Waysoftheearth's Hinterlands PBP
Moderators: ehiker133, waysoftheearth
This touches a broader philosophical discussion about how much meta-knowledge the players should have, and what role mapping plays in the game. I agree the characters in game should have a general spatial awareness of their immediate/recent surrounds that is tricky to convey in the PBP context. However, providing the players with infallible positioning knowledge that their characters don't have is (IMHO) solving the wrong problem. I suspect it's not necessarily the silver bullet it may seem to be (e.g., when the ref's map is non-orthogonal, curvy, natural caverns, and so on), and that it would kinda undermine the "mapping sub-game".sully wrote:I do think it would be easier if we imposed an order on your descriptions that is static no matter which way the PCs are facing or which way they are entering a room. For example, if we went back to the first entrance of the dungeon and labeled "up" as "north", just for the purposes of mapping and general spatial awareness, regardless of whether or not it was truly north, and all further descriptions assumed that north was static, it would make both knowing where we were relative to the dungeon entrance, and mapping, much easier.