I’m sitting at the laptop, it’s dark outside except for an orange candle-lookalike in a window of the neighbours’ house. What is this supposed to mean. Did somebody die? How strange. It always glows in the corner of my eye.
@frotz is going to run a bit of wilderness exploration in our shared referee campaign, The Monday Games. He was proposing some wilderness exploration procedures, @phf mentioned some of the rules in Cook and Marsh’s Expert D&D.
I said that I usually prefer much simpler rules. The Halberts & Helmets Referee Guide has a page or two on wilderness adventures, but basically it is this:
Halberts & Helmets Referee Guide
This is based on some older blog posts of mine.
With this in place, players will usually learn about a new location from NPCs, decide to travel there, have one or two random encounters on the way providing side-quests, other plot-hooks and adding to the wilderness. After exploring the dungeon or doing whatever needs doing, the party will travel back, sometimes picking a different path for their way back in order to learn something about the area they’re in. – 2012-06-20 Hexcrawl Procedure
To be sure, I dont mind using different rules, I just don’t see me planning stuff in watches and mules and food rations and all that. If we are going yo use those rules I vote for one of us or an NPC being the quartermaster and handling it for the party. 😁
As for encounters, I use encounter tables “per region” (which often means a contiguous set of hexes with the same terrain type).
In the following example, merchants and soldiers are only encountered during the day. At night, add +2 to your roll. Thus, kuo-to a and slaadi are only encountered during the night. – Swiss Referee Style Manual
The example provided was the following:
+-------+--------------------+ | d6 | Encounter | +-------+--------------------+ | ░ 1 ░ | merchants (1d6) | | ░ 2 ░ | soldiers (1d6+3) | | ▒ 3 ▒ | gnomes (1d6+2) | | ▒ 4 ▒ | giant frogs (1d4) | | ▒ 5 ▒ | froglings (2d6) | | ▒ 6 ▒ | roll twice: fight! | | ▓ 7 ▓ | kuo-toa (2d6) | | ▓ 8 ▓ | slaadi (1d4) | +-------+--------------------+
We also talked about healing. My house rule in this respect is: you need a bed to heal. Thus, if you find yourself in a survival show, you need to build yourself a shelter with a bed or you’ll die. You can’t be healing and travelling at the same time unless you bring a little house on wheels along. If you’re a band of bedouins crossing the desert, just don’t get injured. Or if you are injured, you might get left behind at an oasis… It also shows why hospitality traditions are super important, why finding safe houses and finding settlements is important. I think it works out nicely in the narrative.
We’ll see how it goes. I’m excited!
#RPG
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We hexcrawl. A lot.
– Sandra 2022-04-07 22:58 UTC
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That is a lot of rules. 😅
– Alex 2022-04-08 06:40 UTC