D&D 5E Running Tomb of Annihilation as a hexcrawl at higher level

[CapnZapp]

I'm stuck in the situation now where they're just using default magic and skills to waltz through the jungle, so my option really is to make the jungle MEANER.

What I'm doing is:
- no long rests in jungle hexes (or badland or swamp hexes for that matter either). Rivers are your friend. (Coastal hexes too, mainly because otherwise the party would just sleep in a ship). This automagically makes the game work like intended - that is, the party will MUCH more often have to face those 6-8 random jungle encounters between long rests that the DMG expect. Explain this as part of the magical curse rather than mundane environmental factors - you don't want them to circumvent the challenge, you want them to overcome the challenge!
- all those niggling environmental rolls and checks reduced to simply "if you have heavy armor, you have at least one level of exhaustion, end of discussion". Don't encourage the meta-game of "how will we use skills and magic to dismiss the penalties so we can adventure just like back at the Sword Coast". Instead, make the players embrace the fact the jungle is different - just like the previous point, its penalties are something to be endured rather than dodged, or why even have them in the first place!?
- don't start the clock just yet - if players know they're on a timer, every encounter will be judged by a "can we skip it" mentality. And that's just anathema to a good old-fashioned hex-crawl, where the joy is in the exploration itself! So hold off Syndra and her quest. Ideally a player character will die half-way across the continent, and then you have yourself a much more personal and engaging timer!
- this means everybody gets to die.. once! You WANT raise dead to work on the player characters, since this means the wasting disease gets up close and personal. A better adventure hook can't be found! Saying "you need to roll up a new character" is a HUGE WASTE in my opinion.

 

[Nebulous]

What I'm doing is:
- no long rests in jungle hexes (or badland or swamp hexes for that matter either). Rivers are your friend. (Coastal hexes too, mainly because otherwise the party would just sleep in a ship). This automagically makes the game work like intended - that is, the party will MUCH more often have to face those 6-8 random jungle encounters between long rests that the DMG expect. Explain this as part of the magical curse rather than mundane environmental factors - you don't want them to circumvent the challenge, you want them to overcome the challenge!
- all those niggling environmental rolls and checks reduced to simply "if you have heavy armor, you have at least one level of exhaustion, end of discussion". Don't encourage the meta-game of "how will we use skills and magic to dismiss the penalties so we can adventure just like back at the Sword Coast". Instead, make the players embrace the fact the jungle is different - just like the previous point, its penalties are something to be endured rather than dodged, or why even have them in the first place!?
- don't start the clock just yet - if players know they're on a timer, every encounter will be judged by a "can we skip it" mentality. And that's just anathema to a good old-fashioned hex-crawl, where the joy is in the exploration itself! So hold off Syndra and her quest. Ideally a player character will die half-way across the continent, and then you have yourself a much more personal and engaging timer!
- this means everybody gets to die.. once! You WANT raise dead to work on the player characters, since this means the wasting disease gets up close and personal. A better adventure hook can't be found! Saying "you need to roll up a new character" is a HUGE WASTE in my opinion.

Yeah, I definitely want to make the jungle more dangerous and more of a threat that is not circumvented by the regular Dungeon & Dragons gameplay that really makes it quite trivial even at low level. I have already introduced The Curse and one player is a relative to the cursed woman so the timer has begun however they do not expect her to live long and I might very well just tell them soon that she died that way they can take a more relaxed pace through the jungle

 

[DEFCON 1]

- all those niggling environmental rolls and checks reduced to simply "if you have heavy armor, you have at least one level of exhaustion, end of discussion". Don't encourage the meta-game of "how will we use skills and magic to dismiss the penalties so we can adventure just like back at the Sword Coast". Instead, make the players embrace the fact the jungle is different - just like the previous point, its penalties are something to be endured rather than dodged, or why even have them in the first place!?

I do really like this way of thinking. Having a constant level of Exhaustion makes a lot of sense and accomplishes exactly what you're aiming for, which is something a PC just has to deal with and not trivialize away by looking for outs.

Were I to adopt this ruling for my own game if/when I run ToA... the one thing I'd really have to think about though is re-arranging the Exhaustion table. I actually use the Exhaustion table in replace of the 3 Deaths Saves table for my two CoS games... and I've found that Level 1 Exhaustion is actually one of the most irritating penalities of the entire chart. The 'disadvantage on all ability checks' pretty much kills the incentive of the player to do anything, especially when they are constantly under its influence. Exploration and Interaction just blows for the player when every single roll they make is Disad, Disad, Disad, Disad... I suppose that if a lot of combat encounters were expected to get dropped in all the time to break things up it wouldn't be as bad... but I know in CoS there have been several game sessions where my players *didn't* engage in combat, and as a result pretty much the player's entire night was just Disadvantaged rolling. Which really sucked from a player-enjoyment perspective, even if it was meant to punish the "PC".

With the ruling you're putting in place, I almost wonder if using the Exhaustion table as it stands is actually penalizing the PC the wrong way? What we're essentially saying is that if a player wants a bonus for their combat ability (heavy armor)... we're going to penalize them outside of combat (Disad on ability checks). Which to me feels kind of wrong. I almost think that *if* we're going to penalize a PC for gaining a combat bonus (higher AC), then the penalty coming from 1 level of Exhaustion should also be combat related. So I wonder if perhaps I might switch Levels 1 and 2 on the table, so that the heavily-armored individual is always moving at half-speed, and its only at Level 2 that they get Disadvantage on ability checks? (Or I might even go so far as move the non-combat penalty down to Level 3, so that Level 1 is half-speed, Level 2 is Disadvantage on attack rolls, and Level 3 is Disadvantage on ability checks.)

Truth be told... at the end of the day were I to incorporate something like this into the game for a ToA campaign... I almost suspect that I'd probably end up going in and jerry-rigging a whole new Exhaustion table altogether with different penalties, since I find "Just use Disadvantage!" as a penalty gets really repetitive when used for almost everything. I think there has to be other types of penalties that could be incorporated, especially ones that relate specifically to over-heating while jungle exploring.

 

[Onslaught]

Not sure if this will work for your game, but how about having the Soulmonger affect the terrain? In other words, Chult begins to actively work against the party - vegetation shifts, blocking paths; rivers flood just as they are crossing; waterways, trees, paths, even some ground landmarks move, making it very possible to become lost. Make Chult itself an enemy, or at least possessed by a malevolent force.

You could introduce this slowly. At first, they just notice some strange stuff with the vegetation. "Hey, wasn't that tree over there when we setup camp last night?" Over time the problems become more significant. This would give the characters yet another reason to address the Soulmonger, a reason that's not on such a tight timetable as the Curse (which I'm not a fan of).

This is why playing ToA in Eberron s so much fun: with the Travelers. USe, you can have an in-game explanation why they suddenly reached that amazing monkey bridge and why your jungle-savvy character gets lost in the jungles of Xen'drik