feartheminotaur
First Post
Thanks!
Yeah I think this is the way to go. When I think of a hex crawl designed as a dungeon, I'm thinking of not just a willingness to include gonzo content but:Try making the hex crawl the 'dungeon'. Isle of dread is a great example of this type of thing.
I'm going to try the 1 mile-per-hex scale, advocated by the 5e DMG. I like that at this scale you can assume that the PCs find whatever there is to find in the hex, and you can have different visibility ranges depending on terrain and weather. My hope is that this will make the exploration feel more concrete, rather than just wandering around until they bump into something interesting. A 5 or 6 mile hex is really quite huge. I'm going to shoot for less of a Lewis & Clark expedition feel and more Robin Hood stomping around Sherwood Forest. Nottinghamshire is in fact right about the size of a single sheet of paper with 1/4" 1 mile hexes.The scale for the map is 6 miles per hex, which I find nice because it gives potentially multiple hexes explored in a single day.
When I asked about short and long rests I was thinking about 1 hour/8hours vs. 8hours/1 week. Seems to me long rests can't be given every night or the party won't come anywhere close to 6-8 encounters per day.Short and long rests are handled by there being a random chance (I think I was doing 1 chance per short rest, and 2 per long rest, for differences in activity cycle between mid-day short rests and over night long rests, but I haven't checked my notes) of wandering monster, using the tables present in the module itself.
I think there's a logic to pairing high encounter difficulty variance with nightly long rests (the variance provides tension in the absence of resource attrition). I would like to control long rests though, so I think a rough measure of balance will be best. Easy enough: the farther away from civilization, the more dangerous the wilderness is.Balance and placement of encounters is basically that there is no balance - the wandering monster table is filled with the expected inhabitants of the area, weighted for commonality, and the specifically placed encounters in hexes are things that would be expected of the locale like nests of pterasaurs, bands of lizardmen, and the like (all expected on a jungle island). It is distinctly up to the players to decide whether to defeat the challenge presented by encountering island inhabitants with combat, evasion, negotiation, or some other tactic (all of which, besides not encounter things in the first place, are worth the same XP value to them).
Agreed.As for when to use the hex-crawl style, I find it works best when the goal of the adventure is exploration. If the characters are either looking to see what all is present in an area, or headed to some location they know a very general location of but not the route to take to arrive there or the specific location itself, a hex-crawl model is fitting. But if the characters are just trying to get to a known location, a different model is more suited for the travel portion (such as just describing the travels and having no encounters at all, or the basic 1-per-day + 1-per-night 18+ on a d20 is a random encounter model shown in the DMG).
What level was the party? Characters of very low levels are in a bit over their heads in most wilderness adventures. Higher level parties have the resilience and resources to be away from civilization longer.
Also the majority of hex crawls are very much exploration focused. The rhythm of play revolves around discovering things as new territory is explored. If your players are expecting a game with more intrigue & plot development then an exploration focused campaign typically features, then they may be confused. Such a campaign expects players to be more proactive than reactive. If your players are not used to this style, then they may feel that something is off.
Another important distinction to make is between outdoor adventuring and true wilderness. PCs may travel over unsettled areas in many types of campaigns. The party might answer a plea for aid from a nearby kingdom. To get there, they must pass through the Dread Willows, a dangerous forest. This is certainly outdoor adventuring but not wilderness exploration.
A true wilderness exploration campaign takes the PCs into territory unknown to the civilized world. There they may find lost civilizations, ruins, dungeons, and other wonders. The campaign itself is all about the adventuring it takes to discover these things. Unlike "known" dangerous lands, there is no research that can be done to find out about the wilderness, it must be experienced firsthand.
To make such a campaign interesting, the DM needs to prepare a suitable wilderness filled with interesting things to discover. Things that will be quite a big deal if the PCs ever make it back with evidence of them. The wilderness is a place to use all that wacky stuff that doesn't really fit into the explored and known world.
Our DM needed a break, so I pitched running a small exploration campaign in hexcrawl format to our group. They really liked the idea. Now, I guess I better start prepping it.
Everyone says use "Isle of Dread". Problem is we've used Isle of Dread already as an adventure (the central plateau hid a wizard's lair - he brought the group there via teleport kidnapping so he could use them in his 'experiments'. He got stabbed to death instead).
Any other good 1/2e adventures that anyone would recommend? I have a few of them in books or PDFs, but none of them are wilderness adventures like Isle.
Another way to avoid grind would be to have something happening on a timeline. You could introduce an orc invasion with random encounters: when an encounter is used, replace it with orc scouts. When you hit orc scouts, replace it with orc war band. When you hit war band replace it with an orc siege army. Or plot stuff on a calendar.
If you decide to concern yourself with that suggested guideline, that's fine - you don't have to though. I don't, and my games are enjoyable for me and my players anyways (because while I don't try to guarantee that 6-8 encounters happen before a long rest can be taken, I also don't guarantee that there won't be that many, or even more, encounters before a rest can be taken - so whether the party faces 1 encounter or 16 in a day, they behave in the same way where spending limited resources are concerned so they aren't steam-rolling those only encounter of the day situations by blowing more resources than they would if they knew for sure there would be 5-7 more encounters later).Seems to me long rests can't be given every night or the party won't come anywhere close to 6-8 encounters per day.
I disagree with both points, and assume that as usual your reasons for believing these statements true are entirely things which you cause by the way you choose to run the game since literally zero of the problems you've ever expressed having with 5th edition have been universally, or even widely, experienced by others.Isle of Dread doesn't work so well with 5E rules as the while 6-8 encounters a day thing doesn't work well with 5E hit point recovery.