HOW TO HEX CRAWL

INTRODUCTION

I want you to think of hex crawling as playing your TTRPG like a board game. On the players turn, they travel a number of hexes and then roll to see what happens, good or bad. Hex crawling is a very simple, rules lite way to explore a portion of the game world as large as a 10s or hundreds of miles. Rules for hex crawling have been explained more clearly in legacy editions of D&D and in retro clones than in current editions, which is one reason why I'm writing this. Hex crawling emphasizes exploration and discovery rather than combat or talking. The risk-reward elements and in essence the "game" elements are in resource management including time and food, avoiding hazards and obstacles, plotting routes, evading dangerous wild beasts or wandering warbands or scouts, and discovering secret locations.

BASICS OF A HEX

Why a hex? A hex represents a circle, but circles do not interlock as neatly as hexagons, so we use hexes instead. A hex assumes you are standing in the very center of the hex, and the boundaries of hex represent your horizon.

A hex represents a distance in miles. That distance is based on the scale of the map. If you look at an entire continent, one hex might be 60 miles, but we don't hex crawl hexes that big. We zoom in so that a hex is more manageable. There are different philosophies about how big a hex can be or should be, but to keep the math at the simplest, we're going to assume all hexes are either 2, 4, or 8 miles. The math below is based on humans being able to marching 24 miles per day which is reasonable. 

Your map will have a hex-grid on top. Hexes themselves come in different scales and sizes. I don't know if there are standard shaped and sized hexes for this practice. I've seen sheets of paper with 15 hexes on the short side and 27 hexes on the long side, 15 hexes on the long side and 20 hexes on the long side, 15 hexes on the short side and 18 hexes on the long side. You could probably do this with square gird paper (graph paper) perfectly well. The goal is to have paper that is a lot of grids across, so it's not too quickly explored.

HEXCRAWL MOVEMENT RULES

• Scales: Maps can show an area or region at different SCALES. Make these assumptions:
• Large Scale or Kingdom Scale: 1 hex = 8 miles. The hex counts shown below are for traveling pace are based on 8-mile hexes.
• Medium Scale (a seldom used in-between scale): 1 hex = 4 miles, double hex counts shown below. 
• Small Scale or Province Scale: 1 Hex = 2 miles, quadruple hex counts shown below.
• Note, province scales are actually1 mile hexes. Using 2 miles hexes simplifies my mini-game.
• Normal Pace: Move 3 hexes per day.
• Slow Pace: Move 2 Hexes per day. Bonus to stealth and perception.
• Fast Pace: Move 4 Hexes per day. Only navigation is possible and possibly penalized.
• Difficult Terrain: -1 Hex
• Encumbered: -1 Hex if movement while encumbered is possible.
• Forced March: +1 Hex per day and roll vs exhaustion. The roll is more difficult in Difficult Terrain or if encumbered.

GENERAL HEX RULES
Note that rules are intentionally rules-lite. GM rulings are encouraged.

• 1 Day = 1 Turn. Players can move a number of hexes per day, and can do one action per turn.
• Players subtract 1 day's rations / provisions at the end of each day. If you are out of rations, make a roll vs exhaustion.
• Hot regions double water requirements per day. 
• Assume you are in the center of the hex. 
• Don't do fractions of a hex.
• You automatically discover any landmarks or locations in a hex you're in.
• You can see for 2 miles in all directions unless obstructed by terrain. This is true at sea level. At higher altitudes, people can see further. 
• Roll 1 encounter per day and 1 encounter per night. 
• Roll more or less encounters depending on the region. 
• Encounters are not always detrimental; they can also be beneficial or neutral. Having potentially good encounters may make rolling for encounters exciting. 
• For the purposes of defining an encounter, an encounter roll may be an event such as weather or anything that may provide an interesting roleplay prompt.

PLAYER ACTIONS
Players can do 1 thing per day:

• Other / Specify: Be creative, I can't think up everything.
• Navigate: The lead player character in marching order navigates. Navigation is automatically successful on roads or in familiar regions. If success is uncertain, make a roll. 
• On a failure, stray off course by one 8-mile hex without realizing. 
• On a really bad failure, end the day in either the same hex or in a random adjacent hex and the party is sure they're off course but they don't know how badly.
• Some terrain and weather may make navigation more difficult.
• Hire an NPC guide who knows the region. Such a guild does not need to roll to navigate.
• Map: This player may make a map of the party's progress on blank hex paper. 
• They must map their progress faithfully to the navigation rolls, even the failures.
• Forage: Search for wild edibles, drinkable water, medicinal plants, firewood and tinder. On a success, add 1d4+Perception Provisions.
• Geography can affect the availability of resources. This generally makes the difficulty higher or lower, but can also make foraging impossible.
• Hunt / Track: Search for signs of wild game or some other quarry. Roll to succeed / fail. On a success, you encounter wild game or track it to its den.
• Scout: You search for enemies, hazards, and other sources of danger. On a success, you detect the danger in time and can't be surprised by it. You may also have a bonus to surprise enemies at the GM's option.

