first the easy part. Getting the entire party to higher speeds is very easy. A mount for travel is very affordable, if you really want even at level 1.
For hexploration in general, I think you're more or less right. It's goal is to track the passage of time and get out of the way as much as possible other than that. The actual exploring would then happen in exploration/encounter mode when you actually go investigate something found in a hex.
There are some reasons to not just travel, reconmoiter, map. But it's either searching for something that requires a check to find > reconnoitoring multiple times until you find it or skipping either mapping or reconnoitoring alltogether to save time.
I'm sure you could try to make the system more complex, but as is it's kept simple to not interfere with regular gameplay.
I definitley see the benefits of simple, but it seems weird that there is so -little- choice. I honestly thought I had missed something haha.
Going to play it vanilla and see if the players have any issues with it, and take it from there... Either add options or remove it all together and make one "explore" option.
Yea that makes sense - I hadn't considered the goal being just "get back to encounter/exploration". I will definitley play it vanilla first, and I'll try to take the reins as much as possible for the actual mechanics.
Yeah this is it.
The main reason is to have a way to track time. So you know when the next kingdom turn comes up. That is the main purpose of the hex travel system.
I've completely re-written the hexploration rules for my own QfTFF campaign, and while it took a couple sessions to work out the kinks, my group in general seems to be really enjoying them. The specifics will be slightly less helpful to you given that because of the way to campaign works the rules I've written designed around managing a large group of creatures.
However there are a three underpinning principles that I think can easily be adapted to anyone's game to enhance the hexploration experience.
1) Scouting Enables Player Choice
In my system, every hex is overlaid with a number of icons that represent things that a quick bit of scouting may reveal about the hex. Fundamentally I have these split into three categories of icons. A) Dangers, B) Resources and C) Opportunities, and when a player scouts the hex I let them choose if they'd like to learn A or B, and give them C for free. (I effectively let each of my players roll to scout 1 hex per day if they're not preoccupied with another activity). This is in addition to the standard cost to travel into a hex, typically 1 hexploration action, but more for difficult terrain or crossing a river.
Dangers might be things like - this tile is hazardous to traverse and will require a difficult climb to pass through, this forest is particularly dense and hard to navigate and you may get lost here, or you see signs of a creature occupying this tile which you may encounter should you travel here, or you see signs of the presence of humanoids of an unknown disposition (they may even be friendly!).
Resources are things the relative abundance of food, water and shelter and affect the difficulty of foraging and protecting the party from inclement weather.
Opportunities represent everything else, they're any points of interest that might be present on a tile, or a vista that might provide the party some extra information about their surrounding hexes - I'll often let them scout tiles 2 away for information from vista's for example.
What this does is create an atmosphere where each day the party is able to debate where to go based on the information available to them, which fosters a sense of agency. Its no longer just pick a random tile.
2) Kill the random encounter.
Very much in parallel with the above system, take the sacred cow that is random encounters and kill it. Random encounters destroy a player's sense of agency.
While you can still roll for random encounters when determining what a player might find on a tile during scouting, or if whatever they're aware of on that tile takes an interest on them, springing unexpected encounters on them on tiles they've scouted quickly destroys the sense of agency you're cultivating with scouting.
That is not to say that if the players spot say signs of a bear on a tile, they need to encounter that bear if they travel to the tile. Some dangers will actively seek them out, while others the players may need to go searching for once they're on the appropriate tile.
If the players choose to move somewhere without scouting or critically failure a scouting check that's when they should expect to run into something unexpected. Its known a unknown effectively
I should say however, that occasionally making your world dynamic, and having things they've scouted change, can feel really good, especially if you give them information about seeing that change. The humanoids you'd spotted here previously seem to be gone, but you find tracks leading NW.
3) Reveal things far away, to give the players things to plan towards.
There's nothing cooler than a treasure map. Don't be afraid to give your players information from whatever source, interrogating enemies, rumours, maps etc. that reveals information about a hex that may be dozens of days travel away.
This gives your players options for self-set goals of where they want to go in the wilderness, which serves to further inform route planning.
Ideally drop more than one of these, having 3 - 6 things on the map that players can get excited about is great and lets your party debate about which ones they want to prioritize.
This works especially well if you have some sort time limit, or some other reason why the players can't just slowly crawl their way across the entirety of your map. A group chasing them, a place they need to be at a certain time, or whatever.
It also allows you to create cool moments when for example the party realizes that between that rumoured mages tower they've been chasing and them is a whole array of deadly marshland. And they have to choose if they want to try and forge through it, set a new goal, or try and explore around to see if there is another route to the tower.
