#RPGaDAY2021 Day 2: Map

Maps. Maps are interesting. If anything, I enjoy maps as artifacts of play. You play a campaign with your friends, there are character sheets and scribbles of notes and maps. Years later you stumble across them and the memories come back! It's nice. Still, in the moment of their creation maps are not made for the purpose of bringing back memories of campaigns years past.

The appeal of maps starts with real ones. You look at where you are on the map. How other places you know of relate to where you are. You imagine what these places might be like. You travel, and a map can guide you on your real life adventures, sometimes. After that maybe you hear a story of pirates and buried treasure, X marks the spot, and all of that. Then there are the stories of lost civilizations, historical mysteries, putting together a map to rediscover these things. Then with fantasy or sci-fi novels and stories, maps of the fantastical lands these fictional adventures take place in, star charts, deck plans, they all pull you deeper into the fiction, make it feel a bit more real. You're reading the Fantastic Four and there is a cut-away view of the top 5 floors of the Baxter Building!

In RPGs, maps can serve at least 4 functions. Let's see:

1. Much like in real life, they can serve as a guide on how to get around somewhere, help you understand where you are in relation to other things. Except, this is all about understanding this in the context of your character and the fictional world, rather than your real self in this regular ol' world.
2. As I described with stories, maps can serve to spark the imagination, help you immerse in a story or fictional place and imagine it more vividly. Pirate maps and a cut away view of M. Bison's island nation headquarters of Shadoloo are both awesome, and you can just sit and stare and imagine!
3. Often done as quick sketches, maps in RPGs can act as a proxy for the character's senses. In real life, we can look around and get a good sense for our immediate environment. In RPGs, GMs are mostly constrained to conveying this information using words. Sometimes, however, a GM will whip out a bit of paper to sketch out a rough diagram of the relative positions of people and things in a place to clear up any misconceptions players might be having.
4. The map can be functioning as a play surface, upon which the rules of the game are used. The immediate example is the D&D dungeon mapped with 5 foot squares. The game may have rules for movement on these squares, and otherwise provide procedures that work in an almost board game-like fashion. Also used in D&D is the example of the hex map, where some games are run as hex-crawls, procedures for how far characters can travel in a day given the terrain, some rules for encounters, etc. Even the sector maps of Traveller function a bit like this, while also serving the first function of just letting characters know the lay of the land. Many traditional RPGs provide for using maps in combat situations in particular. This purpose can even be fulfilled in a less formal way, when playing in "Theater of the Mind" style, sometimes GMs will use quick sketches, as in the 3rd function I describe, to lay out the rough contours of the fictional location, but for the purpose of clarifying things for rules reasons rather than just "what do I see" reasons. 

I generally enjoy maps of all sorts, if not at all times. Like, the RPG map as play surface for a game, I can enjoy dropping into and out of that, but if the whole night of RPG play were to take place on a "play surface" style of map I start to prefer I be playing a different kind of game. This comes down to what I perceive as being the strengths and weaknesses of RPGs as games. I'm sure I will get into this more as #RPGaDay2021 proceeds, but in a certain sense I do not believe RPGs are good games, or at least in the way you might think of well designed board games, war games or video games. To me, the strengths of RPGs are both the actual "Role Playing", interacting in-character with other characters, and what I believe S. John Ross calls "Tactical Infinity", which I take to mean that you can have your character attempt anything imaginable, without a formal set of moves and constrained scope of play (in the way board games, or maybe all non-roleplaying games do, like, you can't negotiate with the bank in Monopoly, or try to have kids or something.)

In the end, maps are tools, and not every RPG requires their use. Still... who can resist the allure of a beautiful map or cut-away.