OPTIONAL RULES

You could use the standard and more traditional 6 mile hex for kingdom scale and 1 mile hex for province scale. In which case, use the adjusted chart below. 

• Scales: Maps can show an area or region at different SCALES. Make these assumptions:
• Kingdom Scale: 1 hex = 6 miles.
• Province Scale: 1 Hex = 1 mile, sextuple hex counts shown below.
• Normal Pace: Move 4 hexes per day.
• Slow Pace: Move 3 Hexes per day. Bonus to stealth and perception.
• Fast Pace: Move 5 Hexes per day. Only navigation is possible and possibly penalized.
• Difficult Terrain: -1 Hex
• Encumbered: -1 Hex if movement while encumbered is possible.
• Forced March: +1 Hex per day and roll vs exhaustion. The roll is more difficult in Difficult Terrain or if encumbered.

5 Things I don't like about D&D 5e

1. THIS corporation I disagree with. The edge of D&D is gone because of WotC. I can understand making a family friendly product, but omitting the word "savage" to be culturally sensitive, and making different races bland and interchangeable and humanizing monsters to avoid non-existent racism is infantilization and nonsense. I don't think this corporation is taking good care of the game, and I don't want to support them.

2. The game is too easy, or in other words, it's too difficult for a GM to challenge 5e player characters. You can mathematically show how some monsters just don't have a chance against player characters. This is probably why they don't publish the math of their challenge rating (or CR) system.

3. Rulings over rules to me means a rules-lite game that relies on GM rulings in the absence of rules or clear rules. I want a rules-lite game that gives the GM more flexibility. 5e has too many rules I don't like and would like to play without, like furries, skills, monks, and charisma checks to have a conversation. 5e doesn't give the GM clear permission to do what they want to the 5e rules. I think it shows a lack of confidence in the customer.

4. 5e puts talks about three pillars of game play, combat, social interaction, and exploration, but it's clearly heavily weighted towards combat. In 5e, exploration is crap. 90% or more of the books are dedicated towards combat, and 5e combat is BORING. Few rules are dedicated to say, hex crawling. In fact, the core books give no instruction on how to run a hex crawl. Exploration is about tension, mystery, and discovery, but some basic character features allow players to NEGATE the risks of exploration, which eliminates the risk reward aspect of exploration and make it lame. Examples: 1st level Rangers who can negate movement penalties in difficult terrain and can't get lost except by magical means, the Outlander background who can always recall maps and general terrain and can always forage enough food and water for 5 people per day if the biome has food and water, and lets not forget the 1st level Goodberry spell. At least Create Food and Water is a 3rd level spell, geez. There are no rules for running a dungeon crawl either. I challenge you to put together a presentation for GMs on how to run a dungeon using ONLY what's in the 5e core books. 5e even has concepts like passive perception so that the GM can play your character for you and tell you when you notice something even when you don't state you're looking for anything. 

5. Too much like a Computer Game? Video games are a medium of art with their own limitations and conventions, like needing to follow a script, having overly designed character builds, an excessive catalogue of player options, High and easily replenishable HP, and an emphasis on game balance. I don't like that some of these computer game-y ideas are prevalent in my table top RPGs either. One of the advantages of paper and pencil RPGs is DIY! Why are people buying supplemental books when they can just DIY? I don't know. I have my fair share of books I don't need.

Fantasy Adventure Guilds for RPGs

Historically speaking, the entire purpose of a guild was regulation of goods and services.

Diegetically speaking, Elder Scrolls III Morrowind's three Imperial Guilds for adventurers, the Fighter's Guild, the Mage's Guild, and the Thieves' Guild, which were ALL very clever because they were all implemented by the government, yes even the Thieves' Guild, to control the more dangerous elements of the society by channeling their dangerous behaviors rather than just imposing laws to restrict their more dangerous behaviors.

The Fighter's Guild was implemented to control independent mercenaries and give wayward soldiers and vagabonds something productive to do and keep them from becoming brigands. Membership grants you training, an income, work that is productive for society, opportunities for advancement and a good reputation, etc. The fighter's police themselves.

