Some of you may already be familiar with the Web DMs, but this is a really excellent overview of hexcrawl gaming.
There’s a bit of talk in the video about when hexcrawls are an appropriate structure vs. not appropriate for wilderness travel. My experience:
1. Exploration. (The “West Marches” approach.)
2. There’s meaningful consequences as a result of the navigation choices you’re making.
Anything else? Don’t run it as a hexcrawl.
When it comes to #2, the meaningful choices also need to largely be at the scale you’re running the hexcrawl at. If Moria vs. the Gap of Rohan is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes aren’t the right scale. If Old Forest vs. the Road to Bree is the meaningful choice, then 3-mile hexes would probably work well.
(You might also consider the benefits of a point-crawl here if the meaningful navigation choices are actually quite limited.)
This makes for an interesting corollary to my oft-repeated comment about keying hexes: If you’ve got a lot of empty hexes or if you’re routinely keying multiple areas of interest into each hex, that’s also an indication that you’re using the wrong scale for your hexcrawl.
Hexcrawl question: How do you deal with wrapping up sessions with parties of adventurers out in the wilderness?
I can see a few options:
– Ignore it. Next session the party is out in the middle of nowhere and might be an entirely different group. Easy, but maybe does some interesting stuff to verisimilitude and players being dropped into the middle of a situation they didn’t get themselves into *downwards thumbs*
– Require parties to return to town before end of session. Maybe has some weird effects on expedition length, constrains player choices in an annoying way.
– Get players to sort themselves into expedition groups; have those groups show up together and run themselves as separate expeditions. Completely defeats the point of running an open table.
– If the players present are ‘close enough’ to a currently existing expedition group, run it; otherwise get people to make new characters and start out a new group. Quickly leads to everyone having infinity characters.
– “Roll to escape the dungeon” tables like in one of your other posts on the subject, just with the wilderness instead of the dungeon. I kind of think multiple-session expeditions are desirable.
Anything I’m missing? Any better approaches? Currently we’ve just been ignoring the issue, but I’m not entirely happy with that approach.
Link to that post for randomizing the return to town. Bear in mind that you’re specifically talking about a problem with an open table. You can run a hexcrawl campaign for a single, long-term group, so this isn’t an issue which will affect all hexcrawl campaigns.
Multiple, steady, long-term groups exploring the same setting can also be rewarding. (Although, as you say, very different from an open table.)
Couple other things to consider:
– If I had a group that didn’t want to return to home base at the end of the session, I would allow them to stay out in the wild if the entire group could immediately schedule a follow-up session before their characters exited “lockdown” or two weeks (whichever was longer).
(Your value for “two weeks” might differ depending on how frequently you’re running sessions.)
See Campaign Time Management for a lengthier discussion of the issues involved here.
– Having players maintain stables of characters (so that they still have a character they can play even when one of their characters is “locked down” on one of these longer expeditions) will help resolve a lot of different potential problems.
– A different value of “ignore / don’t care” is to simply not worry about causality: Bob the Elf can simultaneously be out in the wilderness with Expedition A (which is meeting next week to wrap things up) and leaving today with Expedition B. Maybe Expedition B took place before Expedition A? Or after Expedition A? Whatever. You’ll eventually run into irreconcilable continuity issues, but as my friend Andrew says, “just care a little less”. It’ll still be fun.