The Importance of Hex Crawl Agency

I discovered the "OSR blogosphere" some 8-9 years ago and the insights I gained elevated my approach to running dungeons and hex crawls.  We stand on the shoulders of giants; those early bloggers articulated important tenets on running games that maximized player choice, the essential foundation for a fun game.  The most important tactic I've internalized is the need to radiate information as a dungeon master to enable player agency.  It becomes a virtuous cycle:  players have some information, players make meaningful choices, choices lead to action, action lead to more information, and so on.  The game begins to propel itself.

An example that stuck with me was the meaningless of a typical dungeon intersection*.  Which way should the players go?  Absent useful information, going left or right is basically a coin flip - a random choice.  This is how dungeons become boring.  Instead imagine the characters are at the intersection, but to the left wafts an off-putting odor like stale vinegar; a slimy trail leads off into the darkness.  To the right they can hear the faint echo of maniacal laughter drifting from some distant hall.  It's not much information, but now it's better than a coin flip - they have a basis.  If the players previously heard a rumor about the deranged murderer Smiling Jack, who haunts this level, even better.

The same techniques apply to the hex crawl but more so.  During our first Chult session, the players gained a partial map with some locales marked right on it, which they discussed with guides in the city to learn rumors or hearsay; from a chance meeting with a priest, they learned of a powerful oracle in a ruined locale not yet on their map (but supposedly visible from a ruin that was already marked on the map, a place called M'bala).  One guide they interviewed offered to lead them to M'bala for free, if they first accompanied her to a place called "Firefinger" where she wanted to retrieve a lost heirloom from some enemies.

It's important to occasionally frame the options to make it straightforward for players to understand their alternatives, but let them work through the implications and how to proceed.  Example from the paragraph above, I'd say something like "Based on what you've learned in the city through your sources, you could":

1.  Hire a guide to take you down the western river by canoe to M'bala, as a first step to finding the oracle at Orolunga.
2.  Go with the free guide to Firefinger along the eastern river, help her recover her heirloom, and go to M'bala on the next journey.
3.  (Ideally the players have 3-5 reasonable choices at any given time...)

Continuing my example, the players did choose to go to Firefinger with the free guide.  They met a bird man prisoner there and learned about the monastery of the bird-men and received an offer of friendship (it became a new location on their map called Kir-Sabal); they also learned of another ruin near the bird-men monastery, an evil forsaken place called Nangalore (they put Nangalore on the map in a wide circle - they had a sense but not the specific hex).  Meanwhile, an earlier interaction now made sense; a potential patron from the city had offered the gift of a sailing ship to explorers who could provide a map showing the location of both Nangalore and Orolunga.  They now had a rough area where both places sat on the map.  Information, choice, and action leads to new information which keeps the cycle going.

In my prior discussions of running the hex crawl components of Chult well, I focused on the procedural aspects of keeping the hex crawl moving briskly and delivering evocative encounters.  However, the concepts discussed here, radiating information and helping the players to frame their choices so they can plan and decide, are most important to ultimately making the game fun and satisfying.


*Pretty sure I'm remembering an example used by Matt Finch, but lots of smart folks have expressed the importance of information and choice for sandbox games.

Techniques for Hex Crawling through Chult

Port Nyanzaru squats on the edge of a foreboding rainforest and jungle that seems to cover the entirety of Chult.  Much of the early part of the Tomb of Annihilation campaign involves the characters entering the ominous wall of trees following clues towards ancient jungle ruins, camps, forts, and points of interest.  The problem is that hex crawls are troublesome to adjudicate; long winded narrative descriptions of the wilderness are dull; there's better things to do with a table full of players than to spend minutes each hex rolling on a handful of tables.  Here are the techniques I've used to make peace with the hex crawl.