The Mage's Guild is like the Fighters Guild, but there's the addition of what is considered acceptable magic and unacceptable magic. Now your mages are restricted from doing the "bad magic" to keep their membership. The mages police themselves.

The Thieves' Guild is the most clever. The Thieves' Guild is the ultimate government psy-op. Members are given expectations about what crimes are OK, and what crimes are not OK. This means thieves' guild criminals are less dangerous than non-member criminals who have no such rules. Further, if you're in the thieves' guild and you get caught by the law, the guards will accept bribes and let you go to thieve again. If you're not in the thieves' guild, the guards will NOT accept bribes. Independent criminals and competing criminal organizations cannot compete with the thieves' guild. The thieves' guild police themselves and they police other thieves' without even trying. Additionally, by accepting bribes from the thieves' guild, the government just found out how to tax crime. 

All these organizations are incentivized to keep their charter, which is the document from the government that permits them to operate, by operating effectively. If they go rogue or fail to operate effectively, the government does some culling or some quality control for the members and leaders.

Track the value of money, not the types of coinage

If money in D&D has a gold standard, then instead of tracking the number of gp you're carrying, the number of sp, the number of cp, etc., you just track the value of gp you have instead. Example, 1 cp = 0.01 gp, 1 sp = 0.1 gp, 1 ep = 0.5 gp, and 1 pp = 10 gp (all values based on 5e PHB). So 5 cp = .05 gp and 9 sp = .9 gp. Therefore, if I had 5 gp, 9 sp, and 5 cp, why not just write down 5.95 gp? If the cost of most goods and services are based on GP, then no depth of gameplay is lost. 

Pros:

• Players are already programmed to track only one value for their money by video games, so they don't have to learn anything new.
• Reading that I have 5.95 gp is faster and simpler to understand and to communicate than reading that I have 5 gp, 9 sp, and 5 cp.
• Save time on conversions.
• Simplify your character sheet. Get rid of useless coins like ep, the fifty-cent piece of D&D, and cp, the penny of D&D.
• Players can get good at math if they suck.

Cons:

• Loss of flavor for people who value it. Note that a PC can be assumed to be carrying different coins.
• Probably not compatible with VTT or digital applications.

Charisma Checks suck

 Dump Charisma checks!

D&D 5e Economics

What is the first think you need to know about economics?

If your economy has a gold standard, meaning the value of everything is based on how much gold you can trade for it, then **you need to establish the value of a gold piece in your setting** and the most intuitive way to do this is to determine what is fair pay for an honest day's labor. This is how an individual knows what their labor (meaning their skill, knowledge, and time) is worth, and therefore they know how much of their labor they are trading for a meal, a drink, and a room at the inn, or rent. For example, in real world US dollars, federal minimum wage is $7.25/hr. If you earn minimum wager and if a burger and fries costs $7.25, then you know you're trading an hour of your labor for this meal. Actually no, taxes. Nevermind.

You also need to establish the value of other trade goods, like spices, tobacco, wine, wood, cloth, other materials, beasts of burden, land and property, food, drink, etc. That sounds pretty effortful, but it's all based on the idea of how much gold or labor is fair to trade for it.

Data

Let's look at some numbers from chapter 5 of the 5e PHB and Chapter 6 of the 5e DMG (why not 5e?) to get an appreciation of the value of a gold piece to a person in the 5e setting.

1 gp = 10 sp

1 gp = 100 cp

(we can also write these coinage conversions as 1 gp = 10 sp = 100 cp)

An untrained hireling (assume this is an ordinary peasant laborer or servant) earns 2 sp / workday (let's ignore how many hours are in a workday). 

A person living a squalid lifestyle spends an average of 1 sp / day on expenses such as food, water, shelter, clothes, etc.

A person living a poor lifestyle spends an average of 2 sp /day on expenses

Note that lifestyle expenses do not explain if the expense is the cost of YOU or the cost of YOU AND YOUR FAMILY.

A night at a poor inn is worth 1 sp (ouch), squalid is 7 cp per night

A gallon of ale costs 2 sp (ouch again), 4 cp per mug (I assume the poor drink really watered down stuff considering they spend 6 cp on "Meals (per day)" per page 158).

A loaf of bread is worth 2 cp.

A "hunk" of cheese is worth 1 sp (ouch! Can I assume this is the equivalent of buying a block of cheese from the grocery store?)

A "chunk" of meat is worth 3 sp (son ova! Can I assume this is the equivalent of picking up a cut of steak or some ground beef at the grocery store?)

(A sandwich must be expensive in faerun. Good thing I don't live there.)

