I’ve been playing pretty consistently with a lunch time group at work over the last year. We started with Mothership’s Gradient Descent then shifted over to Bad Kansas City using Liminal Horror for a little while.
To keep prep time to a minimum, we decided to try out Hole in the Oak using OSE. The first two sessions have been fun, but precisely describing the spaces the PCs are moving through has become more important and more challenging than during our previous campaigns.
For folks that regularly run classic dungeon crawls, do you have tips on how to describe spaces, especially weirdly shaped spaces, with enough detail to avoid confusion but not so much that it causes the game to drag or overwhelms the players with detail?
I think this is something everyone should consider for even less constrained games, and if designers have the bandwidth, putting maps that can be used player-facing (i.e. without markings for secret doors) in their modules is a great help.
Mapping as a challenge doesn’t seem to be fun for most people.
I think it’s a good thing to consider. I’ve played some intense dungeon games where mapping was part of the fun, and many where it didn’t add anything.
OTOH it adds to the prep work for game day. I’ve seen one GM who painstakingly printed beautiful color maps, cut them just right and tape segments.
I’ve used Jenga blocks. I build out the room and a player copies it into a map. @cmp238 this could help, except building the room takes time too.
Hole in the Oak came with a blank black-and-white map that would be pretty easy to cut up. Just need to edit out the secret doors before hand. Due to the time constraints, that seems like a nice solution. I also think my players would enjoy collecting the little pieces over time, and they might still get the mapping experience if they forget where all the rooms go.
We play every Thursday, or at least every Thursday I’m available. I work for a non-profit with 14 staff, and everyone is invited to play (open table). Some people just pop in to hang out, but I usually can get 3 to 6 players any given session.
We start as close as we can to noon, wrap up by 1. I give a 10 minute warning for the ending, if the people aren’t back to home base by the time we reach 1 PM, they need to roll a hazard die (high chance of bad outcome) to determine if their folks got back safely.
Disclaimer: I usually use node maps rather than classic dungeon maps, so your mileage may vary. I also tend to run such that distance tracking doesn’t matter so much, I don’t need a grid on the map.
Option A: If you don’t care for precise distances so much, start with two things: a phase that describes the overall shape (e.g. long rectangle, narrow oval, a series of connected squares) and a size adjective (e.g. cramped, sprawling). Then add details as they ask questions or explore (perhaps about ceiling height or floor camber).
Option B: If you care about being precise and want the players to have correct information, just give them a chunk of the map or reveal via fog of war in a VTT.
Option C: Embrace the difficulty of architectural description and have it translate to ‘in game’ flawed cartography. As the player characters are mapping they are struggling to draw the spaces.
I should try Option A combined with a node map. It’ll take some practice and working with players to adapt, but may prove worthwhile. I’ve read about these and have yet to give it a shot.
GM for my current in person group started bringing a big ass sketch pad with him. he lays it on the table, and makes very sketchy, low detail pencil drawings as we go. if we ask for more details, he will add just a few more details to the sketchpad, but also verbal details. it looks more like a diagram than a map.
personally, i find this very rewarding as a player. i am pretty visual, and the issue i have with being presented with detailed maps is that a detailed map itself overlays my imagination, and this becomes limiting; what is on the map becomes EVERYTHING. like, once a map shows a couple chairs, a table, and a rug-- that is ALL that is in the room.
i like having a nice pencil rectangle, marked exits, marked with the super important stuff, then saying, -dining room- on it. then the players and GM can fill in all the details. example: “is there a china set in a cabinet?” (when thinking about throwing plates to make a distraction), as opposed to just seeing the tables and chairs on a detailed map and thinking, “i guess i have to throw a chair, i won’t be able to throw that far enough down the hall, i am out of ideas”.
That’s been pretty much my approach, just that I mostly used a regular A4 graph paper block. All with the requisite Back to the Future “Please excuse the crudity of this model. I didn’t have time to build it to scale” quote.
If more detailed combat is needed, I zoom in. First directly on paper, just doings squiggles and x’es, but otherwise we’re just grabbing pencils & dice and doing improvised diorama.
I wish I could do more evocative room descriptions on the fly that also include the measurements. A fellow GM is pretty great at that, at first I thought he’s just reading boxes, but he’s just very apt at speaking like written. I’m telling myself that I’m better at improv
Having a player map stuff and going into enough detail and waiting for them to finish would probably drive me right out of this part of the hobby, my lack of patience can’t cope with that.
For a while, we experimented with a laptop and an old 24" monitor lying flat on the table as a replacement, but that mostly worked when we had pre-made maps. Which kinda-sorta forced me to grab more of those instead of doing my own home-brew adventures. It wasn’t that bad, grabbing something random that’s kinda-sorta appropriate for where we were often doubled as a bit of a writing prompt.
Maybe I’ll do something like that again with tools like Dungeondraw or shmeppy.
Especially because the time is so short, I’m with what most people here seem to be advocating for. Either use more vague terms and don’t worry so much if it doesn’t match what’s in the module, or print out a map and reveal it when appropriate. I am a fan of cutting up the rooms and laying/taping them down. I try to do it in a way that doesn’t make secret doors and stuff super obvious.
