[Map] How I do Maps

This schematic represents the DungeonTeller campaign world I've been working on. The starting city, Stormgate, is at the lower left. Blue lines mean sea routes, and brown lines mean land routes. The color of each zone indicates its relative level of challenge. Green is safe even for starting characters; yellow a little challenging; orange quite challenging; and red is nasty indeed.

I have been mapping this way for years, rather than with the usual method of drawing a continent and then filling in all the bits. I don't make a traditional Tolkien-esque map until the end of the design process, and that's mostly as a prop for the players, not for me. 
I see each zone as a room in a dungeon, with one or more exits, and a list of contents, including monsters, NPCs, and locations. Often I'll rate a zone with a number that indicates how many days' travel it takes to cross it. Some places (and exits) might require the equivalent of a Spot check to find -- this makes rangers VERY useful during overland travel.

A big time sink.

Of course, schematic maps are of no use for adjudicating hex-crawling wilderness travel -- but that has never worked for me as a DM. I remember buying the Judges Guild Campaign Hexagon System booklet (1977) and then literally getting bogged down drawing tiny swamp/marsh symbols, making sure streams didn't flow uphill, carefully lining up the details in adjacent hexes... None of that made any difference to my players, but the rallying cry of the day was "realism!", whatever that was supposed to mean in the context of a fantasy game, and golly, if I just drew my maps down to the smallest detail, then my campaign would have the ring of truth.


So here's my process in more detail, in case you want to try it, after the jump:

Don't Check for Traps

Traps, you are unsatisfying for players and provide no drama, just non-sequiteur moments of grief. This is how traps seem to function in most dungeon games:

1. Hit-Point Tax: You're walking down a corridor and thwack a blade drops down from the ceiling and robs you of 1d6 hit points. Not meant to kill or disable you, but to wear you down, maybe force you to use magic or a potion to get those hp back. Might also slow the game down in case D&D is too fast-paced for you, as players begin to check laboriously for traps every 5 feet.
2. Saving Throw-away: The floor drops out from under you and you will either leap to safety or plunge into a pit, depending on the result of a die roll. No drama here, cause there's no choice to be made on the part of the player. It's truth or consequences.
3. Red Wire or Blue Wire?: You're presented with a choice, with no clue as to which is the correct one. One chest will open to reveal a 10-pound bag of sugar. The other chest is filled with giant wasps. Will tweaking the living statue's nipple clockwise deactivate it or put it into Berzerk mode? Again, no drama, because there's no real choice. 
4. This way to the Boss: Enough of this aimless wandering through my dungeon. I have placed this slide trap here to deliver you into my lair half-stunned, on your ass, and unprepared. I had thought of putting the trap just inside the front gate, but I thought it was best to let you go up against some of my weaker minions and do a little plundering first just to warm up for me.

So what are some features of a trap element that contributes to the narrative?

1. Eluctable at a price of your choosing. Sure, you can grab on to the edge of the pit. Do you want to drop your sword, shield, or both? You're falling into a hedge of punji sticks coated with orc droppings. Think quickly! I cast wall of ice  to cover up the sharp spikes!
2. Makes its presence known, but not its solution. A wall of fire? How could we get past it? (Players suggest various solutions, all of which will probably work, but when they get through alive, they have OWNED that trap).
3. Actually traps you. A trap, as the name implies, should trap you. The real drama starts when the boss's minions arrive to see what the Have-a-Heart in Sector Three has caught this time.

 

Weapons with Provenance

Hrunting, Sting, Anduril, Excalibur, Grayswandir, Green Destiny... magic weapons in fantasy fiction are unique items with a history. In D&D, magic weapons tend to be generic types. This irks me, especially when having a +1 longsword by the time you're second level is pretty standard in most campaigns.

Honestly, how many lost magic swords do you think should be floating around in a campaign to await discovery? I bet I could keep player interest if they knew that there were no more than half a dozen truly magical blades in the world that had been lost, and no more... and that only one or two smiths in the world knew how to make such weapons.

I'm hardly the first to suggest that RPGs are too generous in this regard, with their gross deflation in the value and scarcity of magic weapons. But how would you actually make this work in-game?


My thoughts follow after the break...

[Design] Replacing Abilities with Actions

Hi, my name is Doug, and I must confess that I don't like ability scores. They always seem to require a set of skills, bonuses, or derived stats to mechanically translate their numerical value into something immediate and useful. They are cozy and familiar and I know how to parse out their mechanical influence on what a character does in-game, but when I step outside that, and try to explain what they mean to a new player, especially one of perhaps six or seven winters, it gets confusing fast.