First up is automating the procedural generation ahead of the game.  For a campaign like Chult, that means having an excel table using various random number functions to pre-generate daily weather, time of day for the weather, and random chance of encounters for morning, day, and night, as well as the actual encounter table dice roll.  If I know in advance what the players are doing from a terrain perspective (ie, canoeing down a jungle river next game session), I'll go ahead and identify the specific encounters, too.

The problem during the hex crawl is switching from the 10,000 foot view (10 miles per hex) down to the encounter level and making the encounter interesting.  I use two tables to help create an instant scene.  One of them is a d100 "what are the characters or retainers doing when the encounter happens".  It has entries like "arguing about something stupid", "drinking water", "scanning the skies", or "moving in formation".

The other table is a d100 of interesting features for the current terrain.  The players are not just canoeing on the river, they are passing over sandbars and shallows, drifting by thick reeds and grasses along a marshy bank, or facing an impenetrable jungle canopy on both sides of the river and an eerie stillness (and so on…)  This helps me quickly paint an evocative scene.

An example from one of the sessions - the characters are crossing some rocky shallows, walking beside their canoes around large boulders in a slow moving part of the river.  I asked them whether any one is prone to telling bawdy jokes, and would they have one handy for the table?  (If none of the characters are telling jokes, it's invariably one of the henchmen or porters regaling the group).  A series of rocks along the river bank started to shift and slide in the water.  A giant crocodile basking in the shallows was disturbed and swings it's massive jaws around towards the nearest canoe.  Roll initiative.

The last thing we've done to keep hex crawling moving along smartly is player preparation.  They've created procedures for setting up camp (who does which jobs), what is the order of the night watches, how do the characters collect water, what's a map of the typical camp layout, who sleeps in which tent, and what seats are in the canoes.  It's worked well to keep the player's side of the daily crawl move along and give me what I need to facilitate engaging encounters along the way.  At this point we've covered about 60 days of campaign time trudging through the rain forest or paddling down sluggish jungle rivers; it's stayed fresh and interesting.  Hope these give you some ideas for your own hex crawling.

Tabletop Ideas from Skyrim

It only took five years for my kids to convince me to start playing Skyrim.

Since I spent the past year and a half sequestered as an academic, lots of family stuff and hobbies fell by the wayside - limited vacations, no GenCon attendance, things like that.  Each kid extracted a solemn promise to do something cool over the holidays; my daughter wanted to spend an afternoon at Barnes and Noble, hanging out at Starbucks and talking about life; my youngest wanted me to learn Madden '17 and try to challenge his crown; the oldest has been obsessed with getting me to finally play Skyrim and 'get it'.  With the master's degree safely behind me, I took the plunge over the holidays and got the Skyrim special edition version for Xbox One.  I've been enjoying the "open world" nature of the game, and it’s hard not to reflect on how we can adapt some techniques to enhance our table top games.

If you're reading this post based on the title, there's a good chance you know what Skyrim is already (or played one of the earlier incarnations).  If your luddite tendencies have kept you cloistered from modern video games - and who can blame you, really? - this brief video review provides a decent summary of the game and game world:  The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Legendary Edition Overview - Newegg TV

Now that I've seen enough to become a 23rd level high elf destruction mage, arch mage of the college of Winterhold, and member of the Stormcloak rebellion, here are various sandbox techniques that I plan on borrowing next time I do a homebrew sandbox game:

Through Line Quests
Regardless of what minor quest or story line the player is pursuing, there are some overarching "big threats" in the campaign setting that create verisimilitude as the player traverses the sandbox.  Examples in Skyrim include a rebellion between the Stormcloaks (rebel Nords) and the Imperials from the south; a plague of vampires and the presence of the Dawnguard, fanatic vampire hunters; the return of the dragons and the threat of a powerful, apocalyptic dragon lord.  Regardless of what you're doing, you might encounter patrols of Imperials and offers to join the Legion; voracious vampires and vampire thralls attack the towns at night; dragons wheel in the distant skies.

