So possible a tangential question, but what's the difference a Dungeon Crawl and a Hex Crawl?  Or maybe, more accurately, can't you have a Dungeon Crawl IN a Hex Crawl?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1045091So possible a tangential question, but what's the difference a Dungeon Crawl and a Hex Crawl?  Or maybe, more accurately, can't you have a Dungeon Crawl IN a Hex Crawl?

You can have a dungeon crawl in a hex crawl.
IMO the big difference is that dungeon crawl is a fully developed game system going back to OD&D, whereas hexcrawl has never become a fully developed game structure - hexcrawls normally lack the sort of systems which have made the dungeon crawl a default play mode for decades. Ben Robbins' West Marches   inspired many attempts, along with our Rob Conley's efforts - I could imagine someone developing a full system based off his approach, but it hasn't really happened yet.

Quote from: S'mon;1045108You can have a dungeon crawl in a hex crawl.

OK. Fair enough, I assumed you could, but it just seemed like they were separate items.  You couldn't do one without the other.  Actually, lemme ask, is levels 1-3 meant to be in the SAME dungeon?

Quote from: S'mon;1045108IMO the big difference is that dungeon crawl is a fully developed game system going back to OD&D, whereas hexcrawl has never become a fully developed game structure - hexcrawls normally lack the sort of systems which have made the dungeon crawl a default play mode for decades. Ben Robbins' West Marches   inspired many attempts, along with our Rob Conley's efforts - I could imagine someone developing a full system based off his approach, but it hasn't really happened yet.

This is news to me, and I'm not being facetious or snarky, but I was always under the impression it was a fully fleshed system.  Can I ask what makes a Hex Crawl hard to pin down?

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1045114OK. Fair enough, I assumed you could, but it just seemed like they were separate items.  You couldn't do one without the other.  Actually, lemme ask, is levels 1-3 meant to be in the SAME dungeon?



This is news to me, and I'm not being facetious or snarky, but I was always under the impression it was a fully fleshed system.  Can I ask what makes a Hex Crawl hard to pin down?

Same dungeon - can be; the Moldvay & Mentzer basic sets seem to indicate the DM should create a dungeon for at least 3 levels of play, and Keep on the Borderlands for instance looks designed that way. But not necessarily.

Hex crawls generally lack a clear incentive to actually crawl the hexes; mapping/exploration for its own sake isn't really sufficient (as Justin Alexander discusses). Ben Robbins' approach treated the wilderness more like a dungeon with PCs exploring (small) ruins among the wilderness in search of treasure.

The best incentives I know for hex crawls that I have used are:

1. Get from point A to point B to point C when either you
2) Find and explore points A,B and.or C in order to find something/somebody

when you

i) don't know exactly where these point are but know they are in a certain region (island, forest, swamp)
ii) must avoid the normal routes because of enemies in the region

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1045114OK. Fair enough, I assumed you could, but it just seemed like they were separate items.  You couldn't do one without the other.  Actually, lemme ask, is levels 1-3 meant to be in the SAME dungeon?

In this context, I am suspicious of the term 'meant' (as well as 'supposed to') since the level of consistency back in the day is pretty lacking (in other words, each group did it differently). If you were in a group that used modules (and we'll never get much agreement on what percentage that is), then looking at the low level dungeons suggests a single dungeon usually could get you at least up to level 3. It certainly didn't have to, as you 1) might not get all the loot out of it, 2) might lose some xp to character death (and not in a way that the next foray into the dungeon could re-collect the same gold), 3) might have more PCs involved than dungeon expects, 4) might roll low on the treasure tables (anywhere where the treasure is not a listed amount, but instead a roll on the treasure tables), and so forth. Regardless, I think it would be easy, if not required, to make a dungeon with a few physical levels include the 25-40,000 gp (including all the copper, gems, expensive wall hangings, whathaveyou) needed to get a party of 4 up to 3rd level.

QuoteThis is news to me, and I'm not being facetious or snarky, but I was always under the impression it was a fully fleshed system.  Can I ask what makes a Hex Crawl hard to pin down?

Do you have access to B/X or 1e (or maybe one of the free retroclones have an equivalent, anyone know?)? They each have very nice sections on using random rolls on charts to create wilderness hexes. That plus random encounter tables means that there is a relatively easy way to create adventure in a random wilderness hex if you want to. Aside from some vague wording, there's not much direction that this is an 'intended' avenue for adventure creation (I'm going to say 25-40% of the other started-as-kids gamers I met BitD just thought those charts were there to fill out maps or if someone rolls poorly on their teleport percentage and ends up 'somewhere', etc.). In other words, it doesn't do a good job of telling the DM 'you should be encouraging the players to go explore the wilderness.' Likewise, the incentive structure of the game (where xp is pinged off of treasure, which is easier to find if you are invading an opponent's dungeon home) doesn't really explain why you the Players are supposed to want to go do this (other than curiosity or boredom). Certainly by the time of BECMI and 2e (the two I started with in '83 and '89, respectively), a whole lot of this emergent play was removed from the wording of the game, and the way I knew about a portion of the game being 'go out into the wilderness and stir up some trouble'-style play was because that was the plot of the Isle of Dread module.

Dungeon Crawls have a built-in Raison d'etre.  In dungeons are treasure and things guarding treasure, or things possessing treasure, or just living in places where there's treasure.

So, if you want to level up, you go there and...
Kill things for XP
or
Loot treasure for XP
or both.

Now, the GM can overlay multiple settings reasons why you want to do this, but, strictly speaking, he doesn't have to.  The WHY is built in.

In a hexcrawl, not so much.  You can be exploring to see if there's a dungeon to find, but randomly doing that is not very efficient.
For hexcrawls, the GM HAS to come up with a setting or system reason for doing it.  

