Dungeons & Dragons began as a game about exploring mazes, trying not to get lost as you navigate spaces with complicated layouts. At some point, these conventions fell to the wayside. The focus of dungeoncrawling shifted to other forms of engagement. Even key luminaries of the dungeoncrawl tradition, like my good friend Josh, openly advocate for removing this once-foundational cornerstone of the genre from your gameplay, encouraging you to simply give your players the map so they never have to experience what was once the main challenge of dungeoncrawling!
Similarly, other designers advocate dungeoncrawls where there's nothing to navigate in the first place. Sometimes that means strictly linear layouts, like a Five Room Dungeon. Other times it means abstracting the layout into a skill challenge, depthcrawl, or other mechanical contrivance. This isn't an invalid option, but it does sacrifice the dungeoncrawl experience in favor of merely evoking the aesthetics of dungeoncrawling.
Not all forms of gameplay appeal to all gamers, and that's perfectly fine. But dungeon-mapping gameplay has become so widely misunderstood and maligned that countless gamers have never even had a chance to experience it for themselves.
I'm here to explain the appeal of this playstyle, why almost everyone gets it wrong, and how to actually do it correctly.
Caveats, as always
I know I can't proceed without first addressing the naysayers, so let me say this as clearly as I can up front: no, I don't think you need the players to map the dungeon as they explore.
If you follow Josh's advice of providing the players with the map, you will probably have a great time. I concede that your game is still perfectly valid even if it doesn't include navigational challenges. Different games are about different things. Not all dungeons have traps, not all dungeons have puzzles, not all dungeons even have monsters. There's nothing wrong with spending the rest of your life playing in dungeons where "getting lost" is simply not a risk at all.
As a matter of fact, I myself have advocated for the virtues of "picture book design" in the past. I love having players interact with visuals, interrogating images directly instead of relying on me to be their eyes and ears for everything. A picture is worth a thousand words, so having a visual aid everyone can point to is just efficient. Every Tricks & Treats scenario I design revolves around a big, detailed map of the adventure sitting in the center of the table, much like a board game atop which players can move their pawns.
The point is that there is no "one true way." We can appreciate many different kinds of fun, and we can also accept that some kinds of fun just aren't fun for everyone.
However, whenever someone tells me about why they don't enjoy the experience of player mapping, they almost always reveal that they were doing it wrong! And that's a disservice to this fine tradition which I cannot abide.
"You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike"
From the NES port of Wizardry
First, let me back up my claim that navigation was once the main challenge of dungeoncrawling.
There are many conflicting accounts about Dave Arneson's first "proto-D&D" gaming session. When it happened, who was there, what took place, etc. Here's one primary source, likely riddled with misremembered details. But any look at the early history of Arneson's Blackmoor games reveals that, first and foremost, he created a game about exploration. More than "using the rules of Chainmail" or "bringing in AC from Ironclad" or even "having all the players be on a team," the main innovation Arneson brought to Wesely's Braunstein is just the concept of "information extraction and management" itself being the main source of challenge.
This comes through in Original D&D as well. When you crack open Book III: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, the sample dungeon described on pages 4-5 revolves almost entirely around navigational challenges. When you read the game's description of "traps," most of the examples attack the party's orientation, rather than their HP.
Page 6 of OD&D Book III
Hell, dwarves have a biological ability to "note
slanting passages, traps, shifting walls and new construction," implying that these sorts of navigational hazards are a routine part of the game.
I think this also comes through when we look at many of the earliest works influenced by D&D. While the video games which inherited the name "RPG" are characterized by stats, XP, and advancement systems, that was just one of many D&D-derived ideas that video games seized on.
Consider, instead, the adventure game genre. While the genre's name sounds ridiculously generic ("aren't nearly all video games about going on an adventure? Is Super Mario Brothers an 'adventure game' then?"), many people don't realize that it's actually a reference to a specific work, in the same vein as "Roguelike" or "Metroidvania." This genre is named for 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure (also sometimes just called Adventure or even ADVENT), which was a text parser game about exploring a fantasy version of the Mammoth Cave system in Kentucky.