Thanes, Lordships, and Property
There are a half dozen major towns across Skyrim; each one is led by a Jarl, and there's a path to become a thane or lord in the Jarl's hall through service.  This opens up the opportunity to gain a follower, buy a house, or develop a homestead land out in the wilds and build your own fortified manor and hall.  After all, you need a nice wall to hang all those trophies!

Guild Memberships
There are a handful of major organizations where the player can climb the ranks - think of it like the thieve's guild, but covering other classes  - so far I've encountered the mages, the assassins, and the companions (the companions are Norse mercenaries that can turn into werewolves).

Discovered Backstory
NPCs disburse elements of the history and setting through brief one sentence blurbs, like tweets, limiting the narrative dumps.  Books are a much richer source of backstory - you're constantly finding books and notes in ruins and tombs; they tell history, and provide hints and clues on negotiating the current dungeon, too.  You can ignore them if reading is tedious.  Dwimmermount used this technique to great effect, and Jim LOTFP pioneered it way back in Hammers of the God, where the secret shame of the dwarves could only be discovered if you worked through the library of books.

Towns
Each town has a distinct character, lots of little subplots and stories, and a number of common services;  an inn, a merchant or armorer, and an apothecary or alchemist.  Plus the local lord and guard.  There's a lot of value in putting more effort into the towns in your game.

Quest Overload and Organization
Skyrim overloads you with things to do, forcing you to prioritize your own story arc.  However, all of the quest ideas and rumors are conveniently organized in a journal.  As a busy adult who only plays once a week, it's really helpful to return to a game log and see my current options as a memory refresher.

In my Dwimmermount game, I made some play aids to help the players keep track of quests and lost knowledge.  I can see myself generalizing it further to include all sorts of quests and rumors that get picked up.  As old school DM's we sometimes view 'note taking' and memory as skill testers, which runs counter to casual, beer and pretzel D&D playing; if the setting is going to deluge the players with options and things to do, help them keep track of the options with a journal of some sorts.  When you show up to game at the end of a bruising 40 hour week, the last thing you want is to have to recall obscure parts of The Silmarillion in order to play.  (Or Forgotten Realms lore).

Level Scaling the Extreme Sandbox
This one is a bit controversial, but Skyrim uses what I'm calling "quantum difficulty" - the levels of ruins and dungeons get established when you enter them the first time.  It's not 100% level scaling, or else you wouldn't feel like you're making any progress.  For instance, a wolf that used to be a dangerous fight can now be dispatched with a single blow.  But a newly discovered barrow, which might have contained Norse undead (draugr) when the character was low level, will feature more dangerous draugr variants if you first discover it as a higher level character.

I'm getting more pragmatic as I get older.  If you're going to present a plethora of choices right up front, there might be an opportunity cost to choosing one thing, and ignoring something else.  But if the dungeons aren't going away, the players may loop back to an earlier rumor and pick it up when they're more powerful.  For instance, the early game has the players hearing about a group of "vicious bandits" that have made travel north in High Saddle Pass difficult.  The players travel in the opposite direction and have a series of engaging adventures somewhere else.  When they return to the north and go after the bandits now, assuming the problem persists, maybe that group of zero level men and humans they might have encountered as level 1 characters is actually a mixed band of humanoids and ogres that can challenge a higher level party.  Is that palette shifting, or just-in-time development, because the nature of the bandits was never fully established in prior sessions?  I'm choosing the latter.

However, there are a couple of things I haven't been happy with in Skyrim, but these are issues you can address on the tabletop:

Suspended Quests
You can be engaging with an apparently time sensitive quest (example:  go ambush the evil guys when they cross the bridge near the town) but there's nothing stopping you from sleeping for the night, selling some gear, and heading out to the bridge a few days later.  Whenever you pick up the quest, now is the time the bad guys happen to be  crossing the bridge.  Ouch.

