Emulating exploration without the hexcrawl

[howandwhy99]

I take it you've used dungeon maps before for underground exploration. So my suggestion is you do the same for overland exploration and other terrain explorations as well.

Square grids work well for DMs underground. They help in tracking movement speeds and ground covered. Most don't do this anymore, but Move: # squares used to represent the number of squares PCs could travel underground in a Turn (while mapping, important!).

Hex grids work well for DMs above ground. They help in tracking the same kind of movement as underground only the time intervals are typically quite larger, everything from hours to 8 hour days, to forced march days can be broken down for ease. Fatigue factors in far more with long term travel, but describing surroundings isn't more difficult.

Describing environment is just like a dungeon. When the terrain changes from grasslands to woodlands, or from natural cave to polished worked stone, relay the info to the players and have the new environment's appropriate statistics near to hand.

Travel lines underground are almost always corridors, while overland travel lines are almost always surface trails. The first makes trailblazing very hard, basically tunneling through a solid to go somewhere else. The other makes trailblazing relatively easy, though other factors still can create difficulty like vegetation, unevenness, slope, etc. However, almost all travel by characters will still be along paths due to ease. Trailblazing is hard, but it has it's pay offs. Taking the road may be a greater distance, but it's usually faster and safer overall.

Encounters overland are like dungeons too. There are "rooms" or lairs where a certain percentage of the time the creatures will be living. There is also "creature territory" where Wandering Monster tables can help in figuring out who characters may Encounter when traveling through them. Just think of the latter here like a dungeon level. WMs are by regional/sublevel or level. Lairs are fortifications in these levels. Then use natural terrain barriers or unnatural constructions to divide each level and map them as is easiest for you.

Treasure is usually kept on encountered creatures or in lairs, and then often with more secure and/or covert positioning (aka traps and hidden caches/pockets). Treasure value matters most here for difficulty, but encumbrance factors in as well. Hiding gems in a trapped chest or secret compartment is one thing, hiding a water barrel is quite another. Treants hide seeds in their boughs too, but not the pond they've gathered around. That is, of course, unless the water barrel or the pond take on greater value somehow.

Tactics are going to be different overland, but not so much so. Enclosed spaces are easily sealed off, which can be good or bad depending upon what side one is on (aka sealed in). Surfaced spaces can use walls effectively too for fortification, but they work best in a ring if not a complete enclosure. Resources like air, water, and food are needed by most inhabitants, flora and fauna. Relatively immobilized fortifications are usually set up near these resources for ease and security (aka towns and cities).

Relationship maps are another kind of exploration altogether, but these are often the most interesting explorations for many players. They give people, places, and things a sense of existence due to history. Neighbors know of each other, they have a past and current attitude and, almost always, trade with each other. Who's saying or doing what about whom may seem like idle gossip/rumor, but when this stuff may potentially relate to the spatial maps rather than the mind maps, it can quickly become more important to know.

Insert adventure modules as desired and level appropriate. This is just like dungeons again, but with access to the more difficult (lower? higher?) levels requiring more difficult obstacles to overcome in order to reach them. For example, if the PCs can convince the bishop to divulge his shameful secret now, it would save the PCs from sneaking into the Enchanter's invisible tower and learning it later. Both overall challenges are about the same difficulty (the treasure being the same), but take different paths, so to speak, and expend different resources to get there.

 

[Nellisir]

The omnipresent wilderness hex map is only one way to depict the outdoors in a RPG. At its simplest level, the conventional RPG hex map is a pseudo-natural plan (or satellite) view of an outdoor area with a fixed hex grid laid over the top. The hex bears no relationship to natural features. Each hex can be viewed as a "room", the inhabitants of which are determined by a random die roll.

This is "hexcrawl" adventuring at its most basic and elementary: hundreds of rooms of identical sizes, with randomly generated monsters. No one would argue this is interesting, compelling, or meaningful dungeon design, but it's somehow transformed into the epitome of adventuring when the base map depicts a wilderness instead of a dungeon.

The concept remains the same regardless of hex size, or if encounters are determined by time rather than distance (in which case each hex or room is a span of time rather than space).

The concept begins to acquire some versimilitude if the hexes, or rooms, or encounter areas, are flexible in dimension, each one encompassing a homogeneous region. One hex might be 40 miles of unremarkable woodland, while the second is a dangerous river crossing barely a half-mile wide, the third a treacherous mountain pass ten miles long, and the fourth hex being the night of the full moon.

The order of hexes isn't important: characters can go from the "river crossing hex" to the "mountain pass hex", or upstream to the "bridge hex", or downstream to the "waterfall hex". There's still player choice; it just becomes important.

 

[howandwhy99]

yeah, to be clear:
I do not do hex crawl. I use transparency overlays with hexes on them to measure the distances on the map. These are typically trails the PCs are following or blazing.

They're also useful for stuff like random teleport mishap results, but the overland rooms are not really the hexes themselves (barring gygaxian room making shapes)

 

[Nellisir]

yeah, to be clear:
I do not do hex crawl. I use transparency overlays with hexes on them to measure the distances on the map. These are typically trails the PCs are following or blazing.

They're also useful for stuff like random teleport mishap results, but the overland rooms are not really the hexes themselves (barring gygaxian room making shapes)

And to be clear, I didn't think you did. I liked your post.

I'm in my 3rd year as a graduate student studying landscape architecture. There is a huge amount of mapping involved, most of it not focused on traditional landscape features.

The more I think about it, the sillier hexcrawl wildernesses seem. What is a hex? Essentially it's a room with a tree (or mountain, or whatever) and 6 exits. Conceptually, there's no difference between hex wilderness and grid wilderness. One has 6 exits, the other has 4. I'm sort of digging the idea of triangles at this exact moment. The number of exits really has no meaning, and the dimensions of the hex are likewise meaningless, so the question becomes, what has meaning in the game, and how do you depict it?

 

[Hussar]

Y'know, if you had a Cataan board, you could do this pretty nicely. Maybe.

 

[gamerprinter]

Personally, I've never needed a hex map to describe overland adventuring. All I need is a map (I make maps professioinally) with multiple interesting locations on it. Then I generate a random monster chart for general areas, or when the party doesn't travel to a specific mapped location. If the party nears the mountains, the lake, or other specific terrain different areas, random charts change, etc. I also use weather charts with temperature variances, various inclement weather, etc. If I use a grid at all, it's only to depict distances on the map, not that this square contains anything different to the next square, as I never use squares or hexes as defined areas for specific encounters.

If the storyline needs the PCs to meet someone, or get in a fight with a specific BBEG, then I put it in their path, where ever they happen to go, just to move the story along.

I can understand others using it, I just never needed some arbitrary grid to determine different places on the map.

 

[pemerton]

Do a montage. Describe some things that happen on the way briefly. Stop the montage from time to time to have something "significant" happen to the players. Come up with some possible encounter ideas and throw them in the montage.

Playing more off the cuff is a great Gm technique, not a situation to be avoided.

There's no reason to assume that it's a "linear railroad."

Great posts, and I find it very telling that you get responses that immediately characterise your approach as a linear railroad.

I think off the cuff can have huge advantages in not railroading, as you can tailor the montage, the encounters, etc to reflect whatever it is that the players are having their PCs do. It's a very dynamic approach to play.

One mechanical issue in off the cuff D&D can be if the players expect to be using divination magic to "outsmart" the GM (in the style of classic dungeoneering play), which is a style of play that tends to rely on the map being predrawn and the GM having already committed to various creatures and treasures being in various locations. But that is a fairly specialised approach to play, and so not a general reason to avoid or be worries about off the cuff GMing.