The creator, Will Crowther, explicitly cites D&D as a primary inspiration for the game. Understand that he's not talking about character attributes and making numbers go up, because you won't find that here. He's talking about the challenge of charting a map as you explore so you don't get lost. Well, that and hunting for treasure. Other early games attempting to "recreate D&D," like Zork and Wizardry, similarly emphasize the challenge of mapping and navigation as a key part of that.
Incidentally, "navigational challenges" also stopped being the defining feature of the adventure game genre, at some point. Nowadays, most fans of adventure games will tell you that they're broadly defined by "puzzles and plots," citing examples like The Secret of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango. They might be surprised to learn that, when they were first released, games like Metroid and DOOM were described as "adventure games." That may sound weird to us now, but they were given this label because of their maze-solving elements.
Correspondingly, almost no video games expect the player to chart a map as they play anymore, just like in D&D. Modern gamers might assume that including an in-game auto-updating map is an objective improvement on those old games and their primitive limitations, not realizing that having to make your own map was once the point!
What is navigation about?
At its heart, the "navigation game" I'm describing is about the risk of getting lost as a primary challenge of gameplay.
But what does it actually mean to be "lost?" It means that your mental concept of how your current location relates to other locations isn't matching up with reality (which in this case, is taken to be "the GM's current description"). Navigation isn't really about the rooms themselves, but their relationships to each other. Obviously that means there's a spectrum to "lostness." Sometimes you might be completely lost, but oftentimes you might just be mistaken about one or two details.
What's cool about the challenge of "getting lost" is that it doesn't need to be simulated through a mechanical abstraction. It's a perfect example of where player skill is the best way to handle an in-game challenge. When the player is lost, their character is lost. When a player is using tools and techniques to navigate more easily, so too is their character.
Notice also that navigational challenges necessarily depend on a relative lack of information. Whether you hand the players the full floorplan, make the full VTT background layer visible, keep all the previous rooms' terrain pieces on the table, or whatever else, if the players have access to an objective view of the dungeon's layout at all times then that definitionally removes the risk of getting lost or disoriented.
It's similar to the problem of Rangers in D&D 5E. They were meant to be the most useful class when doing wilderness exploration gameplay. But their main class feature instead invalidated almost every potential challenge that could happen in the wilderness. It's like if the Fighter had a class feature that just said, "whenever you get into a combat scenario, you automatically win."
The "maze-solving" genre depends on there still existing a possibility that the players get lost. Their efforts at mapping are a crucial tool for combating this possibility, but if they were to ever permanently defeat it, then the game would be over.
So why did this type of gameplay fall out of favor? I posit that it's because you're mapping dungeons wrong!
How to ruin a perfectly good dungeoncrawl
The need for a visual reference becomes evident pretty quickly. If you try to forego any visual aid representing the dungeon, instead relying on the GM to just constantly re-describe your surroundings again and again and again, it will drive everyone crazy. This becomes especially arduous when you start asking the GM to reiterate their descriptions of previous rooms, because your mental image of the route you took here has been deteriorating over the course of the session.
And so, whether by reading advice online or by just using your common sense, you decide that one of the players should be charting their own copy of the map as they go. Makes sense, right?
But that's when you make the fatal mistake. The player grabs their gridded graph paper, the party embarks into the dungeon, and then the GM starts providing precise dimensions for each room and hallway. The player, accordingly, meticulously recreates these dimensions on their graph paper, slowly counting out each square while making liberal use of their ruler. This is what I call the "traditional method" of mapping.
I'll let my friend Nick describe the issues that arise from this (quoting from an old Discord conversation):
90% of games I've played in where the referee expects the players to map in some degree have not actually been run with mapping in mind.Like, it takes a lot of effort to communicate enough about the world to give players the information they need to make a map, and also the game needs to accommodate the time making a map takes. You can't just quickly rattle off a room description. The mapper needs time to draw their map, and if the referee has already moved on to describing the room's contents and now there are NPCs talking, and the mapper reasonably feels like the map is detracting from their ability to participate in the gameOr worse, their mapping detracts from everybody's ability to experience the game because they need to ask the group to pause on some action so they can get the referee to clarify what the shape of the room is.
