I haven't played in decades, when we did we never had visual aides it was just describing. Okay some visual aides (usually used some dice) to show how the groups were situated but it was usually just the initial setup and we took it from there. Even that was rare though, I sort of wondered how often that happens these days, everyone seems to be talk about maps and such. I thought some of the great part of RPGs was using your imagination for it and the DM(or whichever term) would work with it. That said I can totally understand for more tactical games and this was in D&D 2nd Ed era when it was hard to come by those things unless you paid. The times we played say WoD I don't think we used that sort of thing once, so game system makes a difference too.

I led a game with a car chase via Google Street view. So much fun.

What's "WoD"?

Sounds like fun, yeah. How did you approach that mechanically? Asking for a group of friends

World of Darkness, a pretty popular family of games with *Vampire the Mascarade as a figurehead*, it reach peak popularity during the late 90's/early 00's, then almost vanished during the 2010's. But with the recent release of the 20 year aniiversary verion and the fifth edition it's raising again. It's modern Urban fantasy, the setting is *almost the real world*, and the PC are monsters e.g. Vampire, Mage or Werewolf fighting each other to control the city. While the *public part of the setting* is known by everyone you play *Chicago/New-Orlean/Paris/Rome by night* (and can just look ~~gooogle~~ open street map to get a map) , the game has a lot of semi-secret lore, about the creation of the Vampire/Werewolf/the Magic world, and the secret of powerful and ancient being with each sourcebook adding extra lore. A difficulty with that setting, is that there is always a player who is fan of the setting and going to argue that you'll never see this happening because [*insert reference to obscure sourcebook*] and that other player who actually went once to *the city where you play* so while WOD player don't have rule lawyer, they have lore lawyer which are a bit akin. While I talk about *rules*, the system is IMO the good balance between *rule light* (It's still a traditional skill-based/dice-pool system with it's root in the 90's) and *crunchy*, the 2006 revision is my *default system* for modern games (I know-it, it runs fines and fit my need)

Well, it was mostly narrative and started with a screenshare over discord. "Ok, this is what you are seeing. What do you want to do?" We pretended all the cars and stuff were where they were in the picture and I'd bump them down abit in the direction they wanted to go every turn. We didn't get too deep into how fast can the bad guys go with celerity and stuff because jumping in front of a moving car is a great way to get run over as one ghoul learned. The end of the chase was an abandoned shopping mall that they knew was in the area where they could be a little more blatant in their power use. Fun little scene.

Let's not forget the endless conversations about which park is Werewolf territory and which is Gangrel Vampire territory. Then the slow realization that you don't live in a place cool enough to attract *any* supernatural presence.

The struggle when you realize all of the cool ghouls are downtown, and the only immortal for 100 miles is the energy vampire who was turned when he was still a shitty teenager. He works at the gas station on the weekends. Don't ever take his change - if you get too close he'll drain away that meager high you get when you take your first sip of coffee in the morning.

They all live in a house in Staten Island, Toronto

One of the best part of shadowrun was picking irl city and giving it a fantasy+cyberpunk makeover: placing districts of note, choosing what factions operate there, riffing on landmarks.. Venice is where church agents, mafia goons and old money are bidding for old artefacts while gig workers are trying not to drown in half sunken apartment. Detroit is, of course, a jungle of mega factories and spacescrapers. Robo-cops? Naah, there was a trial run, but the tin men always go psycho from sensory depravation. We'll stomp our ~~citizens~~ scum the old fashion way, thank you very much. Moscow metro runs through literal hell. Also grab a molotov, Lenin has risen and calling for a revolution against the corpos. Why are his eyes red? Uhh.. communism? Session 0 was always a blast. (Minus explaining new players how to use chummer5)

That's ST, not DM.

Proposal: OpenCampaignMap, software that fetches OpenStreetMap data for a bounding box and provides a rectangle with corresponding TTRPG features. Any size from a village to a continent.