Urban Gameplay Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)

Credit: Mike Schley

Whether it's a pre-rendered map or a resource for creating your own, the idealized city map for D&D is usually assumed to be lushly illustrated, showing the exact layout of streets and buildings in meticulous and precise detail. This is, of course, based off of the flawed assumptions I addressed in Lesson 2: that cities are meant to be crawled.

But once you know that adjudicating movement street-by-street is a bad way to run the game in most circumstances, that also means that the level of detail in those maps isn't actually of much practical use to you.

The map is not the territory

You may be familiar with Andrew Kolb's Oz. I would like to remark that it absolutely fucking whips. But aside from being a fantastic mega-city setting, it also includes a method for generating complex and believable street layouts. And in my modest opinion, it does not absolutely fucking whip.

Veterans of the old school scene will recognize where Kolb took this from. Re-published in a new book 11 years later and it's still a useless method.

I get how, at first glance, something like this may seem innovative and useful. It's a cute trick. But can you actually imagine the use-case that it would be applicable to? Again, it rarely makes sense to be "crawling" a city, and even when it does, it sucks to do it street-by-street. If an action scene breaks out on the streets, like combat or a chase scene or something, then it could become relevant... but combat rarely sprawls that much and chase scene procedures usually abstract the exact movement and focus on the actions and obstacles along the way.

Another good example that I see all the time is watabou's city map generator. Very impressive-looking results, seemingly a game-changer, you'll never need anything else to prep or run a city ever again, blablabla. But look closer. How is this any more usable than your own shitty attempt at sketching the broad strokes of your city by hand?

Instead, cities are better "mapped" as a dashboard of information. How wealthy is it? What's the culture like? What is it known for? Most of the information should concern the people who live there. Important NPCs, factions, institutions, communities, etc.

SIKE!

(kinda)

This is not to say that you shouldn't ever have a map for your settlements. They do still have value, just not in the way you probably expect.

I'm a big advocate for handouts, especially visual handouts. I love me some picture book design. Because even when the gameplay doesn't demand visual perception (e.g. spatial reasoning, spotting details, recognizing and reading patterns, etc.), pictures are still a great way to feed the players' brains. If it's pretty and evocative, it can instill a sense of place and even inspire ideas for the heroes.

Earlier I was critical of watabou's city map generator. But, really, I was actually criticizing the way people talk about it. The actual generator itself? It's really good at producing a map that's just plain nice looking. Maybe you like having all the little buildings and streets because it just adds visual appeal. That is a 100% valid reason for wanting and using a map like that.

Plus, if you aren't afraid to include lots of writing, it can also be an effective vehicle for delivering lots of information, easy for the players to reference as needed.

Credit: this post by Dead Tree, No Shelter

This is what a useful city map might look like. It doesn't contain the full informational dashboard that I envision, but it's a good example of a visual map with some pretty drawing skills on display, but which nonetheless clearly prioritizes gameable information.

When you communicate the city's points of interest to your players, you could recite them aloud, but that would kinda suck. You could hand them a list, and that would be fine. But if you handed them a simple picture, where each item is scattered around and there's a little drawing of brick walls and a river running through, that would be just a little bit better. It's still functionally the same as the list, for the most part, but it adds that extra dash of tangibility that may engage the players more successfully. It's especially useful if you follow my advice from Part 2 about splitting your settlement up into districts.

The bottom line

Thinking that you need a highly rendered map in order to run a city is like thinking you need a fancy, illustrated, full-color isometric map in order to run a dungeon. Of course not. Sure, it looks cool, but it probably doesn't add much practically speaking, for the sorts of routine activities (or even adventurous activities!) that your players are likely to be doing in town.

Or to put it another way, the more gameplay you anticipate getting out of a settlement, the more beneficial it is to have lots of detail. So if you're running a big megacity campaign (more on that in Part 4), then you totally should get a fancy map. If I were running a game set almost entirely in Neverwinter, then the map at the top of this post would be super helpful. But for the dozen or more settlements that your players will be visiting over the course of their journeys? You don't need a map like that for each and every one.

-Dwiz

Posts in this series

Part 1: the Search for the Holy Grail (is futile)

Part 2: Crawling (is not the answer)

Part 3: Maps (usually aren't useful)

Part 4: Megacities (aren't always the answer)

Part 5: Breaking Ground (without breaking your back)

Part 6: Concrete Jungle Gyms

Bibliography