Consequences
The game is full of shrines to the gods (Divines) and the demons of Skyrim (Daedra).  There's nothing stopping you from swearing allegiance to a Divine for one quest, and then doing something terrible to win a Daedric artifact the next quest.  For that matter, NPCs and characters don't pay that much attention, either; you can swear yourself to Meridia, the goddess/daedra of Light, and wield her holy sword, Dawnbreaker, but a priest isn't likely to know the difference, and there's no problem joining a quest on behalf of Meridia's arch enemy next game session (thanks for the fact check on Mara vs Meridia, +Grey Knight).  Just about the only thing that gets you in any trouble is performing a public crime, especially with guards around.

I understand that in the video game context, all of these quest lines are just "content", and the designers want to maximize your ability to experience all of the content without having to create a new character.  It's a bad video game experience to make choices that completely close other quests. However, in the table top, we don't have the same considerations and can handle both suspended quests and natural consequences in a way that reinforces the setting.

Overall though, I've gotten a lot of good tabletop ideas by playing and observing Skyrim - even if it is 5-6 years later than the rest of you.  Adventurer Conqueror King would make a fine campaign system for a Skyrim style sandbox, since it envisions crafting, homesteading, economics, demographics, rulership and guild establishment - lots of world-building stuff that enhance the campaign side of play in addition to exploration and combat.

Pirates, Assassin's Creed 4 ,and the RPG Sandbox

Sandbox games are fun.  I've really been enjoying logging onto the Xbox after the kids are asleep for the night, slipping into the world of 18th century pirates, and figuring out what I want to loot or explore that particular evening.  It's given me a lot of ideas that translate equally well into the tabletop RPG realm.

Without further ado, here's  an overview of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag (hereafter referred to as AC4).

I had mostly resisted the clarion call of Skyrim, and religiously avoid the FPS games (first-person shooters like Halo and whatnot).  But when I saw that the latest Assassin's Creed game involved pirates, I was intrigued.  When I saw that the game included a giant pirate sandbox where you can sail around a faux Caribbean and listen to sea shanties while hunting ships, I was totally onboard.  This is probably the first video game I've played "seriously" in 12-13 years.

If you're not familiar with the series, you take on the role of a character that gets pulled into a shadowy , ages old conflict between "templars" and "assassins".  The templars seem to be an Illuminati-like conspiracy intent on finding ancient artifacts and ruling the world.  In AC4, the templars are among the colonial governors - men running institutions of power.  The assassins, with their credo of freedom ("nothing is true, everything is permitted") come across like murderous libertarians.  During the game, you sneakg around jungles and towns, hiding, climbing, using exotic weapons like blowguns, and sticking knives in the bad guys.  It's definitely on the violent side.

AC4 starts in 1715 and puts you right into the golden age of piracy.  All of the iconic figures of the time period - Ed Thatch, Charles Vane, Stede Bonnet, Woodes Rogers, Calico Jack, Benjamin Hornigold - they're all weaved into the storyline.  Fun stuff if you're a fan of the period.  There is a mission-based main storyline, where you travel from place to place, initiating each mission with a cut scene that advances an overarching plot.  That seems to be typical video game RPG fare.  The difference here is that the designers have surrounded the main story with a sprawling Caribbean sandbox - and you can take as much time as you like rampaging around the Caribbean until you like it's time to tackle the next chapter of the main story.

So what can you do in this sprawling, pirate sandbox?  You have a ship and a crew, and some personal armaments.  You can sail and find places to explore.  There are islands everywhere and Mayan ruins on most of the large ones - the map even extends to the Yucatan, allowing you to explore Tulum.  There are shipwrecks and undersea locations to explore (but inaccessible until you get a diving bell).  There are a handful of large settlements - Havana, Kingston Jamaica, and Nassau are the biggest - and lots of smaller towns, villages, smuggler dens, and pirate coves along the way.

