Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[Ghostse]

What's the proper way to run a hex crawl, especially over repeated areas, without it turning into a tedious, pointless slog? And how do you handle transport options inside dungeons?


I can kind of make it work with roads. I ask where they're going, if they're sticking to a marked path. Roll random encounter, say they follow the road without issue, done. And sometimes I ignore the random encounter roll.

The problem I struggle with is anything beyond that. A common thing I see is "If the party searches this hex, they find X". The problem is, X can be anything from a hermits hut to a treasure chest. I don't know about you, but 6 miles is a large place to search, and especially if it's untamed woodland. I've seen a couple of OSR adventures where hexes can have multiple villages, roads, and encounters for each hex. Yet most OSR/old school guides have one feature per hex.

Making this worse, many of the adventures I'm considering have a central location the PCs return to between dungeons, meaning they'll be retreading the same three or four hexes multiple times. Likely twice per session, if not more.

This is just the start. There's a lot of edge cases I'd like to ask about, but most would have to be rulings made at the table. But there's one constant. I don't think designers fully grasp how big six miles is.


A related problem I've run into in my current campaign is teleporters. In one adventure I'm considering, a reward for some dungeons is access to a teleporter, basically allowing fast travel. This is a neat idea but I struggle to make it work. In Abomination Vaults, many floors have teleporters that can be restored with a ritual. The problem is again the repetition. I've taken to skipping travel and just having them arrive at the most recent floor they've unlocked and only narrating when they roll a random encounter.

I would caution against teleporters for fast travel. unless its a teleporter between two craggy-ass nowheres, or has some serious limits, immediate travel between two points is going to change your world drastically. I would personally have the players discover shortcuts like stairways or airshafts.

Gygax stresses the importance of having travel taking consistent levels of time in-game. The caveat to that is that doesn't mean every single triple should take the same time. GM should lengthen or shorten it, but they should do so INTENTIONALLY. Travel God puts the wind at their back, forest god causes them to get lost, waylaid by bandits, step through a Feywild portal, etc.
That doesn't mean you can't abstract it and just say "Ok you journey for a week and you're back at the dungeon" but use that sparingly. Even if you've got no plans of letting anything waylay the delve, still do some behind some screen rolls and scribble some notes so it LOOKS like something is happening. But again, even if you're just narrativing an uneventful journey, add some details. "You journey a week through storms and arrive back at the Lair for the Grundle", "Three days of pleasant weather brings you to the gates of Negrotonia","It is a melancholy 10 days that takes to journey the entire length of the ancient battlefield of the giants under the solemn, silent watch of long forgotten monuments as weatherbeaten as the mountains that support them. Whisps of mist and spirits dance in the gloaming darkness beyond the warm light of your campfire, watching eyes glint far away in the darkness. The rusting, crumbling signs of war long ended and forgotten line the road, the wind whipping over them seeming to carry the songs and stories of the fallen. You passed a trade caravan with barely a word, no one seeming to want to interrupt the cthonic silence that hung thicker than the fog that seemed to always fill the valley. But now you emerge between the well-eroded statues that mark the other end of the path, and find yourselves..." though that one feels like a waste to just narrate through with nothing happening


For searching for things in an area, I use a deck of cards instead of straight random encounters. This is not an exact science I've perfected yet, but I love how it works were EVENTUALLY they'll find the goal, they don't have the same encounters every time, I can adjust "difficulty" by adding/removing cards, and have things like "trained characters draw twice". Or if you don't want to give them bandit encounters, etc you can just pull cards to figure out how long the party hacks their way through the bush.

But
As @White Slaad mentions, what you should be doing is adjusting the travel so that party can see and feel their effect on the world. Saving King Fuckmeyer IX from vampires means now instead of bandits on the road they met by a friendly militia patrol who greet their King's saviors with a hearty 'huzzah!'. Saving the local Winery means narration should include more caravans/traders on the road showing that trade in the region is returning, etc.

 

[Quintus]

So in my Darksun game, my players have just found their way to the Forest Ridge as part of the main story. I'm trying to come up with some more scary jungle monsters to throw at them in addition to the halflings and other assorted beasties from the Terrors of Athas book. Any suggestions? I already have a Terrasque sized T-Rex and a insect so deadly, one of the soldiers that is traveling with them instantly dropped dead after getting stung.

 

[BlazikenLover]

What's the proper way to run a hex crawl, especially over repeated areas, without it turning into a tedious, pointless slog? And how do you handle transport options inside dungeons?


I can kind of make it work with roads. I ask where they're going, if they're sticking to a marked path. Roll random encounter, say they follow the road without issue, done. And sometimes I ignore the random encounter roll.

The problem I struggle with is anything beyond that. A common thing I see is "If the party searches this hex, they find X". The problem is, X can be anything from a hermits hut to a treasure chest. I don't know about you, but 6 miles is a large place to search, and especially if it's untamed woodland. I've seen a couple of OSR adventures where hexes can have multiple villages, roads, and encounters for each hex. Yet most OSR/old school guides have one feature per hex.

