Pretty much every dungeon adventure you see comes with a map showing every single room in detail. Do we really need this every time? I think there's a different way to run dungeons.
As someone planning a mega dungeon game, running dungeons like this sounds like a god send! I think making concise but interesting descriptions of the "between areas" in dungeons is difficult, but is definitely much easier than mapping out everything.
This is also really good for barriers like a mazes, mineshafts, marshland, and other things they can get lost in. Concrete maps can be fun to make and build, but a larger dungeon can be made of clumps of such rooms each connected by more abstract spaces. Ex) An abandoned temple (fully mapped) has tunnels in its basement from the kobolds who live in the region (unmapped). These lead to the Dragon's Graveyard (mapped), the quarry above which Alboth's black spire rises (mapped), and into the city's sewer system (unmapped). The sewer system in turn hosts a mutant commune (mapped) and has an access point to most the Baron's estate (mapped). The unmapped portions may have obstacles or random encounters, with simple sub-maps, but aren't detailed out. In the kobold tunnel cases, the tunnels are always in flux, so mapping them is useless. For the sewers, the PCs can obtain a map item of them (or make one) to aid in navigation.
Great food for thought! In LOTR, the purpose at that scene was traversal -- they were not exploring Moria in search of anything -- they were trying to find the way through based on Gandalf's memories. So for purposes of traversal stories in TTRPGs, I agree mapping isn't necessary. Even in the middle of a mega-dungeon, if the purpose is just to get from one end to the other before you resume exploring, there's no need for room by room mapping. But if the purpose is exploration, mapping is part of that. It's part of discovery. It's something in which non-combat stories can be told -- lore can be imparted, puzzles to solve, or just reinforcing the flavor of the setting through repetition of environmental elements. I think it's critical to know what style of game you're running and playing, or at least what the purpose of the current play session is: if the purpose is traversal, and nothing more than scenery will pass by, then yes, narrate. If the purpose is exploration, don't rush the players to combat set pieces. Give them agency, let them make choices about which way to go and decide what catches their interest. And if they want to map, let them (when I play instead of DM, I prefer making line-and-point maps that give me directions and orientation at a glance). Side note: I got my copy of Free League's new Moria book but haven't looked at it beyond noticing the beautiful maps. Back in the day Iron Crown also produced a detailed Moria map.
Good post Steve. I get your point. The story of the Moria traversal is difficult to compare to the average mundane dungeon crawl in TTRPG. However, is dungeon delving ever truly about exploration? It's probably more about treasure acquisition and killing everything in sight to gain XP. Better dungeon crawls do include a story, villains, goals, and better reasons to risk characters' lives by tramping around dangerous, dark often horrific underground labyrinths. As far as mapping there might be several reasons for creating a map on paper or VTT screen if only to get back out again. These maps are certainly not historical accounts of what was discovered underground to be shared for posterity or with other adventurers. Your point about 'exploration' struck me as odd though b/c almost nobody ever looks at any map of a past dungeon crawl once completed. It is tucked into a manila folder of old sessions never to see the light of day again.. ironically, like some old dungeon treasure. Hahaha! Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post!
I know many people love dungeon mapping and even say it’s a key part of play, but it has never gone well for me - my players either quickly had a map so full of errors as to be useless, or I had to repeatedly stop to make sure they got it right - either way we ended up wasting a bunch of time that amount to any fun
I also have connected areas of a dungeon with a skill challenge - for example, a cavernous maze that the PCs navigated not by spending hours mapping out all the tunnels, but by completing a series of checks that, if successful, let them escape whole avoiding traps, monster and resource depletion - failures lead to scenes of puzzle solving, trap disarming and combat
This is good for when location details and crunch aren't critical. I tend to run overland travel this way, as well as something like a sewer crawl. I'll have a page of example passages on the table, so I can point out "the sewer is constructed like this" or "you come to a junction like this." Otherwise, it's descriptive travel and rolls for encounters and when the PCs find their objective.
Ya know as much as TH-cam likes to push clickbait and viral sludge at me it's nice to see the algorithm point me to a tiny creator channel every now and then. This is what the whole thing is supposed to be about, after all! 😊
For years I have reserved the battlemat for encounters and handled dungeon travel narratively. Swapping to online play can encourage this by only requiring that the GM bring up a map for those encounters, but there is also a temptation to map everything and show off the dynamic lighting. ;^)
The mapless dungeons system from Crown & Skull is somewhat similar to this idea but still gives an opportunity for the players to get lost. Might be worth looking at if you aren't familiar with it
This feels similar to, and I mean this as a favorable comparison, hex crawls. Imagine your underground layout stretching for miles, but only a few locations are really worth detailing. Maybe you can't just go in any direction so tunnels are worth mapping out on graph paper but most of the area is going to be empty if not featureless, leaving only specific areas of interest.
