Emulating exploration without the hexcrawl

[Storminator]

Skill challenge.

Narrate a bit, describe the options, let a PC make a decision and follow it up with a roll. Roll leads to new narration. Repeat.

"Failure" leads to some event/location not of the PCs' choosing, "success" leads to them choosing the event/location.

As fast or as slow as you'd like, and as open ended as the PC decisions.

PS

 

[Janx]

Skill challenge.

Narrate a bit, describe the options, let a PC make a decision and follow it up with a roll. Roll leads to new narration. Repeat.

"Failure" leads to some event/location not of the PCs' choosing, "success" leads to them choosing the event/location.

As fast or as slow as you'd like, and as open ended as the PC decisions.

PS

how would PCs not end up in the square of their choosing?

Generally, explorers were fairly decent at going the general direction they chose.

I would suspect natural course deviation to be more likely in:
dense forests at night (confused, lost people)
natural terrain barriers causing people to walk around them (uncrossable rivers, lakes, ridges/mountains)

But relatively passable terrain, is pretty easy to keep going the same direction without dramatic drift issues. Note, I don't mean walking a perfect straight line over the hills and through the woods. But not so bad that we thought we were headed North but have been bearing 33 degrees for the last day.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Sorry for skipping some good conversation, but I had an idea to expand on my earlier post... just not the time to get back online

Upthread I suggested two scales of maps {macro and regional} and then cards for each hex.
My new thought is two more sets of cards for each region, one for terrain and the other for weather.

Both terrain and weather can modify the time it takes to travel through a hex, thereby increasing chances of encountering nasty things.

The more I think of this, the more I would like someone to publish this sort of thing so I could buy it {cause I am too lazy to make something this large myself }

===

while I like the idea of a skill challenge, just one skill challenge to get from one city to the next doesn't give the feel of distance. So perhaps a skill challenge per hex {or group of hexes} to make it through without encounters.

 

[Storminator]

how would PCs not end up in the square of their choosing?

Generally, explorers were fairly decent at going the general direction they chose.

I would suspect natural course deviation to be more likely in:
dense forests at night (confused, lost people)
natural terrain barriers causing people to walk around them (uncrossable rivers, lakes, ridges/mountains)

But relatively passable terrain, is pretty easy to keep going the same direction without dramatic drift issues. Note, I don't mean walking a perfect straight line over the hills and through the woods. But not so bad that we thought we were headed North but have been bearing 33 degrees for the last day.

I'll string together the extreme examples of failing the skill challenge:

You want to head north. You're in moderately wooded terrain, walking on the side of a hill that slopes down to the east. One PC fails a nature check, so the group is heading a bit too far east. The group fails a group endurance check, so the whole group tends to walk downhill over time, and ends up heading even farther east, compounding the error. Then, coming upon and attempting to cross a river, one PC fails the athletics check and gets swept down river. The rest of the group swims after the lost PC, eventually saving them and washing up on the east bank of the river, far down stream.

You've failed the skill challenge, and you're off by one hex to the east, on the wrong side of the river.

Seems like it would be pretty easy to either stretch or compress the time/distance per challenge to get the pace you want for your exploration. You could even do something like 1 challenge for 3 hexes of plains vs 1 challenge for 1 hex of woods vs 1 (higher complexity) challenge for 1 hex of mountains.

I've done a couple dungeon crawls where all the exploration part was covered by skill challenges, and it worked out pretty well.

PS

 

[Nellisir]

I don't know if this helps or not, but the best idea I've heard about wilderness exploration is to treat each distinct area as a dungeon "room".

 

[Niccodaemus]

To me, the answer to the whole problem is to provide meaningful choices along the way.

Locals can warn that while the road is quicker through the valley, there are bandits or undead to be reckoned with. "You don't want to get caught in there at nightfall. If it starts raining, the mud will slow you down. Of course, if you take the high trail, you'll be easy pickins for the wyverns."

In other areas, they can have the option of sticking to the trail or using the river.

Use the example from Lord of the rings... do we take the gap of Rohan around the mountains, the pass over the mountains, or the mines under the mountains?

The more options and choices, the more will be the sense of exploration.

Also, have small adventures along the way... villages that need heroes, or are luring the naive into traps a la the Wicker Man.

 

[Quickleaf]

[MENTION=158]Henry[/MENTION]
How much real world time do you want this travel to take up, a couple minutes, an hour, one session every now and then?

Also how random do you want these encounters to be? For example, would a bunch of tables called "random terrain features of the natural world" meet your needs? Or would you like something tightly crafted around the story and mythos of the Jade Regent AP?

