I was running, though.

Adding the magic tower was something someone (I think rgrove) suggested as an example of a big change in the setting. So I wrote a made-up group of PCs approaching a made-up magic tower in a made-up campaign, just in order to show how my thinking goes in that case, and how much time it takes.

QuoteWell that's the only point of anything that seems like minor disagreement to me. I agree though that you and your group seem not to care or notice at the level where it does make any difference, because you think it through enough in advance.

I hope I do, indeed.

QuoteI just think that I or some of my players, if we were focusing on map-relevant stuff and trying to play the way we do in our well-mapped campaigns, would at least tend to make you think farther ahead and maybe want to take more notes.

Possibly, but also possibly untrue. I'd like to play with you or your players sometime, so we could test the idea.
As it stands, I can neither confirm nor deny, can I?

QuoteBut even we let go of such stuff when we see we're playing with a no/low-map GM. Again, I've been posting in this thread about what the difference is. When we play with one of our no/low-map GM's, well just use that GM's conversational interface to figure out what we need to know to get from A to B and so on, and only occasionally press them for geography and stuff.

Though that's not relevant right now, I wouldn't want you to do that if we ever get to play.

QuoteBut in our own detailed-map campaigns, we're out to get good maps, and when we don't have them, we're at least logging our trip details and possibly making some of our own maps as we go. And as we travel we're doing all sorts of map-related stuff because it matters and we've experienced being bitten by not doing it. Does everyone have gear for the weather and camping? Will we be able to light a fire? How long till the next sources of food and water? Can/should we forage or hunt along the way? Who's scouting for the party? Do we have a wagon or pack animals and how well are they going to deal with the road conditions, fords, etc? Who are we meeting along the road? What do we have to eat? Who's carrying what? Who is the slowest person in the group limiting our speed? Who's getting tired out before others? Who knows how to survive in this terrain and who's clueless and needs to be watched after or they're liable to have a mishap? What threats are we going near and how shall we march to be ready for that? Should we be avoiding certain roads or areas? How screwed are we going to be if/when people get leg/foot injuries? What's our march and break schedule and how fast are we pressing it and how long before it rains or the sun goes down? Are we stocked up on medical supplies?

All good and dandy...until you play with a group who orders the NPCs trackers to plan this for them.

QuoteAll of that is sometimes cut down to carelessly wandering about or "shit we suddenly need to run out of town with whatever we've got on us at the moment", but we've experienced consequences to not thinking about such things and taking appropriate actions. Ya these call all happen without a map, but the terrain governs a lot of it so if you have a map you can do better at what to expect, especially considering which roads (or roadless shortcuts) to take to get to places and so on.

Again, I know what the terrain is. It's just that the players off-load this part to NPCs.
Then I roll a Survival check for the NPCs, and decide, based on the level of failure, what to saddle them with on arrival;).

QuoteOk. Makes sense. I realize it was an example - I was just trying to use it as written.


Sure, sounds good. Again, I've not been trying to say you do anything wrong, or even that I haven't done such things myself in detailed mapped campaigns. I've just been trying to point out and answer questions about what I think the differences can be with established detailed maps versus not having them.


Yep that all makes sense.

Again, I'm not taking it as you arguing, either:).

QuoteAgain, I don't allow players to see the real maps either.  Our GM maps represent the actual real world, and seem like an invaluable thing to map out on paper. I'd rather reduce the need to hold geography in my head than reduce prep time, both practically and also because I love making maps. Also it makes me nervous that I won't be consistent if I don't have a map.

If you love making maps, you should, according to my GMing style;).
As it happens, I prefer making NPCs and power structures, and societies, so that's where I focus my time.

QuoteRight. These are just examples to talk about potential effects. Practically all of our disagreements seem to be about example details or unclear expression and not actual disagreements.

Indeed they are.
(Also, the mandatory "hush you and your common sense trick!")

QuoteSure. Again, I'm not trying to argue about the best way and most of my mapped campaigns have most of their space not yet detailed below something like 12.5km hexes showing terrain type, rivers and large villages or greater, forts larger than small keeps, and roads larger than trails that don't help at 12.5km scale.

Well, at a scale of 12,5 km/hex I can also be said to have a map.

