More on hexcrawling (part 2)

Part one here.

I got to use my traces/tracks/spoor/monster/lair table for encounters this week and found out it doesnt work for hex crawling. If you recall, I was rolling every four hours and cleared the encounter track every night. That means I need six (remember there are 2 traces) out of six dice to come up as successes. Why didn't I figure this out? Why didn't you tell me! Well, that's what playtesting is for, my players got off easy!
Ok, we have two options here, decrease the DC or shorten the encounter track. Either should work, but which is better? I want an encounter once every few days, let's say twenty five percent chance per day. If I were rolling one d20 I would set a DC 15, as each increment of a d20 is one twentieth of one hundred, or five percent. Looking at anydice 6d20 output, 72+ is about 25% so I'm guessing a DC of 12 without any fancy probability math. Is there a website that will do that for me? To google!

Lowering the DC means I still need 6 successes. Or I could use a range. Probably based off of the encounter DC. DC 19 encounter, 17-18 is track, 15-16 is spoor, natural 20 is lair.

So looking over this today, I came up with a solution I like and will try. Nat 20 is a lair, encounter DC-1 is spoor, -2 is tracks, -3 and -4 are traces. Now to make encounter tables!

I removed the graph side and pelaced it with a rocketbook page (not shown). Here is the revised tracker in google drive.

More hexcrawling

I’m working on a few new systems for my hexcrawling and thought I’d bring you all on the ride! I mention my time pool and thought I’d explain it here. Every time a player does an action that takes between three and ten minutes I drop a die in the time bucket. Once a sixth die is dropped in there or if they do something that would attract unwanted attention, I roll the dice and check for an encounter. The number of successes correlates (ideally) with the encounter difficulty. OK, time to get to work.

I’m trying something new for my random encounters, traces, spoor, and encounters. I’m also counting successes by setting a base DC for an encounter and then subtracting my roll to get a degree of severity. Each degree checks off a box in order of traces, traces, tracks, spoor, lair, and creature, each step revealing more of the possible encounter. I’ve decided to start this because of how I roll encounters (with a time pool) for dungeons. Right now I’ve set DCs for five categories. Let’s take a look.

Desolate	Unsettled	Frontier	Scattered	Dense
19	18	17	16	15

So if the frontier encounter roll is 19, three boxes are checked (17, 18, 19); so traces, traces, and spoor is found. The next encounter check will add to the same set of boxes and will clear after the encounter roll for overnight. Using six mile hexes rolling once for each hex and once for rest will get me five rolls. Of course, thinking more on that, that’s only on easily traveled land. This leads me to think there will never be an encounter on a mountains hex as it takes one day to cross a mountain hex. Also wild encounters may be more prevalent in unsettled territory than in densely populated areas, but encounters in general may not be. So let’s change some things.  I think I will roll encounters based on time and use these descriptors and DCs instead.

Creature population	Dense	Scattered	Desolate
Encounter DC	19	17	15

That makes it so I can roll every four hours bringing the daily total to six encounter rolls two of which being at night. So this seems to work out for monsters, but in civilized areas there will be more encounters with humanoids. We can count the lair as a camp, outpost, or hideout. I’m thinking we can skip some of the smaller steps in the ladder if we want. Say finding some traces and spore next encounter rolling past lair and heading straight to creature. Switching lair and creature in the order is an option too, resetting the boxes after a creature is rolled.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to keep track of now and the way I’m keeping track of time on my encounter worksheet is not working out anymore. Here’s a list of things I need to keep track of:

·         Time

·         Days

·         Encounter level

·         Encounter DC

·         Rounds

·         Torches/Light (1hour/4hours)

Rounds

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

Minutes (mark torch or lantern in top)

5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50	55	60

Hours (mark torch or lantern in top)

12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11

Days

1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28

Easy! I’m not sure where to put torches at, I’ll leave them in both hours and minutes for now and see where I use it the most. Hours seem like the most for me because I use a time pool to track hours, but that’s only indoors.  Now I’ll just format, print, and laminate it and have exactly what I need. I printed it out with graph paper on the back and presto, a new tracker for my table, hopefully it lasts through testing.

Making Cities

I was really inspired by Great GM's video to work on this.

It's taken me a while to be able to sit and work on this, the first part is a resource table. Depending on what hex your settlement is located in roll on the table below; d12 green (grass, scrub, forest, swamp or jungle), d10 desert (tundra, broken/barren, volcano), d8 hills (mountains). River settlements can always have some sort of fishing in addition to the results on the table.

	green	desert	hills
Herd Animal	1	1	1
Stone/Marble	2	2	2
Gems/Metal	3	3	3
Coal	4	4	4
Sugar	5	5	5
Incense	6	6	6
Wood	7	7	7
Cotton	8	8	8
Silk	9	9
Salt	10	10
Fruit	11
Wheat	12

Midpoint and defense settlement don't need to roll on the resource table as their function is based on another factor. More to come as I slowly plug away on this. This was the hardest part, whittling down and organizing.