Hex crawling and Sandboxing: Its possible.

I see a lot of confusion over two aspects of D&D, Travel and Sandbox gameplay. In terms of travel its mostly people newer to D&D who may have some assumptions about how D&D travel should work, They find the dissonance between these assumptions and the mechanics jarring and believe that the mechanics are broken hence why I made my previous blog post "Travel in D&D isn't Broken"

https://mazecaretaker.blogspot.com/2022/01/travel-in-d-isnt-broken.html

If I had to sum up what the assumption is its "The journey is just as important as the Destination" D&D is in many ways not Journey focused but Location focused. The game isn't about the journey to the fortress of five sides, its about the Tyrannical Sorcerer amassing an army in his labyrinthine Stronghold called the fortress of five sides. 

In the 5e D&D games I've played this tends to be inversed, locations are small and under developed and travel is so central that there are entire sessions dedicated to simply moving from one area to another. Now its worth stating that this is not the result of 5e mechanics, 5e travel mechanics are the same they have always been its simply a result of play style.

So lets briefly look at 5e's travel mechanics and discuss it a bit, firstly you travel a number of miles per hour or day depending on the speed your traveling. The Normal travel speed is 3miles per hour and 24miles per day, there's a slower speed that allows for stealth or a faster speed that reduces passive perception. The base speed you choose to move at is then modified by the terrain your moving over, over dense forest or jungle, swamps and rocky uneven ground you move at half speed and over maintained roads you move at double speed. It is recommend that you use hex maps to help run travel as each hex 

A lot of complaints I've heard about 5e travel is that its "Just a bunch of skill rolls" yes that's the point... they are abstractions to speed up play, all 3 of the skill checks Tracking, Navigation and Forage reducing the lose of certain resources be it time, food or water. There is no need to make this more complex and the same goes for the rest of travel, it works as intended and allows for fast adjudication of time passing and resource expenditure.

So Sandboxes, a sandbox is an area where the players are free to explore and travel in any direction or way they see fit. This is largely intimidating for DM's it seems like a lot to prep, but the truth is you are focusing on prepping certain things and improvising that which you comfortably can. This is where the location based gameplay I mentioned earlier can help, by focusing on prepping locations such as a town or dungeon and worrying less on the in between you can break you prep down into manageable chunks, it is not your job to worry about how the PC's get to a location only what that locations layout and content.

Improvisation is a useful skill for DM's, it takes a bit to build up the confidence and skill to improvise and I would recommend starting with small things like NPC dialogue or some dungeon dressing. As you go start trying to improvise more and more, the goal is not to make it so you prep nothing but instead that you are able to adapt to the players action and be confident in your ability to deal with the unexpected. Creating tools to help with improvisation can help I generally use name tables and reaction rolls during play, again its about prepping what you need to prep and improvising what you can.

I hope this post was helpful in some way, I enjoy talking about these subjects a lot and will touch on them again in the future.

M.C.

Why I love the OSR, Exploration is king

I think one of the biggest epiphanies I've had playing TTRPG's is that above all else I enjoy the process and rewards of exploration the best, from starting with 5e d&d where exploration is a stated "Pillar of Play" yet seemingly poorly used or understood, with missing dungeon crawl procedures, overreliance on the exhaustion mechanic for overland travel and everything being a DC check to the point where running a hex crawl rules as written must be rolling a dozen d20s every hex (which bogs down the game and is basically just fishing for success/failure after awhile)

It was really when I discovered the OSR that I had this realisation, a lot of the OSR books I have read emphasis exploration, from systems that heavily focus on these aspects of the game like Stars Without Number and Worlds Without Number, to adventure and setting books based around exploration and sandbox-style gameplay such as Hot Springs Island and Carcosa.

So what is exploration? Exploration in the simplest terms is the process of freely interact with a location; The GM creates the elements of the location and then you are free to manipulate the environment through the actions of your character. In game terms there are certain mechanics that form a structure for exploration. These are usually things that have values or measurements to them (Time, weight, size, distance etc) and abstractions for more loose or unpredictable elements (random encounters, weather, reaction rolls etc). This structure helps to ground the actions taken in a sort of virtual reality, but are not meant to precisely model the physics of the virtual reality. For example: the mechanics of the game may lay out how to open a chest with a crowbar or lockpick but the chest itself has certain properties. You could for instance infer that a wooden chest doused in oil may be burnt through (at risk of any flammable content) the rules are in place for abstracting common actions.

A lot of this is me organising my thoughts so it might not be the easiest to read but I hope it makes some sense, I would love to hear your feedback or opinion on the subject and would love to go back to this subject in the future. 

M.C.

Travel in D&D isn't broken

Just a quick blog post as I've not posted something in the last few days, one thing you can find in abundance on YouTube is advice videos on how to "Fix" travel or "how to make travel more interesting" this implies that travel in D&D is broken or boring and to be honest I disagree I think D&D Travel does exactly what its trying to.

Firstly I think this is an issue about what fiction exactly we are trying to emulate, a lot of the assumptions around "fixing" travel seems to be from the premise that high fantasy epics like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time are the examples to be followed, in these story's the journey lasts a considerable amount of time, in a lot of ways more important than the destination, it is during the journey that a lot of character development and action happens this is a polar opposites to D&D's heavily abstracted travel.

If however we compare it to some Swords and Sorcery story's on the other hand this glossing over or abstracting of travel makes more sense, in theses story's large parts of the characters journey are briefly described apart from noteworthy encounters, be it some sort of foe to defeat, obstacle to overcome or character to interact with

This style of travel is a lot more about going from A to B than focusing too heavily on travel, you calculate how long the journey will take, note off any resources expended and roll for random encounters and weather, after you deal with any consequences (combats or roleplay generated by encounters, effects of weather condition on travel etc) you arrive at your destination, it lends it self well to location based play where exploration of a location is the highlighted part and the to and from is more a matter of logistics than anything else.

As I said at the beginning this is just a quick post and this is definitely a topic I would like to talk about in more detail, I am currently running a Apocalypse sandbox using the Stars without number system that I will be starting up again next week so expect some play reports coming soon for that.

M.C.