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Message: <blockquote data-quote="!DWolf" data-source="post: 8101875" data-attributes="member: 7026314">I am only passingly familiar with book 2, but I believe it involves social encounters with elves and then a hex-crawl?I’m guessing that you’re in the hex-crawl portion of the game since this is one of the top hexcrawl complaints!I don’t know the specific details of the module - but most crawls involve infrequent  random encounters and most people have no clue how to do a random encounter (they just have them burst out of the bushes and attack) and so the games end up a slog filled with meaningless fights. Is this correct for the module?  I have found that hexcrawling and time constraints don’t actually work that well together: the hexcrawl wants you to take a lot of time to fully explore stuff while the time constraint is telling you the opposite. The key in this situation, I think, is that the hex portion should be hidden from the players (they see the map without the hexes) and all the interesting locations linked by the “three-clue-rule” from the Alexandrian. This gets rid of the “explore every hex mentality” and focuses the party on moving through an interesting local. You then spice up the trip between the locations with correctly done random encounters (that is each pays attention to fundamentals like foreshadowing, motivations, giving the characters agency by letting them use their skills to bypass or otherwise interact with the encounter, integrating the encounter into the environment/narrative, consequences of the encounter, etc.). In a published module you can even use set encounters in nearby hex’s as “random” encounters! The ideal I strive for in kingmaker is that the players can’t tell if the encounter was part of the prewritten story or not. I like the exploration mode precisely because it address this problem. It lets players make interesting decisions between the set pieces (usually dungeons in hexcrawls) and, once in the set pieces, lets you make interesting decisions on how you approach each encounter.Edit: I am assuming that the objective of the entire adventure is to stop the evil ritual, not just a section of the hexcrawl.</blockquote>

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