 

[Reynard]

Jade Regent travel isn't really hexploration -- it's essentially a railroad with random encounters. I am running this AP myself and am trying to figure out ways to tackle the travel. A few options present themselves:

1) Ignore it. It's just filler anyway. Move from one "zone" to the next with just some narration.

2) use it as an XP buffer. The AP is kind of XP stingy so encounters and mini-adventures "on the road" can add some needed XP and/or treasure to bring the PCs up to par.

3) Make it the focus. Granted, this is the most work intensive, but if you run the AP in such a manner that the getting there is the point of the thing, you don't lose anything spending a lot of time on the travel part.

For my own part, I'm not actually particularly happy with the AP as a whole. We are early in yet, so I am going to offer them the deed to Brinewall and turn it into a Kingmaker style campaign. If they don't bite, I'll tend toward #2 above -- the travel will not really matter but I can use it to run side quests, etc...

 

[Rogue Agent]

To be clearer, it's Jade Regent Adventure Path -- and there's a LAAAARGE amount of travel in that module -- thousands of miles of it. If you're not familiar with it, it's Paizo's take on the Journey of Marco Polo, but via the North Pole.

I'm trying to avoid: "You make it to Magnamar -- and this happens. You make it to Kalsgard -- and this happens. You make it to..."

Hmm. Okay, I don't know the Jade Regent adventure path, so I may be completely off-base. But the Marco Polo reference makes me think that the key elements are:

(1) Keeping the caravan safe
(2) Trailblazing

In other words: Marco Polo had a rough idea of where he was going, but he didn't have a precise set of travel plans.

Again, not knowing the particulars of the adventure path, I'm imagining that the PCs know their road will lead them to Magnamar and Kalsgard, but may not know exactly how to get there. (Like, they might know that Kalsgard is "somewhere north of Magnamar", but they don't actually have directions.)

Thus, we could make the exploration less about "tell me which direction you're moving on the hex map" and more about "tell me how you're going to figure out how to get to Kalsgard".

Asking around Magnamar might get you something like: "Old Man Felnore once claimed to have gone all the way to Kalsgard. He lives about a fortnight west of here now." And then they go and check that out and maybe Felnore has been kidnapped by goblins.

Or they reach a new frontier and there's a skill challenge of some sort to figure out how to avoid the local bandits. And maybe that will involve some hard choices: Journey three weeks out of your way to avoid the bandits; or cut through their territory fast and hope you make it (or can defend yourselves).

So, basically, to generalize: I would break the journey down into a sequence of "legs". (In doing this, I would generally avoid any kind of "branching" -- that's usually a ticket for lots of wasted prep.) Instead of each leg being about movement on a hex map, you make each leg about figuring out the leg actually is: Knowledge checks. Paying for local maps of higher quality.

Probably the biggest thing is including consequences for why delays or wrong paths or getting lost suck. Some of that can be generic; a large chunk of it will probably be contextual to the events of the adventure path.

 

[Water Bob]

1) It's monotonous in spots, with lots of areas without much going on

3) It's time-consuming, eating a lot of time that the more role-playing players could spend interacting with NPCs

Simple answer: Pre-roll/Pre-determine a lot of stuff--as much stuff as you can.

This way, you're exactly prepared for the upcoming scenario, and it moves smooth as glass.

In your game, you can quickly move them from point A to point B, all the time keeping the game fun and intersting.

However, hex-crawling does have the "sandbox" advantage -- namely, the players look at a map, they see a ravine, a swamp, a cave, what have you, and they say, "Ooh, let's see what's in there." and they go find out.

Another simple answer: Even in a sandbox, you, as the GM, can pre-plan and prepare a lot of stuff that you know is going to happen in the next game sessions.

Where the PCs have choice (they should always feel like they've got 100% choice), make up some quick contingency plans.

I usually set up some type of combat session as a contingency plan. Combat takes a lot of time, so I can eat up the rest of the game session with a contingency combat, buying myself time to develop the area the PCs want to go during the next game session.

I've got a game happening tomorrow. I expect to spend the entire session inside the dungeon, but there's nothing stopping the PCs from leaving the dungeon and going cross country at any moment.

My contingency plans are thus: If the PCs exit the cave and go North or West, they'll run into an enemy squad. Combat.

If they go east, they'll backtrack over land that they've already traveled. I've got a combat scenario for 'em

If the go west--same thing--I've a scenario that will buy me time to develop that direction.

I expect them to go south, so I've spent a little more time developing that way. Once I see which way the Players are going during our next game, the direction will get even more fleshed out.