What does Veeky Forums think of wilderness exploration? Personally...

Hah. I live on that peninsula. One of these days, I'm going to make a hexcrawl out of my home state.

On topic: I think that in general, wilderness exploration can be fun and rewarding, especially if the game isn't about a tight, dramatic narrative. The dice, and player choice do a pretty good job of telling a story, but it likely won't conform to expected beats.

I have the Wilderness Survival Guide for 1e, and while I like it, it's also really fiddly in a way that wouldn't make it easy to use in-game (it seems intended mostly for game prep, with some tables an info that has to be used during game, like the personal temperature charts).

Overall though, wilderness encounters are generally just a way of eating up resources on the way to a dungeon crawl, and the hex crawl is kind of a different spin on playing the game. The overworld becomes a gigantic dungeon to explore, with its own pace of resource management, and I think it can be fun, but it also has the potential to be used as padding by an inexperienced or foolish DM.

What I mean by that, is that they use the wilderness exploration rules and encounters as a way to pad out the game on the way to and fro dungeons and other locations, without really adding anything to the game. Now, instead of a brisk description of your journey to a location and a note regarding how much time it took, you get to play out getting rained on, setting up camp, fishing for supper, taking down camp, fighting with the mule because it thought an exposed tree root was a snake, and all manner of mishaps.

And there would be nothing wrong with that if it was expected, but it would get tedious if you weren't super into it.

Fuck off.
We intentionally went for Russia-to-China to avoid all the fucking cliches of Western or not end up in Darkest Africa or as just bunch of conquistadors.

But feel free to run N-th Lewis & Clarke game, because surely those need to be so fucking interesting, where your main issue in the game can be how racist your GM is on scale from 1 to Texan.

I'm mostly asking, because I need hex maps for builder games. For TTRPG I just hand-draw things

>Overall though, wilderness encounters are generally just a way of eating up resources on the way to a dungeon crawl, and the hex crawl is kind of a different spin on playing the game. The overworld becomes a gigantic dungeon to explore, with its own pace of resource management, and I think it can be fun, but it also has the potential to be used as padding by an inexperienced or foolish DM.

That's why I loathe the idea of an interstitial layer of abstraction that wilderness exploration has become instead of a full dungeon crawl and point of interest in its own right. The reason why Kingmaker is so loved in my opinion, is that it simply didn't serve as a buffer zone in between adventures, it was the adventure itself.

While I'm not a Pathfinder fan, I have played Kingmaker, and one of the stories our group has that has become part of our collective experience is the elk encounter. We nearly died to that as level 1 characters, and even now, a year later, we try to avoid large concentrations of herbivores if we can help it.

>Judging a book by its cover
>Not looking the comics before implying

It's actually a pretty good comic, user.
You should read it.

I don't give a single fuck about the comics. I'm against the idea of making retarded Lewis & Clarke recreation in TTRPG.

>standard kingdom/province scale
Is there a standard? Which is it? Is your map on it?

Really curious, because other people's maps always make me confused because it's unclear if the landmass is island or continent-sized, and sometimes they don't really know either.

The whole hexcrawl architecture can be kept entirely behind the screen... it's really just an organizational tool for the GM.

That also leaves it up to the players to map their explorations--and live with the possibility of tripping over their own inaccuracies.

This.

All of it.

5e's DMG page 14. It's actually 3 scales combined together to make it easy to do super-detailed close up maps and large continent-spanning maps with a middle-scale size where each hex is the same size as a small map, which is actually surprisingly useful.

Not him, but is there some idiot-friendly tutorial for this? I keep getting awful maps that just look like full random.

Tell me more, sounds interesting

Honestly, a very small map area is more than enough when your party on foot.

Lately I've taking a liking to use maps of my own region as basis for worldbuilding. Raise water by 100m for a new coastline, take traderouts from highways, that stuff.

Today I got a lost after like 5 constructions site in some bumfuck nowhere villages I see maybe twice a year. It was a 15 miutes delay, but the world completely changes after I got out of my river valley.

Wide fields with a high, wooded hillline in the distance became a constant up and down through curling roads, small villages clinging to the mountainside, almost in reach of hand. The occasional group of 7m trees became a dark forest, only occasionally giving way for rocky cliffs. It was chilling, literally. It gold once I got out of the sun. Curves became sharper with warning sides all over the place as tiny roads took what little space the cliffs would give. And apparently there a villages up there. Ones with like 30 residents. I also passed a limestone day mine that looks damn big on googlemaps, but was actually completely hidden in the forest.

