I recently participated in a Blogwagon, writing a hex for a Christmas themed hexcrawl. Hexcrawls have been on my mind after finishing a small hexcrawl campaign with my players. One take-away I had was that how the procedure interacts with the map is significantly more important than the contents of the map. A given map-and-procedure combo answer these core questions differently:
- Is the crawl a "mini-game" to get to one location or meant to sustain multiple sessions?
- Are hexes being used to solely measure distance or is there play to travel?
- How many hexes should a group get through in a session of play?
- How much time should they spend in 1 hex?
The answers to these questions should inform each other and how the hex map is constructed. To unpack this more, let's take a look at some D&D Brand(TM) hexcrawls.
Isle of Dread
The OG wilderness exploration module and first TSR hexcrawl. It's using 6-mile hexes with a sparsely populated map (24 keyed locations in >200 hexes) and a slightly modified exploration procedure from Expert D&D - players map "1 hex of terrain in every direction when they pass through a hex," improving the odds of the players actually finding something.
Some rules: Movement in the wild is 1/5 of a move per turn in miles (a fighter with a 90 ft move can travel 18 miles in one day as a given example). However, jungles, mountains, and swamps reduce speed by 1/2. Normally, this would prompt some decision making on route,* but Isle of Dread is entirely jungles, mountains, or swamps, so a 90ft move fighter is always going 1.5 hexes. Additionally, players have a 3-in-6 chance of getting lost in the jungle per day.
Parties with a guide can't get lost, making a guide basically mandatory. One of the villages on the Isle offer explicit guide services, but they will only travel ~a quarter of the way north. Presumably, other friendly humanoid tribes would offer guides, though this isn't explicit in the text. Largely, the players are left to get lost.
Lastly, the DM checks for encounter twice, during the day and during night. Jungles have a 4-in-6 chance of an encounter, so basically one per day.
Let's see an example of this in play:
The players have just run away from a difficult combat with the Rakasta Camp (9), fleeing northwest. They decide to press onwards. The players break camp and the caller decides to move northeast. The DM rolls twice, once for an encounter (4, yes) and once for getting lost (another 4, no). The encounter they roll is 2 dryads. The DM decides that 9 miles rounds up to 2 hexes.
DM: You move 6 miles northwest into more hills. You can see west to northeast is jungle but to the east are hills. Suddenly, you see 2 dryads... [Encounter]
Caller: We continue north.
DM: Northwest or northeast?
Caller: They're both jungle? I guess it doesn't matter - northwest.
DM: You travel into the jungle. All around you is more jungle. Night falls, and you need to make camp. [The DM rolls for another random encounter, but the party is safe tonight. Day breaks and the DM makes 2 more rolls. The players are safe today but get lost. Rolling a die, the DM decides the party will veer west].
Caller: We heard there was a plateau in the center of the Isle, so we'll keep moving northeast.
DM: [marks that they move NW instead]. Ok, You move northeast and see jungle all around you, some tree houses to your west (10).
Caller: Interesting! We'll go investigate. [Play continues].
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Some takeaways: there's a lot of dice rolling on the DM side and none on the player's side. Once the players pick a direction, there's no reason for them to deviate. Getting lost was a boon in this case, as it actually gave the players something to interact with. But this process is tedious (especially if the players are changing ideas on where they're going based on new information; in the given example, the Caller is not discussing with the group. This gameplay is largely repetitive and lacks monotonous.
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Tomb of Annihilation
36 years after Isle of Dread, WotC released Tomb of Annihilation, a hexcrawl through the jungles of Chult. With a set-up similar to Isle of Dread, surely, the largest TTRPG publisher wouldn't make the same mistakes as they did over 30 years ago?**
The hex map has >300 hexes with ~27 points of interest. It takes 30+ hexes to move from the starting city to Omu, a key location. Players move 1 hex per day, or 2 hexes if they take canoes. Moving fast increases your speed by 50% (but makes you more easily surprised) and moving cautiously cuts your speed in half (but means you can avoid encounters). This pace is incredibly slow -- it would take the party 6 days (12 hexes) to reach the nearest point of interest by boat if they take the most direct path from the starting town.
Each day the DM rolls three (3!!) encounter checks, an encounter occurring on a 16 or higher on a d20 (25% of the time). Per day, this means there's a 58% chance of an encounter. 6 days out from the starting town, we can expect an average of 3.5 encounters. 5e's combat runs slow (combats take me at least 30 min, typically 1h+), which would mean if each encounter was a fight,*** a single session would essentially be "you travel to this point, and that's it." (if they even make it, some points are even further away).
The party can also get lost if their navigator fails a DC 15 Survival check. They learn where they have (wrongly) moved to when they succeed this check. Let's be generous and say they have a +7 to Survival, difficult to achieve at low levels, they are still failing 35% of the time. So you can expect ~1/3 of your days traveling to be essentially wasted, which means more encounters. Learning where they got lost when they succeed on a check minimizes the amount of remapping and frustration players can feel at the table.
Lastly, there is some mention of resource management under "dehydration," where players need 2 gals of clean water per day. "Create Water" is a level 1 spell that solves this problem.
Let's consider play:
Caller: We know our destination is south, so we move south.
DM: Great, let me roll 4 dice (3 for encounters, 1 for getting lost). [No encounters are rolled, they didn't get lost]. You move south into more jungle. Mark off water as you camp for the night.
Caller: Ok, we move south the next day.
DM: Alright, let me roll 4 more dice again.
Etc.
This feels mind-numbingly tedious. And this is the case where nothing happens! Imagine if there was an encounter! Or if they got lost! Additionally, the map of Chult is so large, it's easy to miss points of interest by just wandering past 1 or 2 hexes. These are the same problems as in Isle of Dread, but somehow worse.
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Largely these hexcrawls are flawed as the procedures are not in communication with the map itself. Tomb's 3 encounter checks per day would be perfectly fine if you could move through 6 hexes per day. Or if each hex had a point of interest and the map was twenty times smaller. Isle of Dread has players move at 1.5 hexes per day, which is just inconvenient for mapping/tracking. Despite 30 years of TTRPG innovation, both of these modules have the same approach. Circling back to our core questions, let's examine them:
There is a disconnect between questions 3 & 4 -- if players shouldn't spend a ton of time in these hexes, then moving through them should be fast so they can actually get to content. These two examples are representative for many hexcrawls in this style: large empty spaces meant for players to wander around in, going through repetitive motions, dragging the game to a crawl. And it's easy to fix!
Both modules even mention ways to improve this experience: pulling back on the random encounters. The authors know their procedure isn't functional. If you're writing a module that has an evident flaw in the procedure, don't tell the DM to adjust as needed, fix the procedure. I would also recommend removing the ability to get lost -- while iconic, the challenge is largely out of the players hands (succeed on a roll) or easily solved (hire a guide). And the punishment for failure is out-of-game consequence of boredom, rather than interesting in-game consequence.
This ran a little long, but I think it's worth going into detail since these two modules are iconic examples of hexcrawls (I'd reckon Tomb is what most 5e players think of when they think "hexcrawl"). Next time we'll look at modules where the procedure plays more with the hexmap. And we'll see if someone can make a engaging jungle island... (Spoilers: yes)
*The decision making here can just be algebraic without a well-designed map. It boils down to "which route is fastest?" which is not a decision, but an optimization.
**I will confess to being a bit of a 5e hater, and WotC specifically. I'm trying my best to be objective and not just dunk on them.
***Looking at the encounter table, most of the encounters are "this animal is pissed off you woke up with your nose still attached to your face."
