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Old 11-13-2020, 07:49 AM   #11
Shadekeep
 
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True, it does seem like some of the original TFT quests might fit the descriptor, at least partially. My personal approach to this style of adventure uses this structure:
  1. Key locations where main quests and storyline development occur
  2. Terrain-based random encounters
  3. Victory conditions

The key locations can be towns on a region map, buildings on a city map, islands on an ocean map, or any other number of things. The terrain types provide a useful way of grouping random encounters by the kind of place they are likely to occur (and you can have ones which repeat across terrains, such as a group of bandits that might appear in forest, plains, desert, etc). This doesn't have to strictly be terrain, it can be any kind of categorical (building type on a city map, for example). And the victory conditions simply let the player know when they've achieved the goal ("find the resting place of the mystic chalice").

This is how I understand the concept, and is based on a number of excellent games and adventures I played many moons ago in this style. Such adventures fit the TFT format very well.
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Old 11-13-2020, 07:54 AM   #12
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To the best of my knowledge, there have only been a couple of games that so something structured with the concept of wilderness exploration. Outdoor Survival is an ancient mystery to most of us but in its day was one of Avalon Hill's all-time top sellers, and Original D&D suggests it is a required play aid. Effectively, the starting point for the rules was supposedly that you used this game for outdoor, hour-time-scale adventures and Chainmail for fights, though it is difficult to judge how much of this actually ever happened. The One Ring doesn't go to this level of detail, but does present its own take on travel as its own 'game within a game', including concepts like a structured categorization of different sorts of landscapes, exhaustion, exposure, hunger, etc. as threats and so forth. Off-hand, I can't think of any others that stand out though I'll bet there are some. I understand this issue is a matter of taste and the default when faced with something unusual like this is to forge ahead the way most of us have always done it — perhaps an encounter table and a nominal movement rate per day and otherwise just skip over travel as a boring part of the montage between fights. In my experience, most people think of this part of play as the 'fly over states' of the fantasy gaming world. Personally, I think that's a major missed opportunity, and that the same sorts of rules-inertia and familiarity are why most games have crumby rules for other major slices of play. But horses for courses and so forth.
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Old 11-13-2020, 09:01 AM   #13
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I'm on the fence about survival elements as well. While I have incorporated basic food and water rules in one adventure, I'm not sure it adds much to the experience. I toyed with making it even more involved by including a "forage" table that gave random results for foraging and hunting. But personally I don't find survival elements very compelling, as to me they get old fast. That being said, I can understand and respect those who do enjoy them. Possibly they should be included as optional?
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Old 11-13-2020, 10:25 AM   #14
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For some reason (nostalgia) I am remembering Grail Quest as a great example of a hex crawl - with outdoor encounters, castles to visit, and other details, but I'm not remembering everything so I think I'll break it out today and have a look at it to see what about it was so great in my memory
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Old 11-13-2020, 10:52 AM   #15
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This feels to me like something that belongs somewhere between a Hexagram article or a short section of a book of outdoor adventures.
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Old 11-13-2020, 12:43 PM   #16
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Might work as a Hexagram piece, "Survival in TFT" or some such. They're not keen on new rules so it would be more useful as a set of tables and the like that folks could just drop into play. Like the forage table would remain a table with extra columns for different terrains or environs. And the roll on the table is modified by talents, with some improving what is found/hunted.

Other tables might cover the availability and quality of water likely to be found, and of course random weather with the various effects they bring. You wouldn't really need to add any rules, just stuff to help flesh out and randomise what is already provided. And clarification on what benefits various talents (naturalist, woodsman, toughness, etc) bring to the table survival-wise.
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Old 11-13-2020, 04:34 PM   #17
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If I understand the concept, and remember the game correctly (it's been a long time since I've played it) the old MicroQuest (#7) Master of the Amulets would qualify as a hex crawl.
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Old 11-14-2020, 04:31 AM   #18
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I highly recommend checking out the title that Steve mentions in his update. This discussion has veered wildly off of what we're interested in exploring and has entered the realm of "no." We are not in search of new rules.
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Old 11-14-2020, 08:49 AM   #19
kommisar
 
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This sounds really really interesting. I am reminded of that old avalon hill game, magic realm, which is basically a "programmed" campaign. Now the combat rules were very hard to grasp but the exploration / encounter system was simple and ingenious and it was infinitely replayable.
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Old 11-14-2020, 01:21 PM   #20
Steve Plambeck
 
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While the extended outdoor adventure doesn't require any new rules per se, it's hard to envision how it would work (as a packaged module) without any guidelines, suggested techniques for handling those things that never come up in dungeon crawls, and tables of some sort.

Now if there's no intention of writing it all up as a module others can use, it becomes easy: the GM does what the GM wants as far as daily travel, supplies, weather, etc. Having once run a huge "campaign-within-a-campaign", where I turned the northern third of our big continent/world, all wilderness, into a large scale hex map the players were free to wander (purportedly the party of PCs were explorers on a quest to find a legendary, lost kingdom near the arctic circle). Running it was significant work of course, but even more work would be turning it into a publishable module anyone else could run -- it'd probably come out a 300 page manuscript and take the rest of my life to write it all up.
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