Wilderness adventures

[logruspattern]

Has anyone ever seen a really good procedure for dealing with long distance travel? Something where the travel time is measured in weeks, and a standard hexcrawl would either lead to so many encounters that the trip never seems to end (if the hexes are standard size), or to fewer encounters which are effectively pointless in standard attrition based D&D because most resources are replenished daily (if the hexes are bigger).

I guess the underlying question is, what is the measure of attrition that should be used to drive decision making in long distance travel?

The Adventures in Middle Earth rules (from Cubicle 7, based on 5e D&D) have a procedure for such journeys. I have read them but not used them. It's thus difficult for me to say whether they are 'good', but I do think they are workable. They outline journey roles for the party members. Party member skill and actions in prepping for the journey influences the ultimate outcome upon arrival as well as determining what types of encounters happen underway.

I think they lend themselves to long distance point crawls when multiple paths between points exist; ie taking the High Road instead of the Low Road. Each route will have its own costs and benefits. The rules also provide for breaking up longer journeys into shorter legs. I believe the attrition factor is how exhausted the party arrives at its destination and whether there are casualties along the way. An exhausted party needs to rest and resupply before pushing on.

The company lost the Middle Earth license so I don't believe the books or pdfs are available for purchase anymore.

 

[logruspattern]

I'm reviving this since I've been thinking of this topic lately and it seems to have cropped up in this thread as well:

The Lost Leagues / The Shadow Pearl

Satellite imagery? Mostly Photoshop. You'll see some repeated elements in the waves, and the bevel effects really give it away.

www.tenfootpole.org

A topic that came up in the other thread is whether a hex map is a useful abstraction for the GM. For reasons of verisimilitude the abstraction of hexes may be hidden from the players.

What then does the player map look like? The above precludes handing the players a blank hex map and allowing them to fill it in. Yet I like this idea as it embraces the game as a game and provides motive for exploration. Conrad's narrator in Heart of Darkness sees the blank map and wants to know what is there. Properly stocked hexes then stimulate PCs to explore the unknown even further.

On the other hand, PCs may only care about how to travel between their havens and the nearby (mega-) dungeons. PC paths between these points will emphasize speed and safety and a PC map of the world will be a point- / pathcrawl map. Even if the GM world or region map is broken into hexes, players will probably only concern themselves for the most efficient path between points of interest unless prompted to do so otherwise (ie the 'safe' path becomes unsafe).

Historically it seems the idea of overland wilderness travel is a rarity. Although Lewis and Clark have been referenced here several times in various threads as the ideal for wilderness crawls using hexcrawling procedures, their actual path was far more linear. But for a brief span most of their expedition followed the paths of rivers with one of the expedition goals being to find an expeditious route between two points:

https://www.nps.gov/carto/hfc/carto/media/LECLmap1.jpg

Going even further back in time, actual maps of Africa, Europe and Asia were very much pathcrawls with little regard to geographic accuracy. The late, great Umberto Eco explains:

The Middle Ages was a period of great voyages, but what with bad roads, forests, and stretches of sea to be crossed trusting in some boatman of the day, there was no possibility of making accurate maps. They were purely indicative, like the instructions in the pilgrims' guide to Santiago de Compostela, which said more or less: "If you wish to go from Rome to Jerusalem, proceed southward and ask directions on the way." Now try to think of maps you find in old railway timetables. That series of junctions is very clear if you need to take a train from Milan to Livorno (and you find out it necessary to pass through Genoa), but no one could use it to extrapolate the exact shape of Italy. The exact shape of Italy is of no interest for someone who has to go to the station. The Romans mapped a series of roads that connected every city in the known world, but here's how these roads were represented in the map known as the Tabula Peutingeriana [...]

(quote from Umberto Eco, The Book of Legendary Lands)

Tabula Peutingeriana: https://www.tabula-peutingeriana.de/index.html

Hexes may make sense as in the context of table top war games: taking the easiest, most obvious route along a road is a good way to get ambushed and killed. Imposing this on wilderness exploration in D&D runs antithetical to how people have navigated historically and in the modern day. Even explorers rarely struck out across open country or open ocean without a sense that they were traveling on the straightest path towards their destinations.

On the other hand, hexes make much more sense to me for domain play.

Wilderness exploration rules should not be onerous and preferably similar to dungeon exploration rules. I like some of the ideas in these rules:

Making Wilderness Play Meaningful — A System

Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.

osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com

Most specifically the rules address a contradiction often made about the war games that inspired D&D. War games take flak for being complicated, yet those same games often simplify movement and distance to movement points and grid distances respectively. D&D still insists on using time, speed and distance even in wilderness play. This becomes clunky.

