Just curious if anyone has played a hexcrawl game with other games and what game was used.
Ages ago, we hexcrawled our way across the planet Volturnus with Star Frontiers. Was tons of fun - I still occasionally get the urge to use Volturnus and the associated adventures.
I've never really been clear on what defines a hexcrawl. Is outdoor exploration enough or does it imply that the terrain is being randomly generated as you move through it? Can there be a goal in mind, a particular destination or must it be aimless wandering?
I ran Mongoose Traveller as an intergalactic hex crawl. I also want to run Monster Island for Runequest 6 as a hex crawl but haven't yet.
Quote from: VectorSigma;719507Ages ago, we hexcrawled our way across the planet Volturnus with Star Frontiers. Was tons of fun - I still occasionally get the urge to use Volturnus and the associated adventures.
I also did this! Tons of fun!
I also was in a MERP campaign where we wandered around Middle Earth exploring.
Quote from: Simlasa;719508I've never really been clear on what defines a hexcrawl. Is outdoor exploration enough or does it imply that the terrain is being randomly generated as you move through it? Can there be a goal in mind, a particular destination or must it be aimless wandering?
I don't think randomly-generated terrain is mandatory, by any means; and I think a goal in mind is totally fine. What makes a hexcrawl a hexcrawl is that a major portion of the game is taken up by the PCs travelling around the map _for the purposes of exploration_ (as opposed to "getting to the other plot-city" or whatever).
The ultimate hexcrawl for me was Griffin Mountain (Chaosium RQ). That accounted for a great deal of well-spent youth.
Quote from: RunningLaser;719496Just curious if anyone has played a hexcrawl game with other games and what game was used.
GURPS since the late 80s works pretty much like it does in D&D.
Of course what do you mean precisely by hexcrawling? A lot of folks use it differently. In my games it meant that the players were free to go where ever they like in the setting.
Yep. Volturnus was a great hexcrawler.
1st and 2nd ed Gamma World are also good for that.
Another one technically is Dragon Storm as you wander and explore from terrain to terrain and can have encounters most anywhere depending on if the GM pregened an adventure or is laying cards on the fly. More like a gridcrawl. But as a GM I liked to lay the terrain down in a staggerd pattern for a simulated hexcrawl. Pretty much the game was only hexcrawling as there were no dungeons.
While not an RPG. Barbarian Prince is a great hexcrawler and in a very different way so is Magic Realm. Also in an odd way so is Voyage of the BSM Pandora from Ares Magazine. Probably others I've forgotten.
Definitely Gamma World and Traveller. Not with any modern RPGs that I can think of though.
I'm using EABA for a hex-crawl at the moment. So far so good.
Quote from: Simlasa;719508I've never really been clear on what defines a hexcrawl. Is outdoor exploration enough or does it imply that the terrain is being randomly generated as you move through it? Can there be a goal in mind, a particular destination or must it be aimless wandering?
Hexcrawl: Short Analysis (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15156/roleplaying-games/game-structures-part-6-hexcrawls) and one way to do it (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl).
I would say that you probably don't need literal hexes to play a game that could be colloquially referred to as a hexcrawl, but I have concluded that the key aspects of the 'crawl (whether dungeon, hex, or otherwise) are:
(1) It uses a map with keyed locations.
(2) Characters transition between keyed locations through simple, geographic movement.
(3) The structure includes an exploration-based default goal.
In the case of the hexcrawl, you're pairing that with wilderness exploration.
Answering the original question: I unsuccessfully ran hexcrawl scenarios with GURPS and FUDGE back in the '90s (when I didn't actually grok hexcrawls). More recently I've developed a hexcrawl for
Eclipse Phase and am currently in the process of developing a hexcrawl for
Numenera.
Hrm. The last time I did a wilderness exploration scenario -- as in "Let's find out what's in this trackless wilderness!" as opposed to "We need your party to go into the jungle valley and clear out the Fuzzy Wuzzys so that we can do all that exploitative colonization stuff." -- was back in TFT days.
Hrm. Definitely been a while. Neither of my current groups are oriented towards that sort of thing, mind you.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;719571I would say that you probably don't need literal hexes to play a game...
Why are hexes so standard in games where exact distance from the center of the space isn't important? Why not square grids that are easier to label with letters and numbers along the margins? What am I missing?
Because hexes are more accurate for measuring distance. You forget most gamers are anal about weird stuff like that.
Quote from: danbuter;719665Because hexes are more accurate for measuring distance. You forget most gamers are anal about weird stuff like that.
Actually I've never personally run into that level of fixation on accuracy. Is it really that important to people? I guess it must have been for WotC to bother including those odd rules for moving diagonally on a grid in 3ed. They did away with it in 4e and no one in my circles complained (a few didn't even notice the change).
