[Curmudgeon]

I haven't actually handed out maps to my fantasy players but I did have a plan for it. Maps (sailing charts in particular) were rare in history and jealously guarded by their possessors, so player maps were not going to be formal, accurate maps. They were going to represent the individual player's character knowledge of the world, i.e. very accurate within a day's journey from home, fairly accurate in terms of the general location of major rivers and big towns and cities that everyone has heard of for the rest of the kingdom and for most of the big, close (at least on the same continent) kingdoms, they'll likely pass through them in the rough directions and order shown but the distances might be way off, and anything beyond that you take your chances and the players were going to be told so.

As for the 'they must have had maps in order to do this or that thing' argument, let's look at a couple of examples I was given many years ago in high school history class.

A rutger (sailing directions) for getting to the New World after Columbus had discovered it read, "sail south until the butter melts, then sail due East." This at a time when Mercrator was making an accurate globe of the Earth.

As late as the U.S. Civil War, it was still a common thing for generals to send a messenger to find the opposing general's forces and invite that general to engage him on a suitable battlefield that he had located. In other words, armies did tend to blunder about looking for each other to give battle. Cavalry in the reconnaissance role could help locate an enemy force but without that knowledge from combat, all an accurate map was good for was letting a general see all the places that the opposing general could strike next based on his last known position.

As for guides, while they weren't needed on main highways or the open ocean, guides were certainly needed on roads which might not have signposts at crossroads and even in the nineteenth century steamboats on the Missippi required local guides (called pilots) to navigate the river hazards, so from a historical point of view, we can say that guides are very appropriate additions to a traveling party.

The experiences of European explorers would suggest that once native guides have warned the party of a danger, they aren't particularly likely to stick around if the party insists on walking blithely right into it.