You can have, say a 6 strong list with some extra smaller encounter rooms too, to have little titbits in between that they CAN investigate further but are free to avoid - to make it feel like besides those main rooms, the rest of the dungeon does exist.
Excellent video! This is exactly how I run dungeons that have any size to them. I only map the interesting bits, and narrate the slog through the uninhabited portions of the tunnels. Liked and Subscribed. Thanks for this.
As typical underground dwellings go, it always struck me as odd when a table or rug was in such a setting. It's like "this room is brought to you by Ikea and it's worth $3000!" (cue Price Is Right tune). Conversely, I had read long ago that basically any interior location counts as a "dungeon", so it makes more sense in that context. Frankly, I prefer to provide cavernous rooms that are too large to depict on maps, like when the Fellowship encountered the goblins in Moria, relying on major and minor keywords to provide descriptions rather than going full Property Brothers. These tend to lend themselves better to chases, which are the bread and butter of most action scenes.
This line of questioning is what got me into playing RPG's more with roleplay, staying in 1st person and in-character. No longer playing the game like a boardgame and 3rd/2nd person (or feeling like we are playing a CRPG by hand...which itself is brutally long)
I'm running a campaign set in a homebrew world where there are loads of ruins from an ancient giant empire scattered throughout the landscape. Naturally, having to produce entire maps for ruins that could be hundreds or even thousands of feet across would be a nightmare. It's a lot harder to prep, and it slows the game down as my players slowly inch their tokens across the VTT. I never thought of producing dungeons this way, but needless to say I'll be doing it a lot more often. Thanks for the video!
Brilliant advice. Every bit as worthwhile as so much from Matt Colville or Justin Alexander's respective media. I've done precisely this sort of dungeon running. I would highlight, perhaps even map out specifically, a given room or rooms. Then I'd narrate the rest using theater of the mind. The players would ask about the room's characteristics, entrances, exits, positioning of PCs and NPCs, and I'd reply applicably. Then they either delve deeper, or they beat feet and try to escape; in either case, I may use a sort of time lapse narration--often using a skill challenge where I allow them to tell me what skills or abilities they're going to use to get themselves toward their goal successfully--and we continue on our journey. That sort of style has led me from keying every room in official D&D adventures, to running my own, 100% theater of the mind campaigns using narrative-focused TTRPGs such as Cypher System, where I have only broad strokes prepped. Improvisation provides most of the in-between moments, and set pieces emerge naturally from the gameplay (ideally, anyway). The players indicate through their decisions what is important and what is not. So long as I've put some degree of thought into our session ahead of time, I'm rarely left wondering what to do next...it has happened, but only a couple of times in the last several years! Cheers from the States.
Huh. So that massive amount of time I put into something that didn't quite hit the point because people got distracted by irrelevant bits in the middle of nowhere... huh. This is... huh. I feel kinda stupid that this is something that actually had to be explained in hindsight!
I've never played any ttrpgs with either maps or minis etc etc etc...the only one with a map was the GM and we never saw it. We did complete theatre of the mind, making believe we were really there in our imaginations.
Bandits Keep mentioned you in a video last week - he didn’t mention your channel by name, and I don’t think he really got the thrust of your video, but maybe he’d be open to discussing it in the comments - cheers ❤
I'm surprised that you failed to mention how all of this came to be in the first place: secret doors. That's why us old grognards were so meticulous at mapping. In a way mapping is kind of a game-within-a-game. So if you're not going to have mapping be such a big thing don't forget how you want to deal with this as a DM. And that will depend a lot on your playstyle and your group. The players are not going to want to feel like they might be missing out on something because they failed to map. While not a perfect fix this might be something as simple as breaking the 4th wall every now and then as DM and saying something like "Look there's nothing there, let's just move on" or on the other hand something like "You've cleared the dungeon but have a nagging suspicion that you might have missed something".
If you aren't bothering to track time in-game and utilize it mechanically, this is the only sane way to run dungeons, I'd argue. Anything but the bits that matter is literally only wasting IRL time.
It makes way more sense to map out a dungeon if it's used as a time-limit escape room puzzle instead of landscaping in accordance of property law or anything equally inconsequential.