I'm thinking about using different modes of play in my game with similar rules for each mode. Domain / wilderness play uses hexes; hexes are broken down not into smaller hexes but rather the interior of a hex is a pathcrawl. Then the points of interest may be dungeons at which point the usual dungeon play applies. Wilderness exploration and dungeon exploration use turns / watches and movement points. Even combat, the most granular of play modes, should embrace the grid and use movement points or grid spaces instead of distance.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

What then does the player map look like?

I have two approaches to player maps, personally - all, or nothing.

"All" means giving the players a copy of the DM map, except stripped of DM-only stuff like hidden locations or secrets. I like this because it's realistic in terms of the game world - cartographers are a thing that exist, why wouldn't the players buy a map that's already filled in if they had the opportunity?

"Nothing" means that no cartographer has ever gotten to mapping this part of the world - ideal for adventures like Isle of Dread where it's plausible that civilization just doesn't know what's on the island and so would never have mapped it. In my "nothing" approach, the players get a blank page of paper and a pencil - no hexes, no grid, no scale, nothing. If they want to keep track of where things are in relation to one another, I let them decide how they want to track it... I don't tell them "you're going to fill in this blank hex grid while you go along"; I consider that a case of the DM injecting himself into player choices, and I don't dig it.

On the other hand, PCs may only care about how to travel between their havens and the nearby (mega-) dungeons. PC paths between these points will emphasize speed and safety and a PC map of the world will be a point- / pathcrawl map. Even if the GM world or region map is broken into hexes, players will probably only concern themselves for the most efficient path between points of interest unless prompted to do so otherwise (ie the 'safe' path becomes unsafe).

Your point here speaks to why I use my approach. The player map is a player tool - let them design it and use it (or not use it) at their own discretion to suit their own purposes. Unless the mission is "a cartographer wants you to painstakingly map out an area", keeping an accurate player map isn't really an objective of play.

 

[logruspattern]

@DangerousPuhson

You also wrote something concerning GM maps in the other thread (Lost Leagues etc.) to the tune of, "What use is the hex map to a GM?"

It made me ask myself that question. As I mentioned above, I can see its use for domain play. In some cases, maybe many cases, I can see it being replaced by a pathcrawl map with no downside for the GM. On the other hand, if we accept that players have the freedom to depart from any point of interest on a map to any other point of interest without needing to stop at other points first, it means that a pathcrawl map will quickly become useless spaghetti to the GM if too many points are placed on the map. At that point a hex map with party travel time calculated using the map terrain becomes advantageous.

 

[DangerousPuhson]

Here's the map for my current campaign, ongoing now for ~4 years (it's also a totally improvised campaign with no prep work, but that's a story for another thread). I use a grid instead of hexes - there are a few different reasons for that, mainly that I find a grid map makes for more natural terrain flow, but also because I don't believe the hex grid to be entirely beneficial anymore (we aren't war-gaming here). My understanding has always been that hexes are used because they provide a more equidistant line outward from the center. What I've noticed in play though is that my players don't care about distances - they care about time, because time is resources.

As you say, the players care only about key places and efficient paths. They point to a spot on their player map (which is the same one but converted to sepia tone and with hidden spots omitted) and they say "We should go there. The main road is always pretty safe, so we'll take it. It looks like we go through 5 squares, so it averages out to about 50 miles. How long will that take us?" and I know that they can travel 30 miles in a day so I can say "It will take just over a day and a half", and then off they go. They still get to make choices like going around forests vs going through them, or taking a river route vs a road or whatever, but I find that once they've set a course, they don't really care about all the minutiae like exact distances or whether a trip that took them 8 hours last time they made it months ago now takes them 12 hours.

So my compromise between a pointcrawl and a hex map is the map I've linked: a grid-crawl. It's done the job admirably so far - I've never had a complaint or offhanded comment about it. It captures more than a pointcrawl map but isn't as prescriptive as a hex map.

 

[Beoric]

Historically it seems the idea of overland wilderness travel is a rarity. Although Lewis and Clark have been referenced here several times in various threads as the ideal for wilderness crawls using hexcrawling procedures, their actual path was far more linear. But for a brief span most of their expedition followed the paths of rivers with one of the expedition goals being to find an expeditious route between two points:

https://www.nps.gov/carto/hfc/carto/media/LECLmap1.jpg

I think this is part of my interest in the topic. The combination of topography, bodies of water, and vegetation tends to direct travel in certain directions, and provides landmarks and a way of providing directions. So even if you leave the road you tend to be on a pointcrawl unless you make an effort not to follow the "path" that the terrain is creating for you.

