Will Map For Fun - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/110/mapping

I make up fake maps for fun.

D&D is one of those things that has been part of me for such a long time, that it's always popping up its head no matter what I do, and apparently mapping is one of them. The crazy part about this is that because I make maps of fictional places, for fun, normal maps are easy to follow.

I had a geography teacher that tried to teach the class maps and how to read maps. The final exam on all of that was taking the New York transit maps and reading them. It consisted of questions about how to get from point A to point B and which train, bus, or subway was the best choice to take to get there. He thought it was impossible and hard to read, but to me, it was an easy map to follow because it made a whole lot more sense than the stupidity that showed up on my grid paper while I was trying to map out a dungeon.

The problems with my maps is that they don't make sense, at all.

When a person maps a house, you have walls and a set square footage that gets used. It's expected that however big the house is on the outside, you're going to explain where that room is when you get to the inside.

However, when I map things for D&D (especially my earliest maps) had nothing to do with the outside appearance of things. The players would walk into a basement, and one floor would be only a few hundred square feet and the next would be an expansive train of rooms that made no logical sense of how or why they were created in that particular order. Instead of looking like a map of hallways and rooms, it was just an advanced form of hopscotch with each square being a different size than the previous ones to 'mix things up'.

The only part worse than my horrible sense of design is the desire to play the game. In the game, a medium creature (like you and me) can occupy a 5x5 foot cell. Unless weird things happen, one person per 5x5 area. That meant that if my party had five players in it, I needed a room of at least 125 square feet just to fit five people in it. Then to put a monster in there, I'd need another 5x5, so I'm up to 150 square feet, just for a simple fight.

The worst part about that is that a room that takes up 6 cells is pretty small, but in real world terms, a 150 square foot room is good sized, and getting six people into it isn't that hard at all. What this meant is that my rooms in D&D are massive when they should be small. The only problem with massive rooms, and I mean truly massive rooms like conference halls and banquet rooms, get too big to map. A huge cavern that is 100 yards long is 60 cells long, and 60 cells on a grid paper is almost bigger than the paper.

That chunk of paper is only a 22x22 area, you'd need a huge chunk of these to even get close to something as vast as a football field. The tricky part is to think about your high school and its size in relation to the football field. If the football field too that much room on the grid, how much grid paper would it take to map out a high school to scale? Quickly, big things that should be taking up huge amounts of paper just aren't worth it, and I'm drawing a school at about half it's real size, but with rooms that are double their actual size.

To this day I am happy whenever I'm playing D&D because I know that none of my players care. Unless I pull out some really stupid things that don't make sense, they don't care if the rooms are jagged, that they aren't perfectly to scale, and that works perfect for me. I hate the idea of some other DM's where they say they have a player who is their cartographer, that keeps track of all of the maps and knowledge of the entire system. I might enjoy making maps, but I know that they are never good enough to force another person to have to recreate.