Re-linking Josh's advice I already referenced earlier, which describes the exact same phenomenon. "On the north wall, there’s two exits. No, the left exit is farther away. No, not like that. Here, let me just draw it for you."
Verbally reciting each length and angle is a slog under the best of circumstances. But when you reach those really complicated rooms with a strange shape and lots of exits, natural language becomes wholly inadequate to the task of conveying each detail. Hence the GM almost inevitably reaching over to just draw the damn map themself.
This method of mapping sucks. I have made this mistake before and it ruined games. And it's no mystery why so many people conclude that "player mapping" is a guaranteed bad time when this was their experience with it.
Other bad methods
Some people instead recognize that this is a solvable problem. That the basic idea here can still be salvaged. Unfortunately, they then arrive at different bad methods. Maybe not as bad, but still not ideal.
First I tried using my gridded wet erase mat from Chessex. You know the one. Whenever the players would enter a new area, I would reveal the next chunk of the dungeon by reaching over and drawing it on the mat myself. Instead of having a player do the mapping, the GM does it. The players still got the experience of exploring a maze, not knowing the dungeon's layout ahead of time but still having a growing visual aid to rely on. Except that this solution was incredibly tedious, only marginally less boring and shitty than the traditional method described previously.
A similar solution involves using physical terrain. You have a collection of physical props representing the ground, walls, doors, pillars, etc. Maybe you set up each terrain piece as the players explore. Maybe you have all the terrain set up ahead of time, covered up with, I dunno, like, tissues or something. Then you just remove each tissue one by one as the players reveal rooms. Regardless, I feel like this method is basically the same as the "GM draws the map as you go" method: not as tedious as the traditional method, but still very tedious all the same. And as mentioned, if you want to retain the risk of getting lost, you would also have to remove the terrain from previous rooms.
The main argument in favor of this method is that modular dungeon terrain is rad as hell. You may find the aesthetic reward outweighs the pains of implementation, and I respect that.
Another method I tried was drawing the dungeon rooms onto index cards ahead of time, and then handing the appropriate index card to the player mapper whenever the party entered that room. Better than verbally relaying that level of detail, but you've still trapped one player into spending all their time and focus meticulously recreating your map onto their graph paper instead of engaging with the game. I still think this might be a good idea for a really weirdly-shaped area, but it's easy to overdo.
And of course, many folks nowadays are playing on virtual tabletops. In most VTTs, you can embed the dungeon map itself onto a background layer, and have players control tokens atop that. If you have a darkness or fog-of-war feature implemented, then you preserve the risk of getting lost, and the players still have a reason to chart their own map. But now they can just copy what's on their screen onto a sheet of paper without asking the GM a single question. This method is actually quite good, but I also don't feel like any answer which relies on a digital setup should be considered a "solved" problem. This is an analog hobby.
Finally, Mr. Mann of the Blue Mountain argues that the traditional method is salvageable so long as the GM and player mapper have established a sufficiently sophisticated common language and standardized procedure for getting the job done. I like this post overall, but I am wholly unconvinced. Their examples of how they'd describe room layouts sounds atrocious to me. In my opinion, it is a perfect demonstration of why the traditional method, even at its best, still sucks.
The correct way for players to map
The trad method is actually pretty close. Just don't include the spatial dimensions and you're golden. No, seriously, that's it.
In practice, this means that the player's map should probably look more like a loose flowchart of rooms. Every room can just be a circle or box or whatever, hastily scribbled onto the page with a line connecting it to other rooms. You can still jot down whatever notes you need about a room, just accept that your map is an abstraction of the "true" version.