But if you have players who tend to push into the unknown areas, like I do, a pointcrawl doesn't work. Maybe they are trying to avoid other creatures, or find a hidden area, but in any event you need a way to manage it when they go off book. So I like the idea of what is effectively an pointcrawl overlaying a hex map. Since you expect most of the content to be be on the known routes, you don't want to spend a bunch of time developing the inaccessible areas. But you do need a way to generate content when they push into the wilderness, and you also need a quick way to record that content once it is generated, because there is a reasonable chance the PCs will use that knowledge to their advantage at some point.

Terrain also tends to directly you away from certain places, making some areas harder to get to or less likely to be found. And you don't always realize it is happening. So you effectively end up with "secret doors" and "hidden rooms" in the wilderness. Which is exactly where those pesky bandits you can't seem to get rid of are likely to hole up. So the whole thing ends up being closer to the dungeon exploration experience, which frankly has more interesting and better developed procedures all around.

 

[Yora]

I see hexes purely as a tool for GMs to quickly estimate the length of a journey that follows a winding path. If the players are following a river until they reach the edge of the forest and then follow the forest's edge west until they reach a winding mountain pass, trying to get a good measurement of the distance with a ruler can be a pain in the ass, and it gets even worse when they keep moving through different terrains with different travel speeds.
Counting hexes can speed this up significantly. It's 6 hexes of grassland, 8 hexes of light forest, and 4 hexes of mountains. Quick and painless.

If you already have hexes on your GM map, you can also use them as a coordinate system to help find locating specific locations from your multi-page map key on the map.

But the hex as a unit of game area similar to a room in a dungeon just never made any sense to me. A single 6-mile hex is the size of a large modern city. You're not going to find anything in a forest if your GPS coordinate are accurate to only somewhere within 5 km. Even a hypothetical 1-mile hex wouldn't really help you finding a cave.
If PCs want to reach a place, they always have to follow visible roads, rivers, or at the very least landmarks. As players are concerned, all wilderness travel should be a point-crawl. So what the player maps are looking like really doesn't matter that much. They can absolutely look like ass and still serve their purpose. And when you do look at historical maps before modern surveying, they do look like ass. Even a really crappy medieval map would still be able to tell you "If I want to go from Rome to Marseilles on land, I first have to head north and try making my way to Genoa and then follow local directions to Nice, where someone will be able to tell me which gate to leave to get to Marseilles." No hex, grid, or coordinates necessary.

 

[squeen]

Here's the map for my current campaign, ongoing now for ~4 years (it's also a totally improvised campaign with no prep work, but that's a story for another thread).

Nice fractal ocean...and that's one BIG mountain. Looks cool.

 

[Beoric]

But the hex as a unit of game area similar to a room in a dungeon just never made any sense to me. A single 6-mile hex is the size of a large modern city. You're not going to find anything in a forest if your GPS coordinate are accurate to only somewhere within 5 km. Even a hypothetical 1-mile hex wouldn't really help you finding a cave.

When I say some hexes are functionally similar to rooms, I mean they are a keyed area that can only be reached from a certain direction, or at least are more difficult to reach from other directions, and must be discovered. But they are not like a room in that you can't see more or less the whole thing at a glance, or expect to thoroughly search it in a reasonable amount of time using a small party. Once you arrive at the hex in question, the procedure probably needs to change.

If you don't just place an obvious landmark marking the hex content, or handwave how easy it is to find the content, then it more or less becomes either a mini adventure or a full adventure. This is consistent with the way the 1e Monster Manual is presented, where you encounter 30-300 orcs or 20-200 bandits, along with leader types, special monsters or spellcasters, and hangers-on and other noncombatants; these are not merely monsters milling about waiting for you to fight them, they are the seed of a whole adventure created around what is listed as an "encounter".

Plus, if it is a location which is or was occupied, there may be tracks, or roads or paths, or the vestiges of same that can lead you to the desired location. Or monster droppings, or human(oid) refuse, or signs of habitation, like structures, or smoke, or lights at night. Or you can add landmarks, or natural paths within the hex, so that one you get to the hex it becomes a pointcrawl.

 

[The1True]

So I like the idea of what is effectively an pointcrawl overlaying a hex map.