I had already planned to run a post-apoc campaign in my area, but now I'm moving the setting away from the city and innawoods.

Sure. The system presupposes hexes sized 5/inch. The smallest map is Province scale, which is 1 hex = 1 mile, so the entire map is 1 days travel or less from the center and 2 days across. The medium is Kingdom scale, which is 1 hex = 6 miles and the map is about "about the size of Great Britain or half the size of the state of California." Finally, a Continent scale map is 1 hex = 60 miles.

The key interactions are that 1 Continent hex is equal to 10 Kingdom hexes, so you can work between them on a decimal basis (if two objects are two Continent away from each other, then they're 20 Kingdom away from each other) and that 1 Kingdom hex is the size of 6 Province hexes making it easy to zoom in and out on specific areas. If you want some double-guidelined maps that make it even easier, they're available at blogofholding.com/?p=6751

Will check the guide, but your explaination probably covered all I needed. Thanks!

Quite welcome

Look at this little snowflake who's playing Not!Western.

I'm not American, just for the starters. Then, I'm sick and tired of used-up western cliches. Third, we were playing exploration game, not motherfucking manifest destiny bullshit. And lastly - go fuck yourself.

Have hexcrawls even existed since the 90s? I've seen attempts at a revival from some single people like thealexandrian, itmejp, and skeletal support in 5e, but nothing significant.

A few actual hexcrawls have been published (Carcosa is one example), and other publishers have put out "campaign environments" that are hexcrawls in just about every way, except for having a map with a hex overlay.

>Third, we were playing exploration game, not motherfucking manifest destiny bullshit.

Dude, calm down. Russia's claim to those lands may not have a fancy name (I'm aware of) but it was still just as land-grabby. With quite a bit of genocide everyone ignores.

Clearly comrade, there was nobody there before we arrived.

Certainly, there was no one there when we left.

I'm not sure you are getting the point.
We were doing the exploration to charter a trade route.
Not colonisation.
If you can't see the difference - not my problem.

Last time I've checked, Russians didn't went past Urals in the 16th century.

It must feel bad man when even Russians out of all people were more humane with their colonisation effort. And extra salty if you are from nation of freedom, democracy and hyperbole

What are you talking about? That genocide is on the Brits, not us.

We did kinda fuck up the Philippines though, but let's be real, those sluts were asking for it.

>Indian genocide is on Brits
Relocations to indian reservations is on French then I guess. Or Spanish? Or hunting bisons into extinction to starve plain Indians?

>asking for it
Asked for what? Being conquered and turned into colony a year after gaining their independence? I guess then you were asking for 1812 war.

One thing that helps is to be flexible with changing up your hex scale to "zoom in" on particular locations that have a higher density of interesting stuff. A 6 mile hex scale will subdivide into 0.5 hexes fairly readily.

Part of the whole reason for hexes is that you don't have to exhaustively detail everything in the wilderness, but if you want to do more work you can subdivide hexes further if you want; that's exactly one of the strengths of hex maps.

So if the party is traveling along roads in the civilized lands of the Peaceful Kingdom you might use a 6 mile hex scale because you probably won't find more than one or two interesting things in a 6 mile patch. You might find a single village somewhere in those 6 miles, maybe a bear cave, etc.

Once you reach the Forest of Despair, or similar interesting wilderness locale, you can "zoom in" by using a half-mile hex map or the like, increasing the density of stuff to find.

>I guess then you were asking for 1812 war.

From what I know of history? Yeah, we kinda were.

>That genocide is on the Brits, not us.

So how come you settled past the Appalachians then, hmm? Ever heard of King George's Treaty? No, you haven't, you ignorant rebel piece of shit.

>I guess then you were asking for 1812 war.

Considering that they started it because Britain was distracted by Napoleon, yeah, they fucking asked for it.

I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I am American. That treaty, unfortunately, wasn't with the American government, and I doubt it ever had any intention of honoring it. One of the myriad of reasons for the rebellion was that treaty and others like it limited the expansion Westward.

I think the guy you're responding to is wrong and foolish, but don't lump all of us together.