My friend Pollux once put words to this distinction that I quite liked:
i think there are two different modes that people are talking about here. maybe "mapping" and "surveying". like imagine google maps died and i asked you to draw me a map to your house. if you gave me measurements down to the 5 or 10 ft increment and accounted for every slight bend in the road i would no longer want to go to your house. for most purposes, having a node map with little annotations ("big room", "septagon shaped", "snakey hallway") is fine.
I've met some hardcore mappers who recoil in terror at this suggestion, deathly afraid of producing a sloppy map full of inaccuracies. But I believe you have the strength to overcome this fear. The sloppy map is better, trust me.
Here's an example of a flowchart-style map I made while playing a game. This is my attempt at mapping Secret of the Black Crag, by Chance Dudinack. I made this on MS Paint (since this was an online session), and I included the true map for comparison. The only reference I had was the GM's verbal descriptions, saying "you go down a hallway eastward" or "there's a crevice separating the room north to south."
As you can see, my version is basically correct (for the rooms we actually reached in our delve), and that's good enough for our purposes.
Here's a map my friend Eric made of Caverns of Thracia. We played on a VTT, and he didn't reduce it to nodes and connections like I would, but he specifically didn't burden himself with being precise. He could see the squares clearly, but he chose not to waste time counting them. You can spot plenty of inaccuracies in the final result, but it's clearly pretty good.
Another clue that this is the correct method is, you guessed it, looking at old adventure games. Here's an example of a player's map of Colossal Cave Adventure, which is also rendered as a flowchart.
However, this is also obviously a very, very high quality rendering. I imagine the cartographer was trying to make a clean, comprehensive map after several playthroughs and early drafts, breaking out the ruler and being thorough enough to even include two connections between every adjacent room, since the route "to" is not always a perfect inverse of the route "from."
Here's a better example of what you can expect this technique to look like during gameplay:
Here, compare the official map of Zork to this fan's attempt at mapping it during play:
Last year I replayed the original Metroid from 1986. Let's compare the true map with the one I made while playing (using diagrams.net):
Even when playing in a visual medium, I still opted for a simplified, imprecise representation of the game's geography. Pausing in every room to break out the ruler would have been way too laborious. And in the verbal medium of RPGs, it would be even worse.
Some other best practices:
First, I like to start off the map for my players. Show them where they should begin on their paper, so they don't accidentally run off the edge. If I know the entrance is in the northwest corner of the dungeon, I'll give them that one for free.
Second, I think you should never assume a specific perspective when addressing the group. There are usually multiple PCs, each one frequently in motion. Who’s to say what’s to the “left” or “right” of all these characters turning this way and that? Instead, use cardinal directions. Describe the door found on the northern wall, or the road bending southeast. And if you do use subjective directions, then make them subjective to a common reference point, like the shrieking eels off the ship’s starboard side or the assassin on the throne’s left.
While both of these affordances don't make sense "in-universe," I value clarity of communication above whatever minor element of immersion is being sacrificed here.
Third, if you're an extremist, you might go so far as to remove the grid entirely. That's right, take away their graph paper. If the player doing the mapping has no choice but to use regular paper, it becomes that much easier to resist the temptation to get precise.
Advantages
There are many reasons I insist that this is the "correct" method.
First, it is the fastest and the easiest method for everyone involved. It requires no prep from the GM ahead of time to accommodate, like terrain or index cards or a VTT background. The GM doesn't have to communicate any mapping-related information while narrating the game, because "you have entered a new room" is all the information the mapper needs to know. The player drawing the map will not be distracted by their mapping for any significant amount of time. It usually takes only a couple seconds, literally just long enough to draw a circle, a line, and jot down a word that reminds you what that room is about. The entire process is seamless.
Furthermore, even in a limited, sloppy form, the map will still be immensely useful. We take it for granted that the measure of a good map lies in its accuracy, but is that true? Ask yourself what the practical benefits of the map actually are. It's a tool that aids in both memory and communication. You record information to keep track of it more easily, and you can talk through decisions by pointing at the diagram. Neither of those things require the map to be "perfect."