Making this worse, many of the adventures I'm considering have a central location the PCs return to between dungeons, meaning they'll be retreading the same three or four hexes multiple times. Likely twice per session, if not more.

This is just the start. There's a lot of edge cases I'd like to ask about, but most would have to be rulings made at the table. But there's one constant. I don't think designers fully grasp how big six miles is.


A related problem I've run into in my current campaign is teleporters. In one adventure I'm considering, a reward for some dungeons is access to a teleporter, basically allowing fast travel. This is a neat idea but I struggle to make it work. In Abomination Vaults, many floors have teleporters that can be restored with a ritual. The problem is again the repetition. I've taken to skipping travel and just having them arrive at the most recent floor they've unlocked and only narrating when they roll a random encounter.

For your hex crawl problem I would go with the idea that the party are not the only group/individuals moving through the wilderness:
there would be bands of bandits setting up camps, blocking roads to demand a toll, hiding treasure.
Groups of Orcs, goblins or gnolls moving across the map either scouting or trying to take up fortified locations.
Big predators that have been displaced by an even bigger predator or magical beast disrupting the balance.


Sure the hex you cleared last time is safe for an amount of time but it may not remain so for long unless you decide to post some NPCs or reach an agreement with a faction (or have the wizard perform a ritual over days/weeks to raise skeletons/create golems to guard the area)

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

So in my Darksun game, my players have just found their way to the Forest Ridge as part of the main story. I'm trying to come up with some more scary jungle monsters to throw at them in addition to the halflings and other assorted beasties from the Terrors of Athas book. Any suggestions? I already have a Terrasque sized T-Rex and a insect so deadly, one of the soldiers that is traveling with them instantly dropped dead after getting stung.

A spring with a water weird. Decapus hiding in the canopy. Ropers disguised as old trees. Ettercaps. Crocodile infested river. Quippers.

 

[BlazikenLover]

@Ghostse would you mind elaborating on how you use the deck of cards to search for things in an area? I often struggle when players want to search a room or area for things of interest and a method like that could help me.

 

[big_igloo_1776]

So in my Darksun game, my players have just found their way to the Forest Ridge as part of the main story. I'm trying to come up with some more scary jungle monsters to throw at them in addition to the halflings and other assorted beasties from the Terrors of Athas book. Any suggestions? I already have a Terrasque sized T-Rex and a insect so deadly, one of the soldiers that is traveling with them instantly dropped dead after getting stung.

Bog Wader

 

[Ghostse]

@Ghostse would you mind elaborating on how you use the deck of cards to search for things in an area? I often struggle when players want to search a room or area for things of interest and a method like that could help me.

So again I don't have this down to an exact science but...

Lets for argument you have a 1d20 search table. I would just take 20 cards, assign them to each result of the search and shuffle the deck and just draw off the cards and interpret the results as if they had been rolled. This just means instead simply 5% chance of finding the thing they are looking for, they are for-sure to find it within 20 searches which just keeps things from grinding on.

For adjustments, let's pretend the D20 table only really has 5 entries on it:
1-9 : nothing of note
10-14 : Bandits or owlbears or w/e
15-19: lost/grueling travel event
20: Macguffin

So by default I'd have 9 cards of nothing, 5 cards of combat, 5 cards of something non-combat bad happens, and one goal card.

Now again, this is art not science so:
- Let's say that the Macguffin is supposed to be hard to find. So maybe I decide I'm going to say put at least 10 cards ahead of it. So I'll remove the goal, shuffle the other cards, deal out 10, then add the goal card to the remaining 9 and shuffle those under the first 10.
- Maybe the party has a ranger. so maybe I'll swap out 3 of grueling travel events for nothing cards, or maybe I'll remove a bandit card. Or maybe I'll decide instead of minimum 10 its minimum 5 now.
- maybe the party has pissed off the goddess of winter, so the weather is now extra fucky, so maybe 4 of those "do nothing" cards are now "weather fucks with you" variations of Lost/Grueling travel cards.

You can also add in a progression system if you want to have your party make progress to a goal instead of straight random chance. So maybe it starts with a small deck, maybe as small as 3 cards. When the goal card is drawn instead of they find the macguffin, more cards get added.
Say they are trying find the lost Capital of Bumfuckegypt. The first thing they'd need to do is find the guide marker, then the trade road, then the Oasis of Bumfuck, etc. Each goal card gets them closer, but the longer they take ups the odds the local bandits discover some weird foreign randos are mucking about in their stretch of desert, or a rival group tries to steal their work and beat them to the discovery.

 

[Corn Flakes]

So again I don't have this down to an exact science but...

Lets for argument you have a 1d20 search table. I would just take 20 assign them to each result of the search and shuffle the deck and just draw off the cards and interpret the results as if they had been rolled. This just means instead simply 5% chance of finding the thing they are looking for, they are for-sure to find it within 20 searches which just keeps things from grinding on.

So, if I understand it right you're essentially using those cards to make a dynamic encounter table.

That's actually a really cool idea. I'm gonna take this to the GM, he's gonna like it.

 

[Ghostse]

So, if I understand it right you're essentially using those cards to make a dynamic encounter table.

