Good Evening Dungeon Masters, I’m Baron
de Ropp. How do we make overland travel and exploration
actually interesting? We have tools like random encounters and hex
crawls specifically to facilitate that sense of exploration, yet, there is clearly a disconnect
between the goal of fostering a sense of discovery, and the use of these tools to do so. Furthermore, what can we learn from games
like Legend of Zelda’s Breath of the Wild or Tears of the Kingdom, in order to resolve
this exploration disconnect? TOWERING OBSERVATIONS
Just as a dungeon room with three identical doors doesn’t really offer your players
any needed information so they can decide what direction they should go in next, dropping
your players in the middle of a grasslands hex, and telling them there are more plains
in the north, west, and east, does little to foster interesting overland travel. And this poor execution of terrain design
might be a lesson learned from some of the most popular video games in our current zeitgeist. Even standout franchises suffer from this
lack of directional information. The uninspired planet-side excursions of 2012’s
Mass Effect were so monotonous and repetitive, they were altogether abandoned in future iterations
of the Mass Effect series. Of course, Legend of Zelda’s Breath of the
Wild and subsequent Tears of the Kingdom tackles the exploration orientation issue in a visually
clear way. By presenting tall, iconic landmarks which
help orient the player as they explore the world, the player never feels lost or overwhelmed
with an expansive geographical white noise. They always have something interesting to
orient themselves and to look at. Additionally, as Link approaches these large,
distant, and anchoring landmarks, like Death Mountain, or the various Sheika Towers, Link
also discovers many smaller interesting locations along the way: locations that are otherwise
obscured or only briefly come into view due to the terrain’s layout. These discoveries include things like moblin
dens or puzzle shrines. To extrapolate these Breath of the Wild location
visibility concepts into a hex crawling system, we need to be cognizant of the size of our
hexes, and how far the adventuring party can see into nearby areas. Using the most common size of six mile hexes,
which represents roughly one third of a day’s travel on open ground, we can surmise that
objects over 10 feet tall are visible in adjacent hexes. Landmarks over 100 feet high can be seen two
hexes away, and objects larger than 200 feet can be easily seen three hexes away. Additionally, a mountain with elevation prominence
of 2000 ft disappears behind the horizon after some whopping 10 hexes. With these benchmarks in mind, we can place
various points of interest around the map, and treat them not just as reference points
for what characters will discover within a particular hex, but also as directional guides
for nearby locations that characters can explore. In a way, these points of interest almost
become a series of undiscovered location markers, like on Skyrim’s navigation compass, for
example. In our earlier case of the monotonous grassland
hexes, that area now becomes far more engaging: A tall mountain range can be seen in the north,
a watchtower on a hill stands tall to the east, and in the west, there is a small copse
of trees, all dotting the otherwise open expanse of prairie. By thinking about what landmarks might be
visible in adjacent or nearby hexes, dungeon masters provide players meaningful options
of what to explore, reasons to get off the beaten path, and opportunities to weigh the
risks and rewards of traveling into these adjacent hexes. If the players decide to check out the copse
of trees, they might run into a bandit camp in the tree grove. Moreover, hiking toward the trees will cause
the fort, back in the opposite direction, to no longer be in view, all while players
can still see the massive mountain peaks to the north. To iterate on map placement, having a few
impressively large landmarks, like those mountain peaks, and maybe some massive magic tower,
roughly 20 hexes apart from one another allows the players to orient themselves to at least
one of those highly visible landmarks as they explore. Additionally, smaller landmarks, like castles
on hills, can be seen some three or four hexes away, so ensuring there is a healthy number
of these smaller landmarks provides a point-to-point context between each of these massive, distant
waypoints. Furthermore, the largest of landmarks are
also useful for when players might wander through a deep, winding cave, or into an expansive
forest. If, when entering the forest, a distant mountain
can be seen behind it, and when emerging from the other side, the mountain is no longer
in front of them, but off to the east, the players have good information to understand
where they now located are in the world, and will help them realize just how large or small
the forest they just traveled through really is. This all being said, designing your maps in
this way only gives players context for meaningful decision making when picking a direction to
travel, but still doesn’t offer much in the way of developing a sense of discovery
as the players explore the immediate hex around them. WONDEROUS EXPLORATION
Players need enough distant landmarks to make informed decisions on where they want to go
next. But, with a gain in a sense of direction,
they leave behind a sense of discovery. To resolve that, we can leverage the mechanical
nature of the hexcrawl itself, supplemented with random tables. Much the same way we have random NPC or monster
encounters, we can use a random location discovery table. In one of my previous videos that I’ll link
to at the end of this one, I discuss setting up random tables that aren’t just lifeless
combat encounters, and we can use a similar method, on the fly, to flesh out interesting
geographical or structural discoveries in a similar way. Whenever characters enter a hex, or however
often you find appropriate, roll a 1-in-6 chance for the characters to bump into a random
encoutner. However, also roll a 1-in-6 chance to see
if the characters bump into a noteworthy landmark. These landmarks should be small, constrained
locations, like the entrance to a monster’s lair, an abandoned shack, or perhaps evidence
of a poacher’s camp. To make a quality custom landmark discovery
table of your own, create three columns we can each roll a d6 on. I like calling these three column tables a
d666, or a dDevil table for that reason. One column can be a specific geographic or
structural feature, the next column can be a theme or mood to influence how the location
feels, and the final column can list some sort of small oddity or detail about the location
that makes the place interesting enough for worthwhile exploration. As an example, for a desolate rolling hills
area, we can flesh out our terrain column with a Boulder Field, a Cave, a Shrub Grove,
some Hot Springs, a Thicket, or some long-ago Stacked Stones. We need a few relevant themes, as well, so
in the next column, we can add Ashen, Withered, Sinking, and a few others. Lastly, for our Details column, we can further
bulk out the table with a few narrative queues or equipment finds the characters might discover. Poisonous plants would be good for a ranger
or druid to tinker around with, a map case might be a useful object to put a clue about
the larger campaign in, a desiccated corpse might inspire questions about other monsters
in the area that clearly killed this person, and so on. With a landmark table filled out for each
explorable area, we have no shortage of thematically interesting locations for characters to bump
into as they traverse the map. Thanks to this table, characters might run
into a sunken hot spring with a number of poisonous flowers growing around a steam vent,
or a cave covered in ash, soot, and splattered blood. These tight little environmental locations
rolled up on the fly do a lot of work to foster that sense of discovery we feel in Skyrim,
for example, when we round a mountain pass and see a dwarven ruin the first time, or
when we encounter our first moblin camp in Breath of the Wild. If you’d like to help me make more content
like this in the future, please consider supporting me on patreon or becoming a channel member. Thanks for watching dungeon masters, and until
next time, good night!