Once again picking on my friends, here's something Arnold once claimed on Discord:
Maps only matter if you have to move through it a second time, plotting the best path. Otherwise they're just a list of doors you haven't opened yet. You almost have to write a dungeon intentionally to include some backtracking.
I disagree!
Imagine substituting charting a map with writing a list of doors instead. How do you verbally refer to each door? Do you assign them serial numbers as you go? Choosing which doors to enter and when is an important decision, informed by lots of contextual factors. If you can detect activity from the other side, if it's locked, if it's stuck, if it smells like rotting flesh, etc. You could try to take comprehensive notes about each door when you add it to your list, but a lot of the salient info about a door comes from where it's positioned relative to everything else.
Additionally, there are other use-cases than just "having to move through something a second time." If you're charting a map as you go, you might be able to pick up on when a fork in the road offers one path that brings you closer to some direction you're heading (e.g. "the center of the volcano") or if it'll loop you somewhere back you've already been (but by a new means).
Also, like, most of the dungeons I go through take quite a few delves to explore. Especially if it's a megadungeon, you're going to be traversing the same halls session after session. You don't have to "intentionally include some backtracking." Just making a dungeon too big to complete in one delve already guarantees backtracking.
At the end of the day, even the simplest map is just another form of note-taking, and players always benefit from taking notes during play. Our memories are fallible, and even the mere act of recording information at all helps us to retain it better. The question then is what form of notetaking is most efficient and effective at serving this purpose. Organizing information visually is oftentimes the best solution!
And for what it's worth, this is also far more realistic than the traditional method. Humans can't easily eyeball the difference between 50 feet and 55 feet, or oftentimes even just between 5 feet and 10 feet. It's unreasonable to grant them information that precise for free.
Are there disadvantages?
Well, yes, but actually no. To me, the occasional inaccuracy produced by this method is a feature, not a bug.
Remember our original description near the beginning of the post. Only by recording information imperfectly can there exist a potential for navigational challenges. So while a sloppy flowchart map is usually "good enough," it sometimes isn't, and that's part of the challenge! All of those "tricky architecture" hazards described in OD&D must reside somewhere in the gaps between reality and the simulacrum that is your map. The missing layer of information. The slight incline of this hallway downwards? The curving corridor? The exact height of this staircase? These are exactly the sort of uncertainties left out of the flowchart map.
Thus, a dungeon like this...
…will probably be easy to accurately map without exact measurements. But a dungeon like this...
…is going to be significantly warped by our method. "Well, the hallway is at kind of a weird angle, sort of diagonal to your current room... and then there's a sorta T-intersection a bit down the way but the other hall doesn't quite intersect perpendicularly..." The errors that result are a completely valid part of the dungeoncrawling experience, which we should welcome.
This is not to say that you can't create a more precise and accurate map. Rather, I think you should have to pay for that added level of quality. If you want to "survey" the dungeon, then your character must spend extra time in-game measuring the room. That means random encounter rolls and candles burning lower. There's a tradeoff between precision and risk. To put it another way, room and hallway dimensions should be hidden information, not landmark. You have to decide for yourself if you feel it's worth the extra time to make your map just a little more perfect. In most cases, it won't be. But sometimes, it is!
It's easy to overdo this type of challenge, of course. All it takes is four or five errors in the map for things to get thrown really out of place. But the same could be said of deadly room traps or high-level dragons, and we shouldn't be afraid to include those in our games, either.
Worse comes to worst, the players abandon their map and begin drawing a new one, starting from the room they're currently in. This is the navigation game equivalent to losing half your party to the dragon before barely escaping with your life, and it is appropriately terrifying.
Confession: yes, I am being deceptive
This blog post's entire argument is based on an appeal to the wisdom of the ancients. "This is how it used to be done, but we have lost our way." Yet this is also pretty misleading.
The reason why the traditional method is the traditional method is because it was, in fact, the method used by the earliest gamers. They loved breaking out the rulers and graph paper. We actually have the original player maps drawn during what (might) have been the first Arnesonian session of proto-D&D. By this account, the players totally took the time to meticulously recreate Arneson's master copy of the map inch-by-inch.