That's actually a really cool idea. I'm gonna take this to the GM, he's gonna like it.

Dynamic and bounded, as the issue I was trying to fix when I came across this was "How do I make something that isn't deterministic but also isn't just 'lol keep rolling till it comes up 20, fucksteak'" because there are only so many abandoned buildings you can explore before you'd eventually find the right one.
there was also the case where there would be random tables with some interesting/relevant encounters on them, but the party would always manage to roll around them and only get boring or annoying results even though they rolled like 10 times on a 1d6 table.

Again,you can fix this with DM fiat on the dice results but that always feels like cheating to me.

edit: And yes, you can do stuff with the deck on the fly like add cards, remove/ignore cards (i.e. one of the cards might be a "blessing" card so maybe the forest gods allow you ignore one "Lost" card).

 

[anti SJW]

Not at my table.

 

[Revelator]

View attachment 6745697

Not at my table.

There's only one correct response:

K. Bye.

 

[AnOminous]

There's only one correct response:

K. Bye.

The only problem is even if you get rid of this clown, just having him there leaves the stench of his lunatic bullshit lingering in the air and totally kills any vibe that was going on. His mission is done, fun ruined, since ruining fun is his idea of fun.

 

[Ah ha']

Well how about this for a fun idea instead of posting scatalogical AI art of
Unfun faggots?

How about we make a campaign setting based off of Kiwi Farms as a fun group project with our own mythology? It could be called the Kiwilands or something.

Listen we should do this and hedge our bets just in case the dimensional merge ends up happening for real.

 

[Revelator]

The only problem is even if you get rid of this clown, just having him there leaves the stench of his lunatic bullshit lingering in the air and totally kills any vibe that was going on. His mission is done, fun ruined, since ruining fun is his idea of fun.

Sure, but that's why you kick at the first whiff of this BS so the least amount of fun possible is ruined. OR, what I prefer, is bring in people that won't ruin your fun in the first place.

 

[EleventySeven]

So in my Darksun game, my players have just found their way to the Forest Ridge as part of the main story. I'm trying to come up with some more scary jungle monsters to throw at them in addition to the halflings and other assorted beasties from the Terrors of Athas book. Any suggestions? I already have a Terrasque sized T-Rex and a insect so deadly, one of the soldiers that is traveling with them instantly dropped dead after getting stung.

My players had a big portion of their high levels in our previous pathfinder game in a jungle and some stuff I used was giant winged serpents, blood-crazed tribals, swarms of mosquitos that turn men into piles of bones, and plant beasts that can meld into the undergrowth so they never know if they're safe from them to name a few. Maybe even plant-animated undead would be interesting.

 

[Mr. Manchester]

View attachment 6745697

Not at my table.

Can another X sign cancel an X sign? He's already got his up so a follow up X sign would supersede it wouldn't it? It's pretty much checkmate.

I think just saying nigger beats all X signs too, that's a rule right?

 

[Revelator]

Can another X sign cancel an X sign? He's already got his up so a follow up X sign would supersede it wouldn't it? It's pretty much checkmate.

I think just saying nigger beats all X signs too, that's a rule right?

"X cards trigger me, because I was raped by a guy wearing a mask with an X on it, so you can't make any xes with your arms or use cards."

 

[Deus Exica]

simply don't get why anyone would be wringing their hands about this

Because to the turbo liberal retards who watched Extra Credits when they were younger, they see everything through a lens so racially stereotypical and lacking in nuance that your average nigger spouting white hooded southerner would pale in comparison.

These people see a genetic warlike species of green people with snaggle teeth, who are infamous for raping, pillaging, murdering, and all around just acting like savages and they think "Wow, these HAVE to be niggers..." And so begins their moral crusade.

A crippling inability to differentiate reality from fiction is the true silver bullet of the generic leftist.

 

[robobobo]

Because to the turbo liberal retards who watched Extra Credits when they were younger, they see everything through a lens so racially stereotypical and lacking in nuance that your average nigger spouting white hooded southerner would pale in comparison.

These people see a genetic warlike species of green people with snaggle teeth, who are infamous for raping, pillaging, murdering, and all around just acting like savages and they think "Wow, these HAVE to be niggers..." And so begins their moral crusade.

A crippling inability to differentiate reality from fiction is the true silver bullet of the generic leftist.

I do feel bad for them, they're victims of a setup straight from 1984 where they've been warped to actually believe lies. The contorted pathways that have to be maintained to balance out an impossible world view like "uneducated ghetto trash is actually a fine example of humanity's potential" results in, well, exactly what we've gotten here. Without an objective reality to be basing decisions off of, because if reality is not politically correct you must deny its existence, the foundation of their entire thought process is critically flawed.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

How about we make a campaign setting based off of Kiwi Farms as a fun group project with our own mythology? It could be called the Kiwilands or something.

The great Kingdom of Kiwi located somewhere it's great enemies include demons of distinct ***** and the overly sensitive pride demons from the 5th dimension.
Its exports mainly include high level sorcerers and rogues.
And is led by the glorious weredog .
He is a 95th level tinkerer his weaknesses include bad cheese and having to deal with his stupid subjects on a daily basis.