[DF] Hex crawling

[Fister]

Originally Posted by Rasputin

Mostly, this is just a cut-and-paste of different rules with no play testing or consideration for how they work together.

Guilty as charged, but I had fun making it and learning more about hexcrawls in general. An expert I am not.

What makes the 6 mile hex the preferred scale?

I look forward to your Pyramid article being published.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Fister

What makes the 6 mile hex the preferred scale?

Well, it lets folks treat hexes as dungeon rooms, with empty/less populated rooms. Personally, I use a 5-mile hex; either way, a 5/6-mile hex is about the range of a man-sized animal. (The difference mainly is source. OD&D, AD&D, and the Judges Guild used 5-mile hexes; Basic/Expert D&D used 6-mile hexes. I learnt from Judges Guild products.)

But that's not my objection. Folks run campaigns quite well in 10/12-mile hexes; you use Justin Alexander heavily, and he runs many, many local games (well, local to him and me) with a 10/12-mile hex. Jürgen Hubert has run GURPS hex crawls at that scale. My issue is mixing apples and oranges. You're including Sorolla's work, which depends on 5/6-mile hexes wherein there are supposed to be empty room hexes, so to speak, and Alexander's, wherein there is supposed to be a major encounter in every hex. You can do an adaption (I had to accommodate both hex sizes for my Pyramid article), but you're forcing someone to keep track of both the 5-mile hex and the 12-mile hex.

Basically, I'm saying, "Pick one."

EDIT: I see now that you don't actually mix hex sizes, but the issue does apply, as you are allowing encounters from two hexes (or, 24 miles) away to show up, which is quite a ways away. Also, you're combining Alexander's (purely unplaced encounters) encounter system with Sorolla's (purely placed encounters). My way of doing this is to use Sorolla's, with the modification that a roll of 12 on a d20 (which is no encounter in his system) is replaced by a pure random encounter, which is then placed on the map. I did something like this in the article when I changed the system to 3d6 (or 2d6 for 10/12-mile hexes, which only goes one hex away rather than two); the mountain lion encounter he gives in the example is a perfect example of a minor encounter that I don't think should be placed beforehand. Admittedly, I use the d30 Sandbox Companion to handle road encounters, since in the inhabited areas characters aren't by any keyed encounters and simple things like markers or dead bodies or random bandits makes sense in those areas.

[Rasputin]

Oh, and don't fret: picking rules and bashing them together and thinking out loud online about them was pretty much how I learned how to hex crawl, too. :)

[Fister]

Thanks for breaking that down for me. Your explanation was really helpful. I'll definitely re-examine/edit my mash-up.

[Fister]

Wilderness Adventures Hexcrawl: Take 2

I went from one extreme, 12 mi hex, to another, the 3 mi hex, because I like the Harn maps published here and here. Harn uses a 5 league (3 mile) hex scale. The pdf maps were edited to add a hex numbering system.

I did add hex size references at the end in case one want to go with a different scale to include the single hex ring for the 10/12 mile hexes.

Sadly, all of this remains untested. I am between locations this year and so I can only participate as a player.