You are an enlightened rebel, and well educated - so you aren't a piece of shit. You are and your countrymen are still rebels, though.

As one of those rebels, I'm thinking of jumping ship 240's post-rebellion if either one of those shitlords get into office. Is Canada a good place to go? New Zealand?

Fair enough.

I'm not really sure how to feel about being called a rebel. I'm neither insulted nor proud of it. It's just kind of there.

I think we may just be screwed man. We've been getting screwed politically for a long time; it just took this election and its obviously terrible choices to shake enough people awake.

New Zealand heavily restricts who can immigrate, and Canada is as wrong headed (if not more so) than our government.

I'm really not sure what we can do to fix the country aside from not voting in establishment incumbents. But then, we're rolling the dice on untried persons who might end up corrupted by the very system we're trying to fix.

It's rather depressing.

Mandatory term limits, redoing elections so 3rd parties have a chance to get seats and only public funding of elections and numerous other things are needed, but fuck all that we'll get that.

I think I might be able to get into New Zealand, but who knows man, who knows...

it's about fighting monsters, but you just judged it by its cover, instead of doing research.

You fucking bigot.

New Zealand is fucking boring and has skill problems because everyone buggers off to Australia.

I agree with you on all of those things, and I also agree we're unlikely to get it.

In the meantime, we've got hexcrawls. So it's not all bad. They can't take those away from us unless they make paper, pencils, and imagination illegal.

And even then, we'll still probably do it. We can be thoughtcriminals together user.

You can't even imagine how much this helps me with preparation for incoming campaign. Many, many thanks

If you look at historic maps, villages tend to be about 3-4 miles apart "generally". The accounts for approximate distances between town centres in a modern urban sprawl. Evidence of which can be seen across the UK and I expect other countries too.

From the village there will be surrounding farm land, agricultural centres and houses/buildings belonging to landed gentry and so on. This 3 mile distance will inevitably be stretched by general topography, stuff in the way like forests and other shit you can't build, settle and farm on.

Whilst it looks a bit weird 3 miles works out as a good rough average between small villages.

What ever YMMV etc etc.

>and I expect other countries too
Then stop making stupid assumptions.

I never understand why Veeky Forums has such hard-on for using English population and settlement density as some sort of universal marker. western Germany and central France would be much, MUCH better, while still ages away from "standard".
Or northern Italy, given the entire region was just a convoluted mess of city-states, petty kingdoms, counties and what not.

>1 mile wide
M8, that's like fifteen minutes of walking to get through at a leisurely pace.

>if that WACKO Trump wins I'm moving to Canada!
>Shillary stole the election from the True Revolutionary! Bernie or Bust, if you want my vote come get it!
>heh, silly amerilards, I'm not like them you see, I have a DEEP and NUANCED understanding of history, which is why I know that contemporary European systems of government are VASTLY SUPERIOR to this first-clap-past-the-post bullshit
>ugh, why do i have to live in such an UNCIVILIZED backwater with so many BIGOTS

Not him, but did you just implied you can't have a compelling scenario that takes place inside, say, a broom closet?

It's hexographer, right? Any advice how to use it? I always end up with extremely boring and linear maps when making my own and the random generator is subpar

Please do, we don't want your kind around here.

Democracy is a failed experiment. So easily does it become corrupt and those in power must follow the will of the people, rather than doing what is BEST for the people. Rights must be respected, but not ignorance.

The only true system of government is rule by the worthy. Rule by those who have merit. Rule by a king and beneath him a council of the wise and the strong and the good.

Abandon your precious 'democracy'. It was dying by degrees since the day it was born and its death knell was the shot that felled its last great leader.

If you post any of your work, we could critique it? The random generator is better if you're working with a smaller land area by the way, it doesn't look very good if you're making province/kingdom scale maps.

Stay mudcucked, limey.

/pol/ called. They want to know why are you shitposting outside the designated board.

I'm not looking for critique, but a tutorial.

your question is based on the difference of cartography vs geography. based on that i would say good transition is needed in both environments and a good DM would not have a tropical forest next to a desert but would have steeps in between

Canada is almost identical to the USA except for the insanity, so that'd be the comfiest destination. I've been to Hawaii, Oregon, and the northernmost states from Washington to Michigan, and from British Columbia to Quebec. It's largely the same fucking thing. t.Canucklefuck