You ever seen a Wizard Dominat @ low LvL?

[Majoru Oakheart]

That is an incredibly boring way to handle overland travel. You might as well bypass all that and get right to the dungeon.

Well, most adventures at the time simply had an "overland random encounter table" that said to roll on it X number of times per day depending on how dangerous the area was. We had DMs who followed written adventures precisely and used them as inspiration for their own adventures when they wrote them.

Which meant, on average we fought 1-2 encounters a day with a possibility of 1 non-combat encounter a day that didn't require spells to pass. After 3 or 4 random encounters, DMs would stop rolling for the rest of the voyage to prevent the entire story from being bogged down by unrelated encounters.

Or, you can do an actual hexcrawl, with the possibility of interesting encounters (violent or non-violent,)exploration, adventure sites, ruins, side-treks, villages, flying witches, environmental hazards, etc., etc.

See above. We mostly didn't want random encounters to get in the way of whatever storyline we were on. I remember one time we had to travel for 3 weeks to warn the king of the impending invasion of his country. The DM wanted the feeling of traveling through dangerous lands so wanted to run a couple of random monster encounters but didn't want the entire session to end without the roleplaying portion with the king.

So, even if we found a side trek or something else we'd likely bypass it since we were in a rush to get where we were going.

 

[Hussar]

The thing about hexcrawls is that they generally don't work on a timeline. You're exploring in a hexcrawl - that's generally the point. If you are traveling from A to B, that's not a hexcrawl. The point of the journey is to get to B, not to sightsee along the way.

 

[Sunseeker]

The thing about hexcrawls is that they generally don't work on a timeline. You're exploring in a hexcrawl - that's generally the point. If you are traveling from A to B, that's not a hexcrawl. The point of the journey is to get to B, not to sightsee along the way.

I guess that depends on how you define a journey.

 

[Hussar]

I guess that depends on how you define a journey.

Again, fair enough. But, I'm responding to DMKastmaria's point about hexcrawling. If the point of the journey is the journey itself, then fair enough, drop in all sorts of side treks and whatnot. But, if the main meat of what the PC's are doing is to get to point B, then side treks are just exercises in frustration.

"We must get to the Color Animal Inn by the next full moon to stop the inn keeper from turning into a werewolf and killing everyone!"

"Oh, wait, hey, there's an abandoned monastery over there, let's spend the next day checking it out."

Generally not the point of play. I love hexcrawls. I really do. But, like anything else, they're a specific tool, not the solution to everything.

 

[Sunseeker]

Again, fair enough. But, I'm responding to DMKastmaria's point about hexcrawling. If the point of the journey is the journey itself, then fair enough, drop in all sorts of side treks and whatnot. But, if the main meat of what the PC's are doing is to get to point B, then side treks are just exercises in frustration.

"We must get to the Color Animal Inn by the next full moon to stop the inn keeper from turning into a werewolf and killing everyone!"

"Oh, wait, hey, there's an abandoned monastery over there, let's spend the next day checking it out."

Generally not the point of play. I love hexcrawls. I really do. But, like anything else, they're a specific tool, not the solution to everything.

After just finishing Diablo 3, I agree. Having dungeon crawls that have no real value to the game other than just existing are fine in a limited amount, and in limited scale. But players really shouldn't be finding a twenty-mile-long cavern every other footstep. I generally feel that if something exists in the game, it should usually serve some greater purpose. Perhaps that abandoned church will hold the Holy Moonstone which will cure even a fully-transformed Werewolf. Maybe that cavern has the Blood Amulet, which will turn the wearer into a vampire(so we can have a cool vampire vs werewolf battle!). But generally speaking, I won't have anything in my game that doesn't at least lead to something bigger down the road.

Crawls for the sake of crawls are fairly tedious.

 

[nnms]

"We must get to the Color Animal Inn by the next full moon to stop the inn keeper from turning into a werewolf and killing everyone!"

"Oh, wait, hey, there's an abandoned monastery over there, let's spend the next day checking it out."

Generally not the point of play. I love hexcrawls. I really do. But, like anything else, they're a specific tool, not the solution to everything.

I haven't read the whole thread, so sorry if my comment is missing something you already covered.

If you're doing a hexcrawl with the above goal, wouldn't you note the existence of the abandoned monastary for a possible adventuring locale to visit after the werewolf issue is dealt with?

I've never gotten the impression of hex crawling that the order you do things is any way impacted to the degree that you'd abandon a time sensitive matter to pursue a local distraction.

As far as I know, that's not one of the attributes of a hexcrawl/sandbox approach. Though I guess you could mandate that you can't leave a hex until you've cleared it, but I've never seen that before.

 

[Ratskinner]

Crawls for the sake of crawls are fairly tedious.

Eh...I dunno. One of the best campaigns I ever ran started as a little hexcrawl to kill some time in the dorm. It wasn't some insanely-packed world of adventure (although I was heavily into magic items...if they didn't want me to use it, why put it in the book?) most of the hexes were...Forest...Forest...Jungle... etc. The players (paranoid as they are) tended to come up with all sorts of intricate plots, schemes, etc. to explain all the things they ran into. (Even wandering monsters that they knew were wandering monsters.) Eventually, I just adopted the ones I liked best and slowly...voila...a full-fledged campaign broke out. It was one of the most intricate, involved, player-engaging things I ever ran. (Kind of a blow to the artistic ego, that.) Its an experience that, to this day, throws a whole bag of monkey-wrenches into my mental machinery about how these games are supposed to work.

 

[dammitbiscuit]

Eventually, I just adopted the ones I liked best and slowly...voila...a full-fledged campaign broke out.

Have you blogged or posted more about this elsewhere?

Don't wanna derail the thread, but do wanna hear more.

 

[satori01]

A 12th level 1e MU has 11d4+1 hp (+/- any modifier for constitution). A magic missile cast by a 1st level MU does 1d4+1 points of damage. In 1e, a 12th level MU is in no danger of dying from a single magic missile cast by a 1st level MU (unless, of course, he was severely beaten up ahead of time and the magic missile just pushed him over the edge of 0hp).

I was not as lucid and articulate as I would have liked when I made this thread. I was attempting to reference that Two 12th Level Magic User could conceivably kill each other trading Magic Missle spells, and that 1st level Magic Users trading a single MM spell most likely would both die.


I do find it interesting that opinion seems to converge that the 3E Wizard with 3 spells per day and Color Spray, Charm Person, could dominate an entire adventure.