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<blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 5822166" data-attributes="member: 158">Having a bit of a thought exercise here, looking for ways that other GMs have solved this problem before.I'm planning an adventure path right now, and parts of it involve some exploration over rather large areas. Problem is this: Our group doesn't meet very often, and we meet for a limited time (about 4 to 5 hours). The traditional &quot;Hex Crawl&quot; representation of exploration suffers from two problems:1) It's monotonous in spots, with lots of areas without much going on3) It's time-consuming, eating a lot of time that the more role-playing players could spend interacting with NPCsHowever, hex-crawling does have the &quot;sandbox&quot; advantage -- namely, the players look at a map, they see a ravine, a swamp, a cave, what have you, and they say, &quot;Ooh, let's see what's in there.&quot; and they go find out.Compare this to traditional &quot;railroad&quot; plots, which cut out the &quot;boring&quot; parts of exploration, and promote Combat or NPC interactions, but remove the &quot;sandboxiness&quot;.So, I'm looking for some mechanics that invoke the feel of hexcrawl-exploration, but can still distill down to the &quot;important&quot; encounters without just being obvious &quot;these spots are the special ones on the map.The only thing I can come up with is something like the chase cards from Paizo -- lay out a series of cards face-down, a 5 x 5 array or something, maybe with the map printed on them, and whatever they want to explore they turn over - but that has its own problems, you might as well just show 'em the GM copy of the map. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Has anyone else worked out alternative means of representing exploration, without resorting to &quot;hexcrawl&quot;?</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Henry, post: 5822166, member: 158"] Having a bit of a thought exercise here, looking for ways that other GMs have solved this problem before. I'm planning an adventure path right now, and parts of it involve some exploration over rather large areas. Problem is this: Our group doesn't meet very often, and we meet for a limited time (about 4 to 5 hours). The traditional "Hex Crawl" representation of exploration suffers from two problems: 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 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. Compare this to traditional "railroad" plots, which cut out the "boring" parts of exploration, and promote Combat or NPC interactions, but remove the "sandboxiness". So, I'm looking for some mechanics that invoke the feel of hexcrawl-exploration, but can still distill down to the "important" encounters without just being obvious "these spots are the special ones on the map. The only thing I can come up with is something like the chase cards from Paizo -- lay out a series of cards face-down, a 5 x 5 array or something, maybe with the map printed on them, and whatever they want to explore they turn over - but that has its own problems, you might as well just show 'em the GM copy of the map. :) Has anyone else worked out alternative means of representing exploration, without resorting to "hexcrawl"? [/QUOTE]

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