The witch's curse persists, but we stay silly. This is part 2 of Hex'd about Hexes, where I examine the procedures and maps of DnD's favorite* wilderness sandbox: the hexcrawl.
I complained about two iconic (and licensed) jungle adventures. Outside of the problematic depiction of native peoples, these modules have tedious crawls with long distances between points, frequent encounter rolls, and high odds of getting lost and wasting IRL time.
Let's take a look at look at some other well respected adventures:
Another Jungle island crawl! But significantly condensed, with each of its 25 hexes having 3 points of interest. While system neutral, the module provides a procedure for exploration.
The party gets 6 watches per day to Explore (find a point of interest in the current hex), Investigate (closely explore a point of interest), Travel (between hexes) or camp, presumably (though this isn't explicit). There is an encounter every time the players Explore or Travel. Lastly, players can get lost, though the book leaves it to the GM (and the game system) to determine how this occurs.
These options give the players a lot of choice! They can make decisions! "We found this den of something huge! Should we Investigate or look for something easier?" And the map is dense enough for each of these decisions to matter -- not "well north-east and north-west are the same because our destination is 6 hexes away."
While encounters are frequent, they add dynamism to exploring. Encounters have context; the lizardmen aren't just wandering around, they are outside a location, which they have an opinion on. Encounters are much less likely to be random fights. My only misgivings is the encounter table are nested 3d6 rolls, meaning the DM has to roll twice for an encounter, which could be streamlined but isn't too different from regular encounter rolls.
How much exploration the players can do in one session is really dependent on if they want to Travel of Investigate. The procedure does require some rolling from the DM (especially if getting lost is a factor in your system), but something happens each time an action is taken, so it doesn't feel as tedious.
The one question I have for Hot Springs Island is how difficult should camping be. Should players need a safe haven (a town or encampment)? How safe is the Dark at night? This can motivate players to gauge how far they can travel per day.
Deviating from our theme of jungle, we move into the swamp. Evils of Illmire is a similarly condensed hexcrawl with 19 hexes populated with ~15 dungeons (with 10-15 rooms roughly). Illmire is mostly system neutral, though says it is most compatible with OSE. Illmire has a light touch with its procedure: it specifies that hexes are 6 miles, taking 4 hours to cross and players have a 3-in-6 chance of finding a dungeon per day. Encounters are checked each time the party explores, travels, or camps.
With each hex having a dungeon, a 50% chance to find one per day is high, a 50% chance for nothing to happen is also high. The null case of dice rolls (you roll and nothing happens) should be avoided. That said, this procedure works in this case because each hex has a dungeon. Using this procedure for Isle of Dread would be maddening -- players would have to explore every hex multiple times to discover any dungeons. In this way, the procedure compliments the specific map it is written for.
Lastly, most of the hexes have some landmark feature that the players can engage with if they can't find a dungeon, those the dungeons are where the meat are. In Landmark, Hidden, Secret parlance, both Hot Springs Island and Illmire gate their most interesting content as Hidden points, accessible at the cost of time.
I'm cheating a little bit to include Hideous Daylight as it's not a wilderness sandbox, but closer to a dungeon crawl. It's 19 hexes, each filled with an encounter, a trap, something weird, or set dressing. The hexes are 1/2 mile, so players can see the entirety of the garden, and threats can see them too. This means there is no chance of getting lost and the players can immediately start making plans about where they want to explore ("Let's check out those statues in 18. But how should we get there?").
It takes 10-20 minutes to traverse a hex, and a 2-in-6 chance of a random encounter is rolled each time the party travels to a new hex or lingers. This is standard rolling for wandering monsters from any dungeoncrawl, which encourages players to be efficient in their movement; dilly-dallying drains resources via encounters.
Since they can see the entire crawl, they must decide on what juice is worth the squeeze. "The statues look interesting, but that's far away and we've already taken STR damage." This is opposed to crawls without obvious features. While players must make the same judgement about how far they can get, without being able to see an end destination, wandering monsters feel more like a tax than a risk. (This is especially true in systems (5e) where resting overnight alleviates all wounds).
Dolmenwood might be the loudest voice in the room, though I don't think I can fully do it justice while being brief. Some key procedures: parties are given "Travel points" per day based on their Speed. They can spend those travel points on moving between hexes or searching a hex for hidden features. This is similar to Hot Springs Island, but is more modular as terrain affects how many travel points are needed for an action. Players have an illustrated map of the region, so they can make a roughly informed decision of whether to travel or search, absent of other information.
Players can get lost, incentivizing them to stick to roads. The campaign book suggests two approaches to handling getting lost: telling the players directly where they've moved to instead or keeping that information hidden. Since the players have an illustrated map, the former makes more sense to me (though I have a strong bias against getting lost).
Lastly, one encounter roll is made per day. Most of these are "a group of creatures," so the Referee has to inject some dynaicism, though Dolmenwood is so richly detailed this shouldn't be too hard. In sum, the Referee rolls two dice (lost & encounter) while the players have the opportunity to make a plethora of macro decisions.
The map compliments the procedure - the roads between settlements might be the safest routes, but might not be the fastest. The rivers and lakes provide obstacles to navigate. While the hexmap is large, it's not sprawling; there is great depth to each hex, making each day of exploration meaningful. Likely, the party will spend much playtime in one hex, searching it, but the determined party can march through several hexes relatively quickly in IRL time.
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For all of these modules, there is some play to the crawl. Players can make informed decisions. There are fewer null cases where nothing happens. With points of interest condensed, players can get to exciting material quickly; the pace of play is improved. Next time, we'll take what we've learned and try to apply it to writing a new hexcrawl.
*See also: Point crawls