Quote from: estar;719518Of course what do you mean precisely by hexcrawling? A lot of folks use it differently. In my games it meant that the players were free to go where ever they like in the setting.
I've never played a hexcrawl game, but interested and reading up on it. I suppose just moving from hex to hex, exploring what's inside, then on to the next hex. Pretty much everything that I've read about it, puts it hand in hand with D&D.
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;719651Why are hexes so standard in games where exact distance from the center of the space isn't important? Why not square grids that are easier to label with letters and numbers along the margins? What am I missing?
It comes from wargames, it made for easier movement on the board.
Yes, with hexes you can
- Count the shortest route in hexes between A and B, and it'll be pretty close to actual distance between A and B. Fairly important and convenient for things that involve ranges and radii. (So, tactical.)
- Regulate movement by assigning "point costs" per hex based on terrain. You can do this with squares, too--but you can move in more directions without having to apply a conversion factor.
True, if you're willing to multiply by 1.4 and keep track of decimals, you can have eight directions with squares. There are other ways of handling diagonal movement. All of them are more complicated. (Like, double everyone's MP and then charging 2 for a clear square, 3 if moving diagonally.)
Quote from: Shipyard Locked;719651Why are hexes so standard in games where exact distance from the center of the space isn't important? Why not square grids that are easier to label with letters and numbers along the margins? What am I missing?
It's primarily to have distance travelled be the same in 6 directions as opposed to only 4 on a square grid. This was standard for wargame maps back in the day, and sheets with hexes individually numbered in the customary fashion were available from Gamescience, The Armory, and other vendors.
Aesthetically, when you make terrain features conform to a regular grid, it looks a bit more outdoorsy with the angles of hexagons than with squares.
I have had my PCs do a ton of Hexcrawling in our Skill based system. I had a group of three pcs ( a pair of knights from different orders and a Priest of the Winiary) searching for an ancient Vineyard. Used a pretty small scale with the venerable Campain Hexagon sheets. went on some 14 sessions, including a long parley and alliance with a humanoid tribe.
Like Sandboxes, HexCrawls can be done in any system.
If a system cannot cope with the PCs saying "We want to go out of this town and explore what's out there" then it shouldn't be counted as a RPG system.
Of course, settings are different. Paranoia is a RPG set in a very specific, closed-Dome setting, where sandboxes and hexcrawls are not really part of the game. However, sending clones outside the Dome us something that could happen, so even that is suitable for Hexcrawls.
I'd second Griffin Mountain as a pure Hexcrawl supplement, so was Borderlands, to a certain extent.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;719571Hexcrawl: Short Analysis (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/15156/roleplaying-games/game-structures-part-6-hexcrawls) and one way to do it (http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17308/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl).
This is a pretty good read. Did you write part 12?
Quote from: soltakss;720488Like Sandboxes, HexCrawls can be done in any system.
If a system cannot cope with the PCs saying "We want to go out of this town and explore what's out there" then it shouldn't be counted as a RPG system.
Of course, settings are different. Paranoia is a RPG set in a very specific, closed-Dome setting, where sandboxes and hexcrawls are not really part of the game. However, sending clones outside the Dome us something that could happen, so even that is suitable for Hexcrawls.
I'd second Griffin Mountain as a pure Hexcrawl supplement, so was Borderlands, to a certain extent.
Borderlands however had a planned campaign arc. However, it's very easy to do hexcrawl -in addition- to the 7 planned adventures in the Borderlands pack.
Good thread. I'm planning on expanding my Earthdawn/oD&D mashup experiment into a hexcrawl, once my player wander away from Hommlet/The Moathouse (which I've thrown into a new kingdom in Barsaive based on Greyhawk).
Oh, oddly enough, it seems our brains track spaces with physical-traingular-grids of neurons (like the movement paths between hexes). CRAZY interesting. After I found this out, I went back to hexes for both over-land movement and combat.
http://www.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fncir.2012.00016/full
QuoteThe puzzling grid cell has become a popular topic in neuroscience due to its simultaneously simple behavioral firing correlate (the animal's position) and complex spatial activity (a nearly regular hexagonal arrangement of spatial fields; Figure 1).
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/36881/title/Mapping-Humans--Mental-GPS/
Quote from: RunningLaser;719496Just curious if anyone has played a hexcrawl game with other games and what game was used.
Yes, I've been hexcrawling with
Traveller for the past 32 years.
What I've found works best for me, and this can be dropped into any hexcrawl game, is make the first hexcrawl to be one of pure exploration.
Traveller lets you do this as a solitaire game, so it can be done as campaign prep. The second hexcrawl in the same area is one of exploitation and colonization as resources mapped out of the first hexcrawl are mined and grown by the settlers brought in who must be defended by PCs from indiginous nastiness.