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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6829596" data-attributes="member: 6701872">I am actually running Isle of Dread right now, though the group playing it is also the group I watch a lot of TV shows with and we got behind on those so we have been trying to catch up rather than playing for a while.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.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.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).I use no house-rules, but I do use a variety of optional rules that don't actually have any specific impact upon hex-crawl style adventuring, so the only one I'll mention is that the player characters use the non-rolled option for hit points gained at each level, and I use the option of not rolling monster damage (just taking the listed average) other than additional dice added on a critical hit. More predictable survivability = more accurate ability to assess what is or isn't too much for the characters to handle.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).</blockquote>

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