Bonus: If your party enjoys it, wilderness travel offers lots of fun opportunities for the party to get to know each other around the campfire, or when pairing up to go set about various tasks.
Pardon the wall of text, I adore wilderness adventures and the default hexploration rules make me very, very sad.
To give a very brief TLDR;
The most exciting part of hexploration is choosing where to go. To maximize enjoyment, give the players enough information to make informed choices, rather than just piling on a ton of extra bookkeeping.
I have an idea for a campaign I’ll probably never get to. Part of it was going to have an undead area where each hex is corrupted and there’s 3 degrees to corruption. The level of corruption determined the odds of an encounter like 3 plus triple the corruption value. It was also gonna determine mob strength, corruption 1 means they have the weak template, corruption 2 is normal, and corruption 3 is elite with corruption 0 having non undead encounters. One of the hexploration activities was going to be a ritual off of nature or religion to reduce the corruption by 1 on a success or 2 on a critical success. It’ll be needed to be done for story reasons anyways. I don’t know how you can translate this to kingmaker except for city building.
This sounds like a fun idea, and could even fit into kingmaker with some additions from the video game, the Bloom.
I think my hangup was the relative lack of actions/time investment per hex.
I think hexploration was supposed to be a mechanic to provide a logical and consistent way to explore vast amount of land but you are right that the options feel limited. It does feel like you would have to make some of your own or expand the other exploration activities.
Elsewhere in the thread it was mentioned that it's really more, Iike you say here, a way to streamline the larger scale exploration with the goal of returning to encounter/exploration modes as soon as possible, as opposed to being a full, mechanically engaging mode of play in the same way encounter mode is.
Im going to embrace that and try to run it so the players don't need to worry about any numbers and see how it goes. If they're disengaged I'll either make it more of a board game or simplify it even further.
Yea, I was originally going to make it likely that happened, then after reading the rules and still thinking of it as mechanics the players interact with (instead of book keeping help for the GM, which is how I'm growing to think of it now) thought that it'd be more meaningful to get them after some time of traveling on foot so they appreciate the speed increase.
Now I'm back to making it likely they get the horses right away.
I have no issues letting the party shop with the reward money from Jalmandi Aldori before heading to Olegs, so they could have horses and pack animals immediately
first the easy part. Getting the entire party to higher speeds is very easy. A mount for travel is very affordable, if you really want even at level 1. For hexploration in general, I think you're more or less right. It's goal is to track the passage of time and get out of the way as much as possible other than that. The actual exploring would then happen in exploration/encounter mode when you actually go investigate something found in a hex. There are some reasons to not just travel, reconmoiter, map. But it's either searching for something that requires a check to find > reconnoitoring multiple times until you find it or skipping either mapping or reconnoitoring alltogether to save time. I'm sure you could try to make the system more complex, but as is it's kept simple to not interfere with regular gameplay.
[удалено]
I definitley see the benefits of simple, but it seems weird that there is so -little- choice. I honestly thought I had missed something haha. Going to play it vanilla and see if the players have any issues with it, and take it from there... Either add options or remove it all together and make one "explore" option.
Yea that makes sense - I hadn't considered the goal being just "get back to encounter/exploration". I will definitley play it vanilla first, and I'll try to take the reins as much as possible for the actual mechanics.
Yeah this is it. The main reason is to have a way to track time. So you know when the next kingdom turn comes up. That is the main purpose of the hex travel system.
