D&D 5E West Marches: Navigation, Getting Lost & Player Mapping

[Obreon]

Hi All,

Looking for some guidance/opinions on handling wilderness navigation for an online VTT West Marches game. I'm already familiar with many of the standard hexcrawl approaches to this - particularly those on The Alexandrian. Generally these entail a more or less involved process of working out actual distance and direction travelled vs intended, and combine this with player mapping to create quite a complex navigation sub-game.

Now, on one hand, I recognise that having players piece together their own map from potentially imperfect information can contribute to an atmosphere of mystery and exploration, and it would be relatively easy to build up quite a cool player-created map over time on Roll20. Additionally, I really want the wilderness to feel unknown and dangerous, so handing out a perfectly-scaled map, even one that is slowly revealed from fog-of-war, seems like a cop-out. Finally, wilderness survival and resource management is going to be a part of this game, so I want rangers etc to feel like their skills have real value.

On the other hand, this is not a hexcrawl properly speaking: players are generally going to be pursuing a specific, single-session objective that was agreed as part of getting a party together in the first place. While I think it would be fun to have the occasional "derailment" where the characters encounter something unexpected on their way and completely change their plans (or have the change forced on them!), I don't think it makes sense for this to be the default mode of play in a West Marches game. The players should have some interesting strategic choices to make about wilderness travel that have real consequences, but I don't want the game to become completely bogged down in travel mechanics. Given the rotating cast - many of whom may be fairly casual/new players - keeping things exciting is going to be important to sustaining interest, and I think that's going to be challenging if the players spend half of each session trying to work out where they are and whether their map is correct.

Can people who have run West Marches-style games comment on how they ran this/what worked/what didn't? In particular:

1. Did you have players draw their own map (especially if running on a VTT)?
2. How did you handle navigation/getting lost? Impose a simple delay reaching a destination; or actually move players somewhere unintended and force them to work out where they went wrong?

Cheers,

 

[iserith]

My town-to-dungeon game, The Delve, was somewhat like what is described as a "West Marches" style campaign. A pool of PCs are in the town. They travel across the forest to an adventure location, delve it, then return to town at the end of the session. I ran it on Roll20 with 10 players and a party limit of four PCs. (Or was it 5? I can't remember. It was nearly a year ago and I'm getting old.)

To answer your questions:

1. No. I did not have the players draw their own map, even though I have professional artists in my group. I would expect that to turn into a map full of cartoonish penises. And while I would find that funny each and every time I looked at it, I figured it might be a distraction for others.

2. For navigation, I used the Activities While Traveling in the Basic Rules. The group would chose a pace (slow, normal, fast) for traveling. Then each PC would choose an exploration task - navigating, tracking, foraging, keeping watch, drawing a map, etc. There was a set distance between the town and the dungeon and your pace determined the amount of time it would take to get there. The hours it took modified a random encounter roll (1d20+hours, 18+ is an encounter). If the Wisdom (Survival) check to navigate failed, the trip could take a set amount of time longer which both made the chance a random encounter go up and also cut into the time they could delve and rest before returning to town. This aspect of play took probably less than 5 minutes to resolve (unless an encounter was indicated), but was full of meaningful decisions and trade-offs that impacted resource expenditure and risk. And they had to do it again when they returned to town from the dungeon.

So, in short, I recommend a system that offers real choices that matter and is resolves very quickly so you can get to the action at the adventure location.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

Instead of a Hex Crawl, I use a Point Crawl method inspired by the Hill Canton's blog. It's written for Basic/Expert D&D, but can be easily adapted to any edition.

Hill Cantons: Pointcrawl Index

I find the approach vastly superior because it is much easier to expand and does rely on me needing to detail hundreds upon hundreds of hexes that will probably never see the light of day.

 

[Obreon]

Thanks for the input guys. My game is a little different to [MENTION=97077]iserith[/MENTION] 's since it features a wider variety of locations and the wilderness is going to be a bigger part of the game, but I think I'm still heading towards a simplified approach. I'm certainly *not* going to do a proper "hexcrawl" with an extensive key. Here's my thinking at this point:

• Terrain + large scale visible features map loaded into Roll20 with Fog-of-war enabled, uncovered as players move.
• FoW only stays uncovered permanently if there's a PC dedicated to mapping (can't forage or look out for danger)
• No hexes - movement done by measured overland distance using Roll20 ruler/move tracking.
• Over time PCs will gradually learn of more and more interesting locations and their approximate location through play
• Travel to a particular location (possibly still covered by FoW) achieved by moving across the VTT map. No ending up in a different hex to what you intended in this game, no player mapping other than annotating the primary map
• Cross-country travel requires Survival checks, failure means the journey takes longer than normal but doesn't entail ending up in the wrong place
• Players frequently won't know exactly where a given site is; they may have to explore a limited area of the map systematically to find it unless it's large/visible from a distance
• Wilderness is divided into zones with their own character and encounter tables. Some random encounters will end up adding new "Points of Light" to the map, and many will connect to nearby existing "points", but in general the wilderness is just a big scary space between the places you want to go. For the sake of having a slightly more engaging graphical backdrop I will display it as a terrain map that gets progressively revealed, but there won't generally be much to be gained by attempting to search it systematically, so in practice it will function more like a points-of-light chart.

 

[iserith]

You might want to check out the new Advanced Fog of War feature in conjunction with the Drawing a Map exploration task. I haven't used it much, but I played in a game with it and it worked well. It reveals the map as you go, then leaves it revealed (except for objects on the Token layer).

As far as learning about new locations go, when I ran The Delve, the first part of the session was dedicated to "Town Tasks," which were modified Downtime Activities. Among those activities was Research. You might try something like that as a way to kick off the session. Like the exploration tasks, I set it up where it took about 5 to 10 minutes to resolve and you could use that to reveal specific locations in exchange for gold. The key is not to segue into a town adventure. That is against the spirit of the West Marches style game. I watched a West Marches actual play podcast for a while and it seemed like they spent all their time in town. I was like, uh, you're missing the point!

If I were doing an expansion on The Delve that included more adventure locations and more wilderness, I'd probably do something like create zones for each wilderness area, then set up game play in phases: Town Tasks, Travel, Exploration, Delving, Return Travel, End of Session. "Exploration" would be when the PCs get to the zone and then the exploration tasks would be different from the travel tasks and would chiefly be centered around turning up the interesting bits in a way that's quick to resolve and offers meaningful choices, risks, costs, and trade-offs. The goal here would be to keep everything but the delving down to about 30 to 45 minutes of real time, not including random encounter resolution. That feels about right for a 4-hour session to me.

Good luck!