There
is an element in old school d&d that having players map their own
map based on the DMs descriptions is prone to a misunderstanding and
incorrect mapping, which is a part of the game that Gygax really seemed
to be into, as much as his "gotcha!" Tricks he seemed to encourage. So
when the party goes back into the dungeon and find out that they
mismapped the section of the graph paper with a dungeon corridor by 30',
it's more frustrating that fun.
Once again, I get it. People think it is annoying to try and make a map. This is an aspect of the dnd that
has been excised from the rules in the last few editions. My internet friend quoted above continued on with this other common thing you hear often when talking about player mapping:
Logically,
if you've been somewhere before, chances are you'll have a good idea
how to navigate back to a location the next day (unless you fell down a
pit or some other involuntary moment happened)
As logical as this may seem it is not true for being underground. I
have been in a pitch black cave with a torch (an electric torch, which is better than a flaming stick). You can't see a whole
cavern at once and it is very difficult to get the dimensions or a
mental model of the space in your head. It is super easy to get lost in a
dark cave:
From our first step into subterranean darkness, our hippocampus,
which so reliably guides us through the surface world, goes on the
fritz, like a radio that has lost reception. We are cut off from the
guidance of the stars, from the sun and the moon. Even the horizon
vanishes—if not for gravity, we’d scarcely know up from down. All of the
subtle cues that might orient us on the surface—cloud formations,
plant-growth patterns, animal tracks, wind direction—disappear.
Underground, we lose even the guide of our own shadow.
Down
in a tight cave passage, or in the bounded folds of a catacomb, our
field of view is blinkered, never reaching beyond the next twist or
kink. As the cave historian William White observed, you never really see a whole cave—only one sliver at a time. When we navigate a landscape, wrote Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost,
we are reading our surroundings as a text, studying “the language of
the earth itself”; the underground is a blank page, or a page scribbled
with language we cannot decipher. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/getting-lost-cave-labyrinth-brain/582865/(You should seriously read the whole article. I am going to get the book the article is base on.)
Here is another account of people getting lost in a cave once their light went out they had no mental model of the cave and couldn't navigate out. Then check out the Wikipedia article on Mine Exploration.
Player
mapping is I think supposed to simulate this. When a player asks how
big a room is and their character has a torch with a 30' radius of
light. I imagine and sometimes describe to the players how they need to
travel from one end to the other counting paces while their comrades
wait in the darkness. One wall disappears. you count. Then a corner
appears. You turn. the corner disappears there is a door way, you pass
that it is engulfed in darkness then another corner. Eventually you
have the perimeter. Then you push out blindly into the middle of the
room. slowly. You might trip. If you've been quiet enough it is
conceivable that there is still something sleeping there.
Patrick Stuart from of False Machine has written a lot about light on his blog during the writing of Veins of the Earth
Here is an interesting narrative about the role of light in underground combat:
Under
these conditions it is highly plausible that you might make a mistake
mapping fumbling around on your tiny island of light in a sea of
darkness scraping your grease pencil or charcoal nub on your vellum or
sheet of papyrus. Here is another excerpt from the Atlantic Article; Apparently real world delvers had just as much trouble mapping as frustrated Dnd players:
Even when they did manage to make measurements, meanwhile, the
explorers’ spatial perception was so warped by the caprices of the
environment that their findings would be wildly off the mark. On a 1672
expedition in Slovenia, for example, an explorer plumbed a winding cave
passage and recorded its length at six miles, when in reality, he had
traveled only a quarter mile. The surveys and maps that emerged from
these early expeditions were often so divergent from reality that some
caves are now effectively unrecognizable. Today, we can only read the
old reports as small, mysterious poems about imaginary places.
Maybe you still aren't convinced. Maybe you think that the artificial seeming dungeons would not be as disorienting as natural caverns. Plenty of people have gotten lost in the Paris catacombs. Here is one account. I would also encourage you to watch this Youtuber get lost in the Paris Catacombs; notice how feeble the light seems and the knee deep water.
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These maps make me think of the early maps that cavers would make, "a mysterious poem about an imaginary place."
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Also imagine the party members that stand still shrouded in darkness watching this orb of light move off in the distance with no accurate way to no how far away the light is. Imagine the dread they feel when they think that the light might go out and their comrade is alone in a sea of dark and they have no idea what happened. You can see some of that in
these videos made at the artificial caves under Castle Valkenburg in The Netherlands (these are the caves I was in. It was amazing; if you ever have the chance take a tour of these caves).
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It's interesting that these maps were labeled by of exploration. It supports my idea that player maps are often adventure logs rather than surveys.
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So you may think player mapping is annoying and you might not think it is fun but it the way that Dnd recreates the disorientation of being underground and the trouble of mapping labyrinths while robbed of all the things that humans use to orient themselves. If you do not want to simulate that in your games that is more than fine. You have the support of the last three version of Dnd. However, If you think that your character would not need to make a map and that your character would "have a good idea how to navigate back to where they were before," you are just wrong and have a very unrealistic idea about what it is like to be underground.
Also check out what the caves under Castle Valkenburg with a bunch of flashing lights
Enjoyed this reflection, David. I’ve always thought that mapping was stupid. We used to do it all the time with 2nd edition, but then it seemed ridiculous and unrealistic. I mean, if we accept that the player-characters have the time and luxury to make a reliable map (and often times the DM would assist to make sure they were correct!), then why bother? Just let the DM answer all the questions you might have and direct you accordingly? And if the DM *wasn’t* clear with directions/descriptions, then there’d be an argument when discrepancies emerged.
Of course, with the advent of erasable, gridded mats, or even model dungeon-construction toys, mapping became unnecessary, and the “fog of war” was all you had to worry about.
I dislike mapping so much because of the immense time-suck, that I even look for ways to not have to make maps in the first place–AS A DM. lol During the 2E days, I had a copy of Ruins of Undermountain, but we never played that for what it was. I just looked for small sections of the map that had the kinds of tunnels and rooms I wanted, photocopied the area, then used a marker to black-out the sections I didn’t need so the map would be self-contained. A few notes in the margin, and then ta-da! A dungeon map. I have long sought a good system for random dungeon generation, since nobody really cares about the *shape* of the dungeon as much as the *adventure* inside it.o