Quote from: DavetheLost;925151"The map is not the territory"

Because it is impossible for me to accurately describe everything in a location, or to know everything there is to know about the village where the characters have spent their whole lives, I allow my plays a high degree of authorial control over the setting. I encourage them to add NPCs, buildings, objects, etc. I retain veto power if something they suggest really doesn't fit with my plans, or is just too unlikely to be at all plausible.

I don't allow them to add those, but I allow them to ask me if there's someone who fits some description. Oftentimes, I answer "no, but X has one third the qualities you need, Y has another, and Z has yet another third", if I feel they're just trying to avoid an obstacle.

QuoteA dumpster to duck behind for cover in a back alley gunfight is reasonable. Reaching under that dumpster and grabbing a bundle of RPGs that "just happened" to have been left ther is not reasonable. That's Rocket Propelled Grenades, not Role Playing Games in case there is any confusion.

Hmm...random question, but now I wonder. If I declared that during a firefight I reach under that dumpster and it turns out I grab a handle of RPGs, as in Role-playing game corebooks, would you let me do that:D?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;925163Patience is a virtue.  It's been over 35 years since a group of players last encountered the Hall of Chiming Skulls, and they decided not to enter.

The Hall waits...

I guess the chiming went to their nerves.
Was there a musty cinnamon smell as well?

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;925164If it's a fantasy game, I don't WANT a scenario with a crux to it in the first damn place.  If I turn west at the crossroads and miss the Tower of the North Wizard, then SO FUCKING BE IT!

Sure, Glorious General, no issue! The tower will lie there, too, dormant...and only detailed in as much as I need it. At least until someone decides to explore it, or the campaign ends.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;925166Yay for massive amounts of pregame prep.

For the record, I don't think that it's a bad thing, I just can't do that very well.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;925166Yay for massive amounts of pregame prep.

To be fair. I know at least two high prep DMs who really cant DM well without the prep. They run pretty good sessions.

One of the bonuses I think of a high prep style is that you tend to have everything really hammered down and so the chance, and urge to "cheat" and move encounters is probably a-lot less since everything is plotted out and you cant do that sort of prep without knowing full well some, or several, elements are never going to see use. (unless the DM is really leading the players by the nose)

Quote from: AsenRG;925173Hmm...random question, but now I wonder. If I declared that during a firefight I reach under that dumpster and it turns out I grab a handle of RPGs, as in Role-playing game corebooks, would you let me do that:D?

Sure, in the right sort of neighborhood.

QuoteI guess the chiming went to their nerves.
Was there a musty cinnamon smell as well?

My thoughts exactly.

Quote from: rgrove0172;925047If we sat down tonight to investigate YE FUCKING WIZARDS TOWER then it would be perfectly acceptable if the GM twisted a few facts to make sure they FUCKING GOT THERE.

• Do the players know where the Tower is, other than "Follow these vague geographic markers or this ancient map?"
• Is the Wizard (or anyone else) trying to thwart them from reaching the Tower?
• How far is the Tower?

See the thing is, there could really be three very valid goals here.
1. Find the Tower
2. Make a difficult journey and survive.
3. Explore the tower.

If you let the player's make their own choices and their own goals, then they've accomplished two goals on their own without help from you before they even get to what you consider "the adventure".

For the Starship Enterprise, "Go to Rigel VII and fix the problem there" is probably focusing on the "Fix the problem there" part, unless there's a Romulan or Klingon ship cloaked over the border or some weird ST shit going on, in which case, there always was more than one goal, really, it just hadn't become apparent yet.

For a 3-man scout ship crew, "Find a way across the Great Expanse, and deliver this transmission directly and personally to the Admiral of the Fleet." - The finding part is a goal and possible mini-campaign unto itself, and delivering the transmission may be perfunctory, or it may be the "real goal" and "main adventure".

Context of the situation matters, but so does player intent.  I've had "adventures" where the characters never left the Inn, or travels on a Reikland riverboat that could have been a "So after a week, you get there" but instead turned into multiple sessions of roleplaying.  The WFRP1 module Death on the Reik, is infamous for players going their own way, and following their own goals.

What you've prepped will not vanish.  You may even find out that...*GASP*... the story that arises from the character's actions, and the world it represents might be more interesting than what you had planned.  Crazy, I know.

Quote from: estar;925149The problem with that approach is that is you are limiting yourself to the bandwidth the human voice. In real life as you travel on foot (or mount) there are all kinds of things you can observe to help you place yourself within a reasonable level of accuracy. I happily slap down hex gridded regional maps of where the players because it convey a lot of information in visual form which I don't have to convey in voice.

