 Hi, I'm Kyle and this video is brought to you by The Old Road Zine. Check out the link in the description below for more details on how to get these maps. Today we're going to talk about how to design a point crawl map and what a point crawl even is. The simplest way I know how to put it is that a point crawl is an area with points of interest that players can crawl between. They can choose in what order they interact with them. I've printed up a copy of my map so I don't have to mark up my original to demonstrate what I mean. It's difficult for me to pinpoint the origin of the term point crawl but I will have some articles listed in the description below for you to check out at your leisure. Sometimes this method is called the point crawl, sometimes it's called points of light. I prefer to think of it as a rhizome as described in Deleuze and Gatari's A Thousand Plateaus but I'm a pretentious weirdo and I do not expect anybody else to care about that. To design a point crawl map the first thing you really need is just to have some points of interest on it. Oftentimes in previous videos you have seen me make a list of images or scenes that I see in my head and I just kind of put them together and kind of try to make them somewhat evenly spaced throughout the map. The second part of a point crawl design is to make sure there are no walls that if no matter where you start on the map you could your characters could probably see almost everything on it. There might be some things obscuring others but for the most part you could kind of chart your own path through that area and in place of walls you would put kind of obstacles things that you might need to pass a skill check for or something like that but it's not an impassable obstacle you would not need to get out digging tools or demolition tools to blow up a wall or blow up in a gate you would just need to roll athletics or you know some kind of traversal skill once the characters are in the area they can choose what they want to do what they want to interact with and kind of make their way through through the obstacles and interacting with the environment but nothing's really impeding them from kind of free floating around and like a butterfly between all of these points of interest all of these points of lights all of these points of content if you will this is why having a map is so important if the players can't see it and the characters can't see it that transparency doesn't exist and they can't pick their own path and choose their own obstacles and go where they want to go it's a very different style of running a game um conventional wisdom has you think that information scarcity in a fantasy game like dungeons and drag is important but i think you can get a lot of enthusiasm and interest just by showing people cool stuff to do and letting them pick their path to do it where i think things get really fun for me as a game designer as a gm as a player is when a set piece when one of these points of interest doesn't necessarily directly connect with the critical path the the overarching plot it's just a little vignette for people to to roleplay to inhabit the world to imagine how cool it would be to hang out in a hot spring with a bunch of goats that just abide and chill above all else and that's the big fun of designing games and and running players through it and designing maps is the kind of emergent stories that come out of people interacting with the evocative details that you're putting in whether it's through narration or it's through these kind of visual aids of maps by putting kind of these mysterious points of interest on something and and just allowing players to have fun and and run around and play and allow their characters to emerge and allow the story of them picking their path through that environment to emerge this is this is kind of some of the stuff they talk about in the old school renaissance or osr but i i really think uh i really think that this can exist in anywhere i think this really really uh exists very nicely in the story gaming space as well which is kind of where i feel most comfortable these days once you have your points of interest in place and you have the transparency in place and you've kind of designed some light obstacles to navigate the only thing left to do really is just come up with some basic uh hooks for reasons to interact with these things maybe you have to go talk to the skull crows for some advice or or perhaps they have uh collected a soul before it is before it's time right like there are all kinds of ways to come up you're a creative person whoever you are watching this video right now you are a creative person and sometimes you can be creative on the fly and just get some maps out and run a game and sometimes you need to sit down and write notes because that's what makes you feel comfortable is to have a plan going into it but whatever it is just respond to the space and invest in points of interest and make sure that those points of interest are transparent and you're going to have kind of a different style of game than what you're going to have like in the depths of a dungeon where around every corner could be lurking your death this is a very different tone a very different style um but i think you'll enjoy it if you give it a shot well that's it for this video uh there's obviously a lot more to talk about with this stuff i mean people have been playing games for decades and decades there's a lot of wisdom there's a lot of strong opinions about these things but hopefully this is a good start for thinking about designing a point crawl game in a point crawl map uh if you found this interesting or heard something helpful go ahead and leave me a like if you want to see more videos like this hit that bell or subscribe and maybe one day we'll meet on the old roads until then farewell