Life on the Grid

I don’t like to bring a lot of gridded maps into my in-person* RPG sessions. I prefer theater of the mind for combat and other tense, moment-by-moment scenarios. I typically only want maps for the most spatially complex situations, where they’re absolutely necessary to ensure player comprehension.

But I like to interrogate my preferences, and it takes me to some interesting places…

So Transparent

Getting off the grid was a gradual process for me. I went from the big Chessex map (nice, but hard to take on the go), to the interlocking dry erase tiles (more mobile, but still restrictive), to these transparent gridded overlays. 

The obvious use for the transparent overlay is to conveniently turn a gridless map or landscape into a battlemap. The less-obvious use is to lay them over any image and use the resulting grid to facilitate play, whether we interpret the spatial relationships it creates literally or figuratively.

For our Strangers on a Train game, I can print any sort of image of outdoor terrain, lay the grid on top of it, and immediately create a pointcrawl with measurable distances. This technique isn’t limited to top-down views; for images conveyed from more conventional perspectives, the grid can also suggest height. Encounter checks trigger (and time advances) whenever the group moves across one of the gridded lines.

Spatial Relations for Every Situation 

But the image doesn’t even have to represent a place. Any handout can benefit from an overlaid grid. 

Progress clock. It’s one thing to say the bomb explodes after five setbacks. It’s another thing to watch a token move across a grid laid over an image of a bomb on the center of the table.

The kaiju. Print an image of a giant creature. Lay the grid on top of it. Player tokens or miniatures reinforce the relative size of the creature, and the grid forms a map for climbing around its body and attacking its weak points.

The puzzle. Lay the grid out on top of a puzzling image, and invite PCs to indicate which bits of it they will investigate, in turn.

The factions. Print an image displaying rival factions. Use the grid to map the ebb and flow of their power and influence; or alternately, plot the PCs’ relative prestige with either side.

The battle. Take a painting with a lot going on, like Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire; Destruction and lay the grid over it. The grid subdivides the space into grokkable chunks, and gives players a way to choose what to interact with in a scenario that’s bigger than they are.

Advanced techniques. Is a square grid too boring for you? Grab any image you like and run it through a Voroni Generator. Great for a pointcrawl through a twisted, physically abstracted space like the plane of Limbo, or corrupted cyberspace.

*I use the grid more liberally for online play. Without people in the same room, face-to-face with each other, there’s a greater need for imagery to visually center the players and keep them on the same page.