I also sketch and gesture and use physical objects when it helps.
How well one can see the surrounding terrain depends on what's blocking the view, if anything. Even when you can see a wide area, it's not the same as having an accurate top-down map let alone with a hex grid that your GM agrees defines correctly where you are. I greatly prefer your system to there being no map, as it provides tons of meaningful detail, doesn't reveal everything, and often many players may not care about including limits of knowledge, but it is giving a lot more/better info than people would really have, especially if they haven't explored the area before.

QuoteFor example is what my players would see

[ATTACH=CONFIG]461[/ATTACH]

This is what in that giant green blob of a forest

[ATTACH=CONFIG]462[/ATTACH]

The first map doesn't "give" anything away and has no more information than what somebody would know about that region.

Well, but it does give away several things, especially to someone who isn't from there and has never seen a map of the area. Even for someplace someone has lived all their lives, they may mostly know all the major places and how to get between them, but they don't have an accurate mental map of every detail, and all the shapes of the terrain and so on. A local may have effectively almost that level of information, especially if they are spatially oriented and travel it frequently, but that's an extreme and still isn't going to be perfect. It may be close enough that no player cares though, especially since the apathy scale often goes all the way to "who needs a map? are we at the dungeon yet?"

QuoteThe same with this local level map

[ATTACH=CONFIG]463[/ATTACH]

Or this map of a town

[ATTACH=CONFIG]464[/ATTACH]

People in life don't sit down and sketch maps to get around. Instead they build up a mental picture of the landscape based on what they learned and what they are told. This was driven home to me after watching people explore the area around the main camp of a LARP. Slapping down a map with a scale is the most efficient way I found to translate this to when we are sitting around a table and roleplaying.

Generally people don't sketch maps, no. They don't need to. They form mental maps and memories of paths and landmarks between places. As you write, yes, it is faster and more effective/efficient to have an accurate map, especially in a game. It just loses the part about how less can be more, if you're interested in that. That is, if you might learn stuff by exploring, and things can be unknown and hidden, including just the what's there in detail. Or one might find it interesting to play out the effect of some people knowing a region better than another does, for pursuits, treasure hunts, intrigue and/or tactical advantage. Your Phandalin map in particular looks like it has many routes that no one would know about if they were just passing through, because of all the terrain that looks like it would block vision (well, if brown is high ground and dark green is woods). Again, of course, one can choose at what level it's better to make the info available easily, and what you want to make players learn in character.

QuoteFor area with restricted views (like a dungeon) I don't plan to draw or build out (when I use Dwarven Forge) the entire dungeon. Instead I use a big enough area that I feel would represent the spatial memory of the players. When the size of the layout or drawing exceeds that I will tear out or erase the oldest section and draw or build the new. In MOST cases the players don't both mapping because the place is ultimately small enough that they remember. But there are time when one players will say "Hey we need to stop and let me draw this or we will get lost."  For Roll20 I use the fog of war and lighting feature every chance I get.

I view the "ideal" of verbally describing everything and people expecting to map from that to be very gamey and not at all realistic. It is a unrealistic complication in all but a handful of situation.

I strongly recommend using maps that have "just enough" information and save your verbal bandwidth/time for the more interesting things of the campaign.

As you suggest there at the end, I do something between making people map everything and showing them the real map. If they really don't know much about where they are and they can't see very far, then it's verbal description, but otherwise I'll give sketches or they'll have some (often very) not-entirely accurate/complete maps. Often the map details are not known or important to convey, and it would be ridiculous to try to map anyway. Then short-range maps only come out for tactical situations, the PC's seeing where they are at the moment and yes, sometimes leaving the maps up where they just were.

Quote from: rgrove0172;925157It might have...

I for one don't mind if a player sticks a dumpster in an alley, a well in a village or a fireplace in a tavern. If they start sticking businesses in towns, NPCs in the scene and seriously adding to the world Im presenting I draw a line. Their characters are theirs, the world is mine.

I allow this in the form:
Player: "Is there a dumpster nearby that would work for me to do X with?"
or
Player: "Is there a blacksmith in this town?"

If they say, "I go to the blacksmith" then I check or if I don't know, assess chances and roll, and if so, "well yes there is a blacksmith" or if not "hmm you haven't seen a blacksmith here... do you want to ask someone where the nearest one might be?"