Great idea! More narrative until combat. Though when I think of Moria I think of more a cave system with really interesting locations within. Definitely something to chew on.
Why map out something unless it matters? Gamers have always mistaken 'versimilitude' with 'relevance'. Unless you're running a game for a group of architecture fans, best to skip to the exciting bits for the plebs (We are all plebs).
More often than not, in situations where they aren't truly necessary, game boards strike me as distracting and seem to tempt fidget-happy players to move around their miniatures like it's a video or board game before the roleplaying game that it actually is. Worst case scenario, it's expected that you move your miniature around and if you don't, your character isn't actually exploring anything. Not my kind of game for sure. I find the approach you described in this video thoroughly superior. The best games I've been a part of only ever brought out the game board when it became relevant, keeping it in theater of the mind otherwise while working with tools to create an appropriate atmosphere. Background music/noise loops, lighting, or in the case of virtual tabletops, a still image in the background that would give an impression of the surroundings. Good times. But I digress, enough of my rambling. I'll be sure to take a look at your other videos sometime. Have my subscription.
I was today years old (as the kids say) when I realized that except for Frodo, the Hobbits were *children* ! Minors! Taking on the Dark Lord! Merry didn't hurt the Nazgul because he was a Hobbit, but because he was a boy (also not a Man). Tolkien really *was* a monster, wasn't he? 😆
I would never refer to Tolkien in a discussion about doing things sensibly, any more than I would consider what George Lucas might say. I have never seen a player try to diagram every single room they enter. I feel like you're inventing a problem to "solve."
As someone planning a mega dungeon game, running dungeons like this sounds like a god send! I think making concise but interesting descriptions of the "between areas" in dungeons is difficult, but is definitely much easier than mapping out everything.
This is also really good for barriers like a mazes, mineshafts, marshland, and other things they can get lost in. Concrete maps can be fun to make and build, but a larger dungeon can be made of clumps of such rooms each connected by more abstract spaces.
Ex) An abandoned temple (fully mapped) has tunnels in its basement from the kobolds who live in the region (unmapped). These lead to the Dragon's Graveyard (mapped), the quarry above which Alboth's black spire rises (mapped), and into the city's sewer system (unmapped). The sewer system in turn hosts a mutant commune (mapped) and has an access point to most the Baron's estate (mapped). The unmapped portions may have obstacles or random encounters, with simple sub-maps, but aren't detailed out. In the kobold tunnel cases, the tunnels are always in flux, so mapping them is useless. For the sewers, the PCs can obtain a map item of them (or make one) to aid in navigation.
You're describing essentially a "point crawl" and ironically, it's heavily in use in the newly released Moria supplement from FLP.
Yep. Narrative Point Crawl with 'Ultimate Dungeon Terrain' when things happen.
Great food for thought!
In LOTR, the purpose at that scene was traversal -- they were not exploring Moria in search of anything -- they were trying to find the way through based on Gandalf's memories. So for purposes of traversal stories in TTRPGs, I agree mapping isn't necessary. Even in the middle of a mega-dungeon, if the purpose is just to get from one end to the other before you resume exploring, there's no need for room by room mapping.
But if the purpose is exploration, mapping is part of that. It's part of discovery. It's something in which non-combat stories can be told -- lore can be imparted, puzzles to solve, or just reinforcing the flavor of the setting through repetition of environmental elements.
I think it's critical to know what style of game you're running and playing, or at least what the purpose of the current play session is: if the purpose is traversal, and nothing more than scenery will pass by, then yes, narrate. If the purpose is exploration, don't rush the players to combat set pieces. Give them agency, let them make choices about which way to go and decide what catches their interest. And if they want to map, let them (when I play instead of DM, I prefer making line-and-point maps that give me directions and orientation at a glance).
Side note: I got my copy of Free League's new Moria book but haven't looked at it beyond noticing the beautiful maps. Back in the day Iron Crown also produced a detailed Moria map.
Good post Steve. I get your point. The story of the Moria traversal is difficult to compare to the average mundane dungeon crawl in TTRPG. However, is dungeon delving ever truly about exploration? It's probably more about treasure acquisition and killing everything in sight to gain XP. Better dungeon crawls do include a story, villains, goals, and better reasons to risk characters' lives by tramping around dangerous, dark often horrific underground labyrinths. As far as mapping there might be several reasons for creating a map on paper or VTT screen if only to get back out again. These maps are certainly not historical accounts of what was discovered underground to be shared for posterity or with other adventurers.
