A Good Comment

My in-thread comment replies aren't working, and I also deleted a good comment by mistake, so here I am! The good comment was on this post about Open air Dungeons, and it was (paraphrased) "how is this materially different from a point crawl?".

The answer is that it's not materially different at all, it's just points and lines. 

I guess the implied question with that was: "what's so special about this then?". The answer there is that that system about using randomization and semi-conscious procedure instead of deliberate design to create an adventure. 

If I wanted to make a miniature cave system, for example, I just need an impure block of limestone, a continuous drip of water, and thousands of years. I don't need to "design" it, there's a process that'll do it for me. I want to make things that work like that, but faster.

So just drawing a  point crawl would be fine, but in that case you end up having to make all these decision about where everything is, what kind of spatial relationships there are. That can be alright, but if a randomized procedure does that instead you end up seeing the meaning of the layout as you play the game. Things will happen that you didn't plan, or couldn't ever plan. For me, at least, that's way more interesting to run, and play with.

I also like what it does for the imagination. You have a process that'll lay things out, right? You just need to think of stuff that might be in there. Beyond that, you can mix and match. Place what's necessary, randomize the rest. 60/40, 50/50, 90/10, whatever. It's flexible.

When it comes to making maps I'm not really trying to like, find new shapes for people to make maps out of or whatever. I'm trying to abstract space and time in ways that aren't about accurate scale, trying to make something that allows you to prep and use an adventure in like 15 minutes, and also something that let's you have an actually different Adventure if you run it again later. I also think of it as a play-aid instead of an illustration, every kind of map I use looks like scribble, but it's functional scribble.

A map that make the game a process of discovery-through-play for everyone. I like that a lot. That's what's different about it.