How Do You Run a Hexcrawl?
I've been hexing my party through the Misty Vale in Dragonbane, and I think I failed them as a GM. I have to up my game. Literally.
Last night, it hit me. I suck at running hexcrawls. I love them, but I suck at them.
If you’re not familiar, hexcrawls are a way of breaking the map into a hexagonal grid with encounters and things for the party to see as they travel from location to location, or just through the wilderness, is an easy way to make travel a lot more fun.
And I’ve learned over the past few weeks that I am very bad at running them as a game master.
Part of that reason is that I have been playing Dragonbane and using @mattiassvendsen’s hex map of the Misty Vale. It’s super cool, but it’s not something the map was initially designed for. And I didn’t take this into account when working the encounter tables.
How I Ran The Hexcrawls
Each hex on the map was 15km across. That meant it took the party 6 hours, or 1 shift, to travel across. They could do two of these in a day—three if they were willing to exhaust themselves.
Each time they entered a new hex, I would roll on the encounter tables for the area they were in. And that was a bad idea. Not because the encounter tables were bad, but the encounter tables in the Dragonbane core rules are about 50% “nothing happens.”
With my group’s luck, the pathfinder rolls consistently low on Bushcraft, so they don’t get in trouble, and then I roll 1-6 on my D12 for random encounters, which means—you guessed it—nothing happens.
Now, I do understand why the tables are made that way. But…
On one hand, Dragonbane is hard. Too many encounters at the wrong time could kill a party member (or members) in short order.
On the other hand, Dragonbane is hard. That level of challenge means the world should be that dangerous.
The more I thought about it, trusting the dice to decide on the party’s encounters meant that travel has been relatively uneventful. Sure, some stuff has happened and we have lots of laughs and stories from it.
But probably 65-70% of the time, the dice come up empty. And doing nothing in an RPG is much less fun than doing something. Not just for the player characters, but for me as GM as well.
So…I’m gonna make some adjustments. Some pretty big ones.
How I Will Run Hexcrawls in the Future
From now on, there will be a 0% chance of nothing happening. Yep, zero. Now, they’re not all going to be combat or deadly encounters—maybe the party sees a family of mallards swimming in a pond as they go past or merchant trundles along at a crossroads with a couple of rare items, perhaps—but something will always happen.
I plan on having not only my own list of D66 random encounters for Dragonbane, but I also am going to create a series of randomized dungeons that might only be one or two rooms big so they can stumble across them Skyrim-style.
I also need to really dig into the fun stuff that Blue Mountain mentions in their post about creating meaningful hexcrawl encounters. (Thanks to M.T. Black’s newsletter for that link!)
TL;DR:
I need to make our hexcrawl-like traveling in Dragonbane a lot more exciting. Having “nothing happens” happen is kind of crappy. I want the setting to feels more and vivid to the players. I’ll let you know what happens.
What do you do to keep hexcrawls and overland travel interesting in your games?