Your point about 'exploration' struck me as odd though b/c almost nobody ever looks at any map of a past dungeon crawl once completed. It is tucked into a manila folder of old sessions never to see the light of day again.. ironically, like some old dungeon treasure. Hahaha! Anyway, thanks for the thought-provoking post!
I know many people love dungeon mapping and even say it’s a key part of play, but it has never gone well for me - my players either quickly had a map so full of errors as to be useless, or I had to repeatedly stop to make sure they got it right - either way we ended up wasting a bunch of time that amount to any fun
I also have connected areas of a dungeon with a skill challenge - for example, a cavernous maze that the PCs navigated not by spending hours mapping out all the tunnels, but by completing a series of checks that, if successful, let them escape whole avoiding traps, monster and resource depletion - failures lead to scenes of puzzle solving, trap disarming and combat
why would you correct their map errors?
Like the London Underground tube maps. Linked points with just a description for what lies between each point. Great idea.
This is good for when location details and crunch aren't critical. I tend to run overland travel this way, as well as something like a sewer crawl. I'll have a page of example passages on the table, so I can point out "the sewer is constructed like this" or "you come to a junction like this." Otherwise, it's descriptive travel and rolls for encounters and when the PCs find their objective.
Ya know as much as TH-cam likes to push clickbait and viral sludge at me it's nice to see the algorithm point me to a tiny creator channel every now and then. This is what the whole thing is supposed to be about, after all! 😊
For years I have reserved the battlemat for encounters and handled dungeon travel narratively. Swapping to online play can encourage this by only requiring that the GM bring up a map for those encounters, but there is also a temptation to map everything and show off the dynamic lighting. ;^)
I just figured out I prep too much, brilliant!
The mapless dungeons system from Crown & Skull is somewhat similar to this idea but still gives an opportunity for the players to get lost. Might be worth looking at if you aren't familiar with it
This feels similar to, and I mean this as a favorable comparison, hex crawls. Imagine your underground layout stretching for miles, but only a few locations are really worth detailing. Maybe you can't just go in any direction so tunnels are worth mapping out on graph paper but most of the area is going to be empty if not featureless, leaving only specific areas of interest.
You can have, say a 6 strong list with some extra smaller encounter rooms too, to have little titbits in between that they CAN investigate further but are free to avoid - to make it feel like besides those main rooms, the rest of the dungeon does exist.
Excellent video! This is exactly how I run dungeons that have any size to them. I only map the interesting bits, and narrate the slog through the uninhabited portions of the tunnels. Liked and Subscribed. Thanks for this.
As typical underground dwellings go, it always struck me as odd when a table or rug was in such a setting. It's like "this room is brought to you by Ikea and it's worth $3000!" (cue Price Is Right tune). Conversely, I had read long ago that basically any interior location counts as a "dungeon", so it makes more sense in that context.
Frankly, I prefer to provide cavernous rooms that are too large to depict on maps, like when the Fellowship encountered the goblins in Moria, relying on major and minor keywords to provide descriptions rather than going full Property Brothers. These tend to lend themselves better to chases, which are the bread and butter of most action scenes.
This line of questioning is what got me into playing RPG's more with roleplay, staying in 1st person and in-character. No longer playing the game like a boardgame and 3rd/2nd person (or feeling like we are playing a CRPG by hand...which itself is brutally long)
I'm running a campaign set in a homebrew world where there are loads of ruins from an ancient giant empire scattered throughout the landscape. Naturally, having to produce entire maps for ruins that could be hundreds or even thousands of feet across would be a nightmare. It's a lot harder to prep, and it slows the game down as my players slowly inch their tokens across the VTT.
I never thought of producing dungeons this way, but needless to say I'll be doing it a lot more often. Thanks for the video!
Brilliant advice. Every bit as worthwhile as so much from Matt Colville or Justin Alexander's respective media.
I've done precisely this sort of dungeon running. I would highlight, perhaps even map out specifically, a given room or rooms. Then I'd narrate the rest using theater of the mind. The players would ask about the room's characteristics, entrances, exits, positioning of PCs and NPCs, and I'd reply applicably. Then they either delve deeper, or they beat feet and try to escape; in either case, I may use a sort of time lapse narration--often using a skill challenge where I allow them to tell me what skills or abilities they're going to use to get themselves toward their goal successfully--and we continue on our journey.