In fact, I already showed my hand earlier in this post. You may have noticed this sentence from Page 6 of OD&D Book III: "Natural passages and caverns which have varying width and direction, so that it is virtually impossible to accurately map such areas." To me, this reveals that recording exact widths and directions was absolutely the norm otherwise.
By 1983, Frank Mentzer's "Red Box" D&D actually included a step-by-step tutorial instructing players to practice copying the GM's map inch-by-inch, thus teaching a whole generation of gamers to use this shitty, unfun method.
Navigational gameplay may have once been the core of dungeoncrawling, but that doesn't mean our predecessors were good at it. Folks have been making this mistake since the very beginning.
Why this matters to me
"Navigational challenges" are merely one example of a broader sort of game we're playing here. As I said in the beginning, Arneson's real innovation was just the concept of gamifying the processes of extracting and managing information. You could argue that this is the true definition of "exploration games."
This is easy to take for granted because many games specifically go out of their way to avoid this type of challenge. Making information freely available and seamless to manage allows you to instead focus on other challenges. I myself often advocate this very practice, having argued in the past that it's better to simply give your players the price lists while shopping or to give them the rumors instead of making them ask the NPCs about gossip.
But to "explore" through the verbal medium of RPGs is to make the process of acquiring information itself the gameplay. In an exploration game, the GM's primary role is to manage the flow of information, doling it out based on specific triggers the players activate. The foremost among these triggers is just "the player asks what their character perceives around them." The back and forth of questions and answers is not merely the method of play, but the subject of it.
This is why, despite my love for games without a singular GM, they're typically a bad fit for this sort of gameplay. The segregation of information is a necessary component for players to have the experience of discovering something.
Of course, like many things, it's more of a spectrum than a strict binary. Players need some information provided in order to get started. Giving the players the dungeon map ahead of time doesn't necessarily prohibit any exploration-based challenges. Perhaps some of those rooms contain secrets which can only be discovered when examined in-person.
But I really do cherish the struggle of being forced to work for it. To have to put yourself at risk to obtain GM narration, and to have to take notes on it because reminders aren't free, either. This is what makes a dungeoncrawl feel like a dungeoncrawl to me. I know my character is in a dungeon when even the basic layout of the building is a secret, and one which is going to take some bravery and skill to uncover.
It's funny that, of all the forgotten traditions of ancient D&D, the OSR never quite managed to remember this one. They all love Jaquaysing, yet they don't fully understand it. This is revealed whenever you see someone reduce it to mere "looping." Old-schoolers can explain at length the benefits of bolstering player agency by providing pathing choices, how it enables them to pick their battles and exploit the geography in tactical situations. But they look right past the first and foremost purpose of the Jaquaysing techniques: it makes navigation more challenging!
And you can build on this foundation to create some truly unique possibilities. The aforementioned charter of Thracia, Eric, created an entry in the recent Puzzle Dungeon jam which, honest to goodness, was one of the coolest dungeoncrawl experiences I've ever had. Yet it also wouldn't work at all if you gave the players a map ahead of time.
Likewise, our same group once played through Arnold's Lair of the Lamb, and I charted the map as we went. Here's what I had produced halfway through:
Then, we found a partial map of the dungeon. Here's what that looked like:
Figuring out where this lined up with my map, which rooms corresponded and where I had been mistaken, was so much more rewarding than if we'd been given this up front. Trying to combine two partial maps was one of the most compelling puzzles I've tackled in a dungeoncrawl. The synthesized version, complete with additional rooms added afterwards, looked like this:
Lastly, one of the easiest to overlook appeals of this genre of play is the simple joy of creation. You produce a tangible artifact of play, both a physical record of your evening of fun with friends as well as an externalization of the game world itself. Every hand-drawn map has a uniquely human character to it and is always personal in a way few other game processes ever are. In some sense, it is the one true proof of your conquest over the dungeon.
-Dwiz
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