I red somewhere someone saying a pathcrawl is just a fancy name for a pointcrawl, but what Beoric is saying I think is what truly sets these two procedures apart. With a pointcrawl laid over a hex or square grid, we have the opportunity to mentions paths of interest branching off into the rhubarb at the side of the road or river. So then focus-driven characters can do the medieval thing and say "I am heading west into the unknown, taking the 4 day journey from Adventuretown to Grimdark Mountain" and you can mention the strange totem standing on the hill along the way, or the gory goblin corpse with giant claw marks leading off into the tangled briars and see if the PC's bite. If they do, they're hexcrawling and you've got a procedure for that. Otherwise they're going from point to point and a subway-style map laid over a simplified illustration of your world will make a lot more sense but will turn into a real mess over time if they start sandwiching points of interest in between.
Personally, I'm a big fan of filling in hexes; clearing away the 'fog of war'-black. The pathcrawl gives me the best of both worlds. Lets the PC's plan logical journeys and lets the DM put diversions in their path.

 

[The Heretic]

But the hex as a unit of game area similar to a room in a dungeon just never made any sense to me. A single 6-mile hex is the size of a large modern city. You're not going to find anything in a forest if your GPS coordinate are accurate to only somewhere within 5 km. Even a hypothetical 1-mile hex wouldn't really help you finding a cave.

Pathfinder came up with a number of systems to address this. The cheap and easy one was to have a skill check to discover the 'hidden' feature of the hex.

They developed a newer system that abstracted exploration a bit, so that you weren't doing an actual hexcrawl. Here's a link to the rules, the example at the end is interesting to look at: https://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/exploration-movement

Maybe there is material worth stealing there.

 

[The Heretic]

Wilderness exploration rules should not be onerous and preferably similar to dungeon exploration rules. I like some of the ideas in these rules:

Making Wilderness Play Meaningful — A System

Old-school Renaissance / OSR theory and design.

osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com

Most specifically the rules address a contradiction often made about the war games that inspired D&D. War games take flak for being complicated, yet those same games often simplify movement and distance to movement points and grid distances respectively. D&D still insists on using time, speed and distance even in wilderness play. This becomes clunky.

Thanks for the link! That looks interesting, I may steal some ideas from there.

I always get bogged down in internal debates between being as realistic as possible vs being as gameable as possible. My group is about to go into a hexcrawl-like area, and I think I'm leaning towards gameable at this point.

(It's like reading the Two Towers. I suppose reading about Frodo and Samwise climbing down a ravine, getting stuck, climbing back up and then having to find another way down has a bit of verisilimisilitude to it, but I only need to read that once, thankyouverymuch.)

 

[The1True]

Maybe there is material worth stealing there.

OMG, Discovery Points

I hear what you're saying about verisimilitude. No one wants to play Advanced Accountants and Actuaries. Or at least, I don't want to meet the play group that does. If you can come up with a gameable system that allows the PC's to make an informed choice about there travel plans, roll some dice and then lets you clearly communicate the results. I've been working on a Travel Pool over at GTC and you could have that LoTR moment without the agony. Like, the characters see the terrain ahead, say how and where they want to proceed aware of what that will cost them from their total travel budget for the day and you can then say "alright, you spend 6 hrs slowly combing through the jagged crags and crumbling cliffs of this hex. Travel is slow and you're not going to get much further today, but your searching did turn up a secluded monastery clinging to a lonely peak in the heart of the region." Or alternatively, PC's may just want to get from Town'ndownville to the Pits of Evil Doom. They look at the map, decide to take the road, figure out it will take a day and a half and head out. Then it's up to you notify them of side 'paths' along the way and either run a couple of meaningful random encounters drawn from the local wilderness roster or just skip to the gates to the underworld.
'Swordfish Islands' got really really heartbreakingly close to this, but left me cold with its cartoony oversimplification in the end. To be fair, part of that might have been its rules agnosticism which is the same thing that killed 'King for a Day' for me.

 

[The Heretic]

How far away can one see a major geological feature. If I'm in a hills hex, and two hexes away is a major mountain range, would I be able to see if from where I am?

 

[Beoric]

How far away can one see a major geological feature. If I'm in a hills hex, and two hexes away is a major mountain range, would I be able to see if from where I am?

Depends on if you are at the top of a hill or in a valley, and how tall the mountain is.

I am looking west out of my window right now. I am at a high point on the plains, perhaps 30 miles from the foothills, 40 miles from the nearest mountain, and almost 50 miles from the nearest large range of mountains. I can see the close mountain, and the range of mountains.

