Apologies for dropping by so late. When I finish a long post, I sometimes need distance from the subject for a while, so a lot has already been said.
WRT
@squeen 's distaste towards the form, there may be some deep philosophical disagreement there, but I still think I could have been misunderstood in some way. Hex-crawl content is not random noise. Like EOTB, I use random generation to create strange combinations and juxtapositions of ideas that would not come to me naturally, then use those basic ideas to come up with the actual encounters and sites which form the hex key. By the time they make it to play, they should have the following qualities:
- basic plausibility ("this could exist in a fantasy world");
- for a good percentage of encounters, a sense of the fantastic ("this might seem strange even in a fantasy world");
- gameplay relevance ("the players can interact with this in a meaningful sense");
- something beyond what a "raw" random roll could create (i.e. more than "3 trolls with a +1 sword");
Not every hex encounter will be all these things all of the time, but the overall landscape will have a good stock of encounters following these principles.
Second, yes, this is an improvisation-heavy playstyle (altough you could construct a very detailed hex-crawl, at least on a rather small scale). This does not make it bullshitting. Improvisation rests on
both flights of fancy and fitting improvised elements into a logical larger design (even if some of this is done post-game). Improvisation is a technique to exploit opportunities and happy accidents and go with the flow. It is not directionless.
Third, the numbered hex grid does serve a useful purpose. This was a literal "Eureca!" moment for me when I first encountered it in the early 2000s in Wilderlands of High Fantasy. Suddenly, after several years running wilderness games via bullshitting, and lots of fruitless detours, here was a useful, compact model for conceptualising game space in a way that is
- GM-friendly (easy to wrap your mind around it, to manage a game, and to develop content for);
- player-transparent (putting a game board before the group to facilitate and encourage travel);
- gives a good framework to have a landscape dotted with ruins, monster dwellings, and centres of civilisation;
- ...and a good way to keep your setting ground-level and bottom-up instead of the top-down model which offers little assistance to run day-by-day-games.
It is super simple and very versatile. And that's the beauty of it.