Here are the various side tasks I've found myself planning and executing; exploring and clearing islands and ruins; diving the wrecks looking for "ship upgrade plans";  looking for cadavers, which carry treasure maps, to find locations that have buried treasure; hunting animals for craft goods, or harpooning sea animals for craft goods - you can hunt for rare black jaguars, or try to harpoon a great white shark; many of the settlements have guarded warehouses to plunder; there are assassination contracts and naval contracts for specific roguish missions; of course, there is sailing around and using the spyglass to look for ships on the horizon!

Naval combat is furious - you have chain shot, swivel guns, fire barrels, and different kinds of broadsides.  Ships can even use mortars, and rams - the game doesn't strive for realism.  The Caribbean map is concentrated, time elapses quickly while sailing, and there aren't merchant ships; the nationalities are basically Spanish and English war ships (carrying various trade goods or money), and other pirates.  This is no simulation.

Once an enemy ship is disabled in combat, your ship can grapple and board, making you swing over on lines and accomplish a number of tasks on the other ship to break morale - defeat a certain number of crew, defeat the captain or officers, sometimes climb the rigging and cut down the flag.  Hand to hand let's you block and parry with cutlasses and rapiers, and mix pistols and sword fighting fairly fluidly.  It's all fun, swashbuckling pirate kind of things.  At higher levels, raking the deck with the swivel gun is usually enough to quell the smaller ships without boarding.  There's a natural progression of difficulty, from gunboats and smaller schooners, up to military schooners, brigs, frigates, and finally man-o-war ships in the far south of the map.  It's set up very much like a tabletop RPG sandbox, where things get more dangerous the farther you go, forcing you to spend money on ship upgrades, and seek out the right kinds of cargoes and ship plans.  Many areas are controlled by forts, which need to be toppled to open the area up for exploration.  Finally, there's a whole campaign side-game where you can send captured ships to your own fleet, and undertake a world-wide network of missions versus the colonial powers by sending your fleet on missions around the colonies, Europe, and Africa.

So what are the kind of takeaways for your tabletop game?  The biggest one I'm experiencing is the affirmation of the "rogues in the sandbox" concept, which is that miscreants and scoundrels on the hunt for money find themselves in a target rich environment and get to be proactive.  In the case of the pirate sandbox, that means skulking around a British town like Kingston, plundering British warehouses, preying on British shipping (or Spanish) - all great fun when you're a pirate.  It lets you plan your targets and figure out how to take down a big haul.  Even failure is pretty thrilling, such as trying to escape a military compound after the alarm is sounded, or unfurling the sails and catching the wind because you couldn't take down a ship quick enough, and now a large man-o-war is bearing down on you.

We usually think of wilderness hex crawls as borderlands or the wilds, with exploration as the primary mode.  Getting a taste of the pirate life is making me see the possibilities in having a civilized (but enemy) sandbox, putting the players in that target rich environment.  If the sandbox describes a realm controlled by an evil power, the players get thrust into the role of insurgents or partisans - very much a Robin Hood style of game.  A similar approach could involve two warring powers with a tenuous border, giving the players the opportunity to sneak across the border, raid various wealthy targets, and whittle away the opposing side's territory by knocking out forts and outposts as a group of "irregulars".

I've mostly avoided sprawling, wilderness hex crawls because they've always seemed on the dull side to me, just a collection of lairs and random encounters.  Boxing with shadows.  Giving the players an actual adversary in the wilderness sandbox - whether it be a colonial power or an occupying force - is a way to let them don that roguish mantle, without running an 'evil-aligned' tabletop game - and they can trade blows with an adversary that's going to punch back once in a while.

Edit:  Rogues in the Sandbox:  I reflected on the way to work, there's no way to tell whether folks still reading the blog are old timers or newer additions.  Rogues in the sandbox is an old theory article written by Pornstar Zak a few years ago, breaking down how super heroes are reactive (waiting around for the villains to do something) whereas villains are proactive - and then he goes on to discuss how villains make such better characters in a sandbox game.  It's a fantastic read, very insightful, and encapsulates well the allure of being a pirate along the colonial frontier.  I assumed folks would know the reference, but then figured it'd be safe to include link nonetheless.