On Towns in RPGs, Part 1: Are Town Maps Useless?

A recent 
series 
of 
articles  by 
Alexis Smolensk
at the brilliant and eclectic Tao
of D&D asked a bold question: the question of whether, in the context
of D&D, town maps are useless in actual play. As I read, I found myself nodding
in agreement, but part of me—a big part—simply struggled with the concept. How
could town maps be useless when I—and many GMs—simply adore town maps?

What follows isn’t exactly response to Alexis’s
posts, which you should definitely go read, but rather, my own train of thought
on the same question.

So What’s Wrong With Town Maps?

Source

Here’s a map of Sutulak, posted as part of
Wizards of the Coast now-defunct Map-A-Week
program after the 3.5-era Cityscape supplement
in 2006. For the time being, you can still get these maps in a hidden corner of
their website, if you know where to look. I chose this map not because it was
particularly good or bad, but because it was relatively typical of the sort of
RPG town map you can find if you google “D&D town map.” The map
accompanied this blurb:

Sutulak resembles a military community in general layout. The
streets are wide, albeit less well kept, to allow for horses and carts to carry
slaves to and from the markets. While the main avenues are straight and easily
navigated, the majority of the city’s smaller streets are winding and
confusing, making it difficult for newly captured slaves to find their way out
if they should escape their restraints.

Source

The map isn’t just a piece of art, it’s a
game prop, created to efficiently convey information to the GM and players. Through
that lens, what does this map actually tell us?

The precise layout of the streets and buildingsThe size and scale of the town, including exact
distances between buildingsThe precise location of various keyed locations
(marked by numbers 1 through 14)The general look and feel of the town

Let’s break down each of these points in
detail to see how they’d come up in play.

The
precise layout of the streets and buildings

Neither as GM nor player have I ever cared
one whit about whether the Green Dragon Inn was a left turn or right turn from Ye
Olde Gnomish Alchemy Shoppe. Typically, the party navigates a city by simply
saying “we go to the Green Dragon Inn,” and the GM either whisks them
over there immediately, or stops and describes something they find along the
way (often with help from a random encounter table of some description).
Possibly, a skill check—knowledge (local) or gather information—is required to find
the route. On the whole, this category of information is completely unhelpful
to any game I’ve run.

The
size and scale of the town, including exact distances between buildings

This is slightly
more useful than the point above—I can conceive of wanting to know how many
minutes it takes an Animal Messenger
to go from the castle to the temple—but it’s also something the GM can
reasonably make up on the fly without blinking an eye. When walking on foot,
exact distance between buildings is hardly helpful, as movement speed in a city
rarely has much to do with distance as opposed to road maintenance, traffic,
the time of day, and other factors not shown on a map.

The
precise location of various keyed locations (marked by numbers 1 through 14)

While sprinkling a city with memorable
keyed locations is critical to any kind of urban adventure, I’m not convinced
that I actually care that much about where they are in relation to each other.
It matters, for instance, that the Green Dragon Inn is deep in the slums while
the Ye Olde Gnomish Alchemy Shoppe is across the river, but I don’t need their exact
lat-long coordinates.

The general
look and feel of the town

The map is more than just a schematic or a
character sheet, it’s a piece of art, and it conveys information that would
take paragraphs of text. Unlike the past points, this is legitimately useful to
me—but is it the best way to convey
such information?

Here’s a medieval
painting of Nuremburg. It’s not a map—it’s likely not particularly accurate—alongside
a tourist map
approximating the same area. To me, the painting is highly evocative, showing
the lords on their hill gazing down at a city tightly packed inside their wall.
The tourist map on the right, while not specifically an RPG map, conveys similar information, describing
certain keyed locations. It may not be as pretty as the map of Sutulak, above,
but in some ways is more useful, as it reduces the information overload by
leaving out unimportant structures. Still, judged solely by the the final point—the
look and feel of the town—I give the win to the painting on the left, not the tourist map on the right.

On the whole, this isn’t looking good for
town maps, as the one thing I find actually useful about them–capturing the feel of the town they portray–can be done better with other forms of art.

But I Love Town Maps!

And yet,
I, like many GMs, simply adore town
maps. I love making them, I love searching for them online, I love staring at
historical maps of London and Paris and Berlin and thinking about running campaigns
in them. So there must be some use to them, or why would I—like so many other
GMs—be so drawn to them? If we can isolate why
we love town maps, we can determine why
they’re useful, and thus can work towards creating a better map that is more
geared towards actual play. We can strip away superfluous information and focus
on what a GM actually needs.

This is going to be a bit of an adventure we’re
undertaking together, and I don’t yet know where—if anywhere—this will go, but
with any luck, we’ll figure something out and finally crack the mystery of the
urban campaign. To do that, we must first figure out what a town is to an RPG. Is a town just a fantasy Walmart-slash-Motel
6, where you crash for the night, buy a shovel and 50 feet of rope for
best-not-to-ask-why, then leave to be on your way to more interesting places?
Is it just a dungeon on a grander scale, with roads for hallways and houses for
rooms?

If you have any insights on this—or recommendations
to blogs or splatbooks on a similar subject—feel free to chime in. Until then,
watch this space, as I’ll be back later this week with part 2.