That sort of style has led me from keying every room in official D&D adventures, to running my own, 100% theater of the mind campaigns using narrative-focused TTRPGs such as Cypher System, where I have only broad strokes prepped. Improvisation provides most of the in-between moments, and set pieces emerge naturally from the gameplay (ideally, anyway). The players indicate through their decisions what is important and what is not. So long as I've put some degree of thought into our session ahead of time, I'm rarely left wondering what to do next...it has happened, but only a couple of times in the last several years!
Cheers from the States.
Matt Colville in particular is perhaps my favourite RPG TH-camr, so this comment really made my day! Thanks!
Great video. I've subscribed and will be watching for more!
Huh.
So that massive amount of time I put into something that didn't quite hit the point because people got distracted by irrelevant bits in the middle of nowhere... huh.
This is... huh. I feel kinda stupid that this is something that actually had to be explained in hindsight!
Welcome to the inner circle lolol
I've never played any ttrpgs with either maps or minis etc etc etc...the only one with a map was the GM and we never saw it. We did complete theatre of the mind, making believe we were really there in our imaginations.
Bandits Keep mentioned you in a video last week - he didn’t mention your channel by name, and I don’t think he really got the thrust of your video, but maybe he’d be open to discussing it in the comments - cheers ❤
I believe we can all thank videogames for heavily detailed dungeon maps with no stone unturned for a chance of treasure 😂
I was playing those first games, I can tell you the mapping on graph paper came WAY before computer games.
I appreciate this advice. I'm running B4 Lost City and this style will help me inject a sense of distance between the main dungeon and the city below.
Good points!
I'm surprised that you failed to mention how all of this came to be in the first place: secret doors.
That's why us old grognards were so meticulous at mapping. In a way mapping is kind of a game-within-a-game. So if you're not going to have mapping be such a big thing don't forget how you want to deal with this as a DM. And that will depend a lot on your playstyle and your group. The players are not going to want to feel like they might be missing out on something because they failed to map. While not a perfect fix this might be something as simple as breaking the 4th wall every now and then as DM and saying something like "Look there's nothing there, let's just move on" or on the other hand something like "You've cleared the dungeon but have a nagging suspicion that you might have missed something".
Not to mention that almost every map I ever made as a player, became a repurposed new Dungeon as a DM.
If you aren't bothering to track time in-game and utilize it mechanically, this is the only sane way to run dungeons, I'd argue. Anything but the bits that matter is literally only wasting IRL time.
It makes way more sense to map out a dungeon if it's used as a time-limit escape room puzzle instead of landscaping in accordance of property law or anything equally inconsequential.
If I could make my points this succinctly and eloquently I'd be a happy man lol. Great video!
I like the way you think! Thank you for sharing. ❤
Encounter networks are cool.
Yeah, try that with my group… it won’t go well
Great idea! More narrative until combat. Though when I think of Moria I think of more a cave system with really interesting locations within. Definitely something to chew on.
Why map out something unless it matters? Gamers have always mistaken 'versimilitude' with 'relevance'. Unless you're running a game for a group of architecture fans, best to skip to the exciting bits for the plebs (We are all plebs).
More often than not, in situations where they aren't truly necessary, game boards strike me as distracting and seem to tempt fidget-happy players to move around their miniatures like it's a video or board game before the roleplaying game that it actually is. Worst case scenario, it's expected that you move your miniature around and if you don't, your character isn't actually exploring anything. Not my kind of game for sure. I find the approach you described in this video thoroughly superior. The best games I've been a part of only ever brought out the game board when it became relevant, keeping it in theater of the mind otherwise while working with tools to create an appropriate atmosphere. Background music/noise loops, lighting, or in the case of virtual tabletops, a still image in the background that would give an impression of the surroundings. Good times.
But I digress, enough of my rambling.
I'll be sure to take a look at your other videos sometime. Have my subscription.
I was today years old (as the kids say) when I realized that except for Frodo, the Hobbits were *children* ! Minors! Taking on the Dark Lord! Merry didn't hurt the Nazgul because he was a Hobbit, but because he was a boy (also not a Man). Tolkien really *was* a monster, wasn't he? 😆
Try having 10-year olds as frontline soldiers fighting in a clone war.
@@commandercaptain4664 Oh that's just absurd! lol
Keep AD&D alive!
/sub
Heres another way to run dungeons dont! Do them at all! Problem solved! Lol 😆
To bad Morgan is so late to the party and not really inside anyway... lousy fog breather.
I would never refer to Tolkien in a discussion about doing things sensibly, any more than I would consider what George Lucas might say. I have never seen a player try to diagram every single room they enter. I feel like you're inventing a problem to "solve."