Oh, that’s fascinating. There was a conversation back in February about how a lot of us confuse east and west (with each other, flipping the map left/right), so directional confusion is certainly a thing.
But I don’t think I really confuse north/south with up/down. I feel like especially in buildings, I generally think of the separate floors as separate maps, with up/down connecting between them: it helps “chunk” the space into manageable pieces. In fact, I’ve often had confusion when games have directional synonyms for stairs (where you can use both up and east to climb a set of stairs) but now I’m wondering if that’s because they didn’t map to north/south?
But that confusion makes a lot of sense in The Bat where the map is so small and the upstairs and downstairs hardly need to be thought of as separate “floors” – there are only three rooms upstairs and one cellar room?
I don’t know how to encourage that, except that of course, visual maps can work well for the players who can see them: I find the steps confusing in this map from The Master of the Land but I think it illustrates the “separate floors” thing pretty well?