• The local Lord is offering bounties for clearing out the frontier and and mapping it.
• The PCs are trying to find the lair of something menacing civilization.
• The PCs have a map or legends that tell them something worth going to is out there.
• The first group that successfully maps the passes through the DeathSpine Mountains gets their weight in gold.
• Exploring earns XP.

The WHY isn't clearcut or built-in at all in baseline D&D.

There is a very real temptation to throw out some rules.

For example, Alignment Languages. You share a language with creatures of your save alignment that can speak and when you change alignment you lose your old language and learn the new one.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1045163Dungeon Crawls have a built-in Raison d'etre.  In dungeons are treasure and things guarding treasure, or things possessing treasure, or just living in places where there's treasure.

So, if you want to level up, you go there and...
Kill things for XP
or
Loot treasure for XP
or both.

Now, the GM can overlay multiple settings reasons why you want to do this, but, strictly speaking, he doesn't have to.  The WHY is built in.

In a hexcrawl, not so much.  You can be exploring to see if there's a dungeon to find, but randomly doing that is not very efficient.
For hexcrawls, the GM HAS to come up with a setting or system reason for doing it.  

• The local Lord is offering bounties for clearing out the frontier and and mapping it.
• The PCs are trying to find the lair of something menacing civilization.
• The PCs have a map or legends that tell them something worth going to is out there.
• The first group that successfully maps the passes through the DeathSpine Mountains gets their weight in gold.
• Exploring earns XP.

The WHY isn't clearcut or built-in at all in baseline D&D.

I made a couple of suggestions of my own upthread about motivation for hexcrawling.

I think Mr. Bryce of 10 Foot Pole reviews makes a very good point indeed: don't just motivate the PCs, motivate the players.

A GM can ask him/herself "What would motivate my players to explore this area?"

Some players want money, some magic weapons, some spells, etc. Get all of them and put them in a few linked locations. Then let the players know that all three and/or whatever else the players want for their PC s are in that region. The rest of the fluff, like encouragement from a Duke to explore or a village that is afraid of the Valley of Badness is lovely window dressing on the essential "wherefore explore?"

I don't see *anything* about any of these descriptions about Dungeon-Crawls/Hex-Crawls and how people want to define their conceits that can't be done as a normal mode of play with Savage Worlds?

And that includes transitioning those conceits to others larger-scale affairs on the fly.

There are literally dozens of fantasy settings for SW. I have a hard copy of the Fantasy Companion and Shaintar Legends and Lankhmar and that would suffice.

Quote from: tenbones;1045188I don't see *anything* about any of these descriptions about Dungeon-Crawls/Hex-Crawls and how people want to define their conceits that can't be done as a normal mode of play with Savage Worlds?

And that includes transitioning those conceits to others larger-scale affairs on the fly.

I don't think there is.
I do, however, think Savage World would severely choke, and/or be severely anemic in handling Immortals.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1045205I don't think there is.
I do, however, think Savage World would severely choke, and/or be severely anemic in handling Immortals.

I have precisely ZERO experience in playing SW at that level. And I'm suspecting you're right.

I have all the Savage Rifts stuff - but I have yet to use it. They do make some changes to the system - but not to the mechanics of play itself. It's definitely more high-powered, I've always been a little skeptical of SW going to full God-Mode, but I think it's possible. I think it'll lose a little coherence tho.

Quote from: tenbones;1045050I think you not only can duplicate that structure in Savage Worlds - I think out of the box SW does it better with better rules-cohesion. I fully submit that this is probably due to the age of BECMI in relation to SW.


SW Ranks *are* levels of play with more bleedover than just the conceits you've presented and have all the same conceits - but with better gameplay. You're not necessarily going to TPK as easy in SW at the low-end of the pool. I'd ballpark it like this -

Novice = levels 1-3
Seasoned = levels  4-6
Veteran = levels 7-12
Heroic = 12-15 - you'll be leveraging high-powered rules like Shaintar at this range.
Legendary = 15-God-mode Supers etc. - here you'll want to be leveraging mechanics you see in Savage Rifts/Supers/Shaintar depending on your setting.

All the other stuff - domain management, even magical dimension hopping as it relates to BECMI you can do pretty much at will in SW, it's not assumed to be cordoned off based on your Rank, just the criteria of the setting may need adjusting which isn't really an issue at all since the system scales remarkably well within itself.

SW is more cinematic in feel than BECMI is to me. And this is due to some mechanical differences like how combat plays out. Of course this is dependent on a lot of setting criteria too... so I'm speaking in general.

This, except that given the changes in BECMI once you hit the "Immortals" level...I suspect you might as well replace Savage Worlds with another system. Maybe one meant to emulate super-powered beings in a fantasy setting;).

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1045204There are literally dozens of fantasy settings for SW. I have a hard copy of the Fantasy Companion and Shaintar Legends and Lankhmar and that would suffice.

Oh I'm a big fan of those (don't forget Hellfrost) and they work for most plots at our table. I just wouldn't run a BECMI campaign with Savage Worlds and vice versa, I consider them good at different things which is why I'm trying to mash them together.

Quote from: CRKrueger;1045205I do, however, think Savage World would severely choke, and/or be severely anemic in handling Immortals.

We're running a Supers Campaign with increasing power points. We're at 40 now. Our effective power is closer to level 15+ Pathfinder non-fullcaster characters. God-like power as far as actual religions and myths go, but pretty far away from Rules Cyclopedia immortals, let alone the expanded rules in Wrath of the Immortals.

It's doable, I guess. Idk, I feel like Shaintar handles Immortal power levels better when you get very deep into legendary, but I'm just not familiar enough with it yet.

I know I wasn't particularly impressed with Wrath of the Immortals, I'd rather use the RC rules than have supper fine grain diety mechanics.