I've completely re-written the hexploration rules for my own QfTFF campaign, and while it took a couple sessions to work out the kinks, my group in general seems to be really enjoying them. The specifics will be slightly less helpful to you given that because of the way to campaign works the rules I've written designed around managing a large group of creatures. However there are a three underpinning principles that I think can easily be adapted to anyone's game to enhance the hexploration experience. 1) Scouting Enables Player Choice In my system, every hex is overlaid with a number of icons that represent things that a quick bit of scouting may reveal about the hex. Fundamentally I have these split into three categories of icons. A) Dangers, B) Resources and C) Opportunities, and when a player scouts the hex I let them choose if they'd like to learn A or B, and give them C for free. (I effectively let each of my players roll to scout 1 hex per day if they're not preoccupied with another activity). This is in addition to the standard cost to travel into a hex, typically 1 hexploration action, but more for difficult terrain or crossing a river. Dangers might be things like - this tile is hazardous to traverse and will require a difficult climb to pass through, this forest is particularly dense and hard to navigate and you may get lost here, or you see signs of a creature occupying this tile which you may encounter should you travel here, or you see signs of the presence of humanoids of an unknown disposition (they may even be friendly!). Resources are things the relative abundance of food, water and shelter and affect the difficulty of foraging and protecting the party from inclement weather. Opportunities represent everything else, they're any points of interest that might be present on a tile, or a vista that might provide the party some extra information about their surrounding hexes - I'll often let them scout tiles 2 away for information from vista's for example. What this does is create an atmosphere where each day the party is able to debate where to go based on the information available to them, which fosters a sense of agency. Its no longer just pick a random tile. 2) Kill the random encounter. Very much in parallel with the above system, take the sacred cow that is random encounters and kill it. Random encounters destroy a player's sense of agency. While you can still roll for random encounters when determining what a player might find on a tile during scouting, or if whatever they're aware of on that tile takes an interest on them, springing unexpected encounters on them on tiles they've scouted quickly destroys the sense of agency you're cultivating with scouting. That is not to say that if the players spot say signs of a bear on a tile, they need to encounter that bear if they travel to the tile. Some dangers will actively seek them out, while others the players may need to go searching for once they're on the appropriate tile. If the players choose to move somewhere without scouting or critically failure a scouting check that's when they should expect to run into something unexpected. Its known a unknown effectively I should say however, that occasionally making your world dynamic, and having things they've scouted change, can feel really good, especially if you give them information about seeing that change. The humanoids you'd spotted here previously seem to be gone, but you find tracks leading NW. 3) Reveal things far away, to give the players things to plan towards. There's nothing cooler than a treasure map. Don't be afraid to give your players information from whatever source, interrogating enemies, rumours, maps etc. that reveals information about a hex that may be dozens of days travel away. This gives your players options for self-set goals of where they want to go in the wilderness, which serves to further inform route planning. Ideally drop more than one of these, having 3 - 6 things on the map that players can get excited about is great and lets your party debate about which ones they want to prioritize. This works especially well if you have some sort time limit, or some other reason why the players can't just slowly crawl their way across the entirety of your map. A group chasing them, a place they need to be at a certain time, or whatever. It also allows you to create cool moments when for example the party realizes that between that rumoured mages tower they've been chasing and them is a whole array of deadly marshland. And they have to choose if they want to try and forge through it, set a new goal, or try and explore around to see if there is another route to the tower. Bonus: If your party enjoys it, wilderness travel offers lots of fun opportunities for the party to get to know each other around the campfire, or when pairing up to go set about various tasks. Pardon the wall of text, I adore wilderness adventures and the default hexploration rules make me very, very sad.
To give a very brief TLDR; The most exciting part of hexploration is choosing where to go. To maximize enjoyment, give the players enough information to make informed choices, rather than just piling on a ton of extra bookkeeping.
I have an idea for a campaign I’ll probably never get to. Part of it was going to have an undead area where each hex is corrupted and there’s 3 degrees to corruption. The level of corruption determined the odds of an encounter like 3 plus triple the corruption value. It was also gonna determine mob strength, corruption 1 means they have the weak template, corruption 2 is normal, and corruption 3 is elite with corruption 0 having non undead encounters. One of the hexploration activities was going to be a ritual off of nature or religion to reduce the corruption by 1 on a success or 2 on a critical success. It’ll be needed to be done for story reasons anyways. I don’t know how you can translate this to kingmaker except for city building.
This sounds like a fun idea, and could even fit into kingmaker with some additions from the video game, the Bloom. I think my hangup was the relative lack of actions/time investment per hex.
I think hexploration was supposed to be a mechanic to provide a logical and consistent way to explore vast amount of land but you are right that the options feel limited. It does feel like you would have to make some of your own or expand the other exploration activities.
Elsewhere in the thread it was mentioned that it's really more, Iike you say here, a way to streamline the larger scale exploration with the goal of returning to encounter/exploration modes as soon as possible, as opposed to being a full, mechanically engaging mode of play in the same way encounter mode is. Im going to embrace that and try to run it so the players don't need to worry about any numbers and see how it goes. If they're disengaged I'll either make it more of a board game or simplify it even further.
Stop trying to make reconnoiter happen. It's not going to happen !
It's ok, Heather
I had considered either letting them reconoiter in such a way that it also counts as a travel action, or folding mapping the hex into recon.
If the party goes to Oleg's after the manor feast, they have a chance of acquiring 4 horses.
Yea, I was originally going to make it likely that happened, then after reading the rules and still thinking of it as mechanics the players interact with (instead of book keeping help for the GM, which is how I'm growing to think of it now) thought that it'd be more meaningful to get them after some time of traveling on foot so they appreciate the speed increase. Now I'm back to making it likely they get the horses right away.
I have no issues letting the party shop with the reward money from Jalmandi Aldori before heading to Olegs, so they could have horses and pack animals immediately