One aspect of tabletop role playing games that may be off-putting to new players is the lack of a traditional game board. Many locations are simply described to the players. For people who think visually like myself, this aspect can be kind of annoying.
All movement in a game should be done on a game board. To accomplish this, I propose creating gridded maps for regional travel, cities, and dungeons.
For regional travel, you might make a map of the region where each square represents 24 miles, which is roughly how far an adventuring party can travel in a day on foot. The players can then move a piece on the map just as they would on a game board.
For exploring a city, you would create a similar gridded map depicting the entire city. The game master will have prepared a short description of each grid and everything the players may find within that square.
Exploration at the dungeon level is standard for most DnD games. Each block in the grid represents five or ten feet, and players can use miniatures on the map to explore the dungeon.
The idea is to have all exploration in the game done with counters and maps, just like in a conventional board game or in a video game.
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