I cannot really see the foothills due to the curvature of the earth. I actually won't be able to see the foothills until I am essentially in them, because forests block the view.

So using 6 mile hexes, I can see the mountains at least 8 hexes away, and could probably see further if there weren't mountains in the way. Doing a little googling, looks like from a hilltop at Buck Lake you can see the mountains about 60 miles away. So say 8 hexes from the plains if you aren't in a depression, or 10 hexes from a hilltop.

But the Rockies are tall. I am not sure I could see as far if I was looking at mountains in Scotland. But who uses fantasy mountains that are small?

 

[DangerousPuhson]

I am looking west out of my window right now. I am at a high point on the plains, perhaps 30 miles from the foothills, 40 miles from the nearest mountain, and almost 50 miles from the nearest large range of mountains. I can see the close mountain, and the range of mountains.

Looking out the window of my home in a valley, I can see all the way to the neighbors.

How far away can one see a major geological feature.

Google will tell you that the furthest a person can see something (on Earth that is, to the horizon) is 3 miles, but if your landmark is large enough it can be seen from much, much further. As an example of that kind of perspective, here's a recently-publicized picture of Mount Everest (5.5 miles tall) as seen from Kathmandu, 150 miles away

 

[Beoric]

Google will tell you that the furthest a person can see something (on Earth that is, to the horizon) is 3 miles, but if your landmark is large enough it can be seen from much, much further. As an example of that kind of perspective, here's a recently-publicized picture of Mount Everest (5.5 miles tall) as seen from Kathmandu, 150 miles away

Not disagreeing with your general point, but it is obvious that picture is taken from a high tower or other vantage point far above most of the buildings in Kathmadu.

 

[logruspattern]

How far away can one see a major geological feature. If I'm in a hills hex, and two hexes away is a major mountain range, would I be able to see if from where I am?

Here's a quick reference to do visible range calculations. Easy to do even if the observer is not at ground level. See the table for an example. The formulas come from Pub 9, the American Practical Navigator aka Bowditch. The range table comes from the US Light List.

Google will tell you that the furthest a person can see something (on Earth that is, to the horizon) is 3 miles, but if your landmark is large enough it can be seen from much, much further. As an example of that kind of perspective, here's a recently-publicized picture of Mount Everest (5.5 miles tall) as seen from Kathmandu, 150 miles away

Not disagreeing with your general point, but it is obvious that picture is taken from a high tower or other vantage point far above most of the buildings in Kathmadu.

Using the wikipedia height for Mt Everest (29,029 ft) and the formula above, the top of Mt Everest would be visible to an observer at ground level from a distance of 199 nm or 229 survey miles. An observer on a tall building would be able to see it from even farther away. This assumes atmospheric conditions allow it and that there are no intervening objects.

Edit: Also worth noting, as DP stated, that 3 miles to the horizon from ground level is valid for Earth (and those three miles account for a height of eye of 6 ft). A world with a different size or curvature would need to use a different formula than the one above. Even on Earth there are places such as at the poles where the curvature becomes flatter and an observer can see farther than they normally would. I have heard that this is the case in Antarctica, that it is noticeable, and it is a 'weird' feeling.

This could be something for a DM to keep in mind when world building and would be neat to use to keep observant players on their toes. Though the visible distance to the horizon might also be common lore for the world.

 

[The1True]

Alexandrian summed it up nicely here.

or just get lazy and use a calculator...

I got obsessed with this while building the hexcrawl for the Vanished Wastes over at GTC. I wanted to write down landmarks you could see in the distance while traveling through each hex. I went so far as to literally extrude all the features on the map on a 3D plane and run a 6-sided camera through the environment at roughly man-height. The 30 fps video is ... a flickering glimpse into the wailing-nightmare soul of madness. It was ... an insane thing to do ... I cannot recommend this activity
Unfortunately I still can't shake the stupid idea I'd love to be able to know what natural features the PC's can use to navigate as well as be able to inform them of local distractions based on line-of-sight...

 

[Beoric]

I expect it would be worthwhile to come up with an average mountain height for your world, an average elevation for your plains/hills, and run the calculation to make a general rule for your overland travel. After that I would just wing it.

You should probably lowball your estimate a bit: atmospheric distortion is a real issue, and while you can draw a line from your eyeball to the top of someone's head over a three mile distance, odds are you can't really make out the top couple of inches of a head, or even a head sized object, at that range. Same goes for mountains, you need to be able to see enough of the mountain to distinguish snowpack from clouds, or even dirt-coloured mountain from dirt-coloured horizon.