A skilled hireling (assume this is a skilled laborer or tradesman, likely still a member of the peasant class) earns 2 gp / workday

A person living a modest lifestyle spends an average of 1 gp / day on expenses

A person living a comfortable lifestyle spends an average of 2 gp / day on expenses

Analysis

"Rations (1 day)", weighs 2 lbs, although an adventurer only needs 1 lbs of food per day (reference Chapter 8, Adventuring, section Food and Water on page 185), is worth 5 sp. Really think about this one. 5 sp is the same as 50 cp. 50 / 2 is 25. If a chicken costs 2 cp, then you can buy 25 chickens for the price of 1 day of ration. Poor people spend 6 cp on meals per day. 1 day of rations costs 8 times more money than a poor person spends of food per day. Rations which is defined as an allowance of a commodity during a shortage! The 5e books do not give the weight of a chicken, but I googled it and got a result of 5.7 lbs. Let's round down to 5 lbs because the people of faerun aren't using steroids on their chickens. You can buy 5 lbs of food (one chicken) for 2 pieces of copper, or you can buy 2 lbs of food (one days rations which the book describes as jerky, dried fruit, nuts, and effing HARDTACK) for 5 pieces of silver. Someone is being exploited, and I think it's the idiot adventurers. Call it murder-hobo tax.

As an exercise, look at Maintenance Costs table of page 127 of the 5e DMG. An abbey cost 20gp to maintain per day and requires 5 skilled hirelings and 25 untrained hirelings (30 staff). If 5 skilled hirelings worked full workdays, they would earn 2 gp each and cost 10 gp total per day. 25 Untrained hirelings working full workdays earn 2 sp each for a total of 50 sp per day. 50 sp equals 5 gp. The total cost of your staff is 15 gp per day. Where are the other 5 gp of daily maintenance costs going? Well, this table doesn't have a supplies cost, but we can assume supplies may include food and lodgings for the staff because it's common for the staff of an abbey to be a live-in staff.

Chapter 5 of the PHB has a table for Food, Drink, and Lodging. "Meals (per day)" says 3 sp for a modest lifestyle, and 6 cp for a Poor lifestyle. Notice that people living a modest lifestyle spend five times more money on food than the poor. Our abbey has 30 staff. 30 * 3 = 90 sp. That's 9 Gold, so the abbey probably isn't feeding these guys this well. 6 cp * 30 = 180 cp which comes to 1 gold, 8 silver.  Sounds better. We still don't know about the other 3 gold, 2 sp cost of daily maintenance. 

The same table also says Inn stay (per day) is 7 cp for squalid, 1 sp for poor. We can assume the abbey is not providing inn service for profit, and if the staff is live-in, then laundering beddings and clothes is part of their duties. I would just assume the cost of soap, which is 2 cp, but we can't quantify how much soap is used based on the information in in the PHB, and so we can't say what the total cost of soap is. I'm just going to shrug and throw my hands up at this point.  That other 5 gp allows you to assume some loosey-goosey other stuff. It works perfectly well for your pretend elf-game needs, and that's the point.

Conclusion

I think the costs of things given in the 5e books are inconsistent but functional for a game. Most importantly, I can't say prices are intuitive so that I can't intuit the value of any damn thing and I have to look it up. I think it's fair to say people are easily POOR or worse in Faefun. I mean this game doesn't even tell me about EFFING TAXES. Could I do better at designing an economy in my own fictional setting. I think I could, but it would take me as long as it took Tolkein to write his books. I think what would really strains my suspension of disbelief (if I actually cared about economics) is the cost of adventuring rations vs the cost of meals per day for the poor. And you know what, I say 5e a lot, but for all I know these tables could go back to the first edition in the 1970s and maybe they haven't been updated since. I don't know if any of this data is based on real world data, and if so, how much of it is based on real data and how much is arbitrary.

Proposals

Proposal 1. Make all food and drinks cost 1 cp minimum and 2 or 3 cp maximum. Remember a whole chicken is worth 2 cp in the rules. People cannot break money down into amounts smaller than 1 cp without bartering. So, when a restaurant puts a dish together to serve to a customer, the amount of food in the dish will be based on what is equal to 1 or 2 or 3 cp worth of food and service (cooking, cleaning, waiting on customers). A poor person spends 6 cp on food per day. Assuming three meals a day, 6 cp divided by three meals is 2 cp. This makes the math simple.  If a tavern serves you some drink, they give you a minimum of 1 cp worth. 1 cup of ale is 4 cp, making ale a drink for a special occasion. The taverns probably water their ale down into grog unless you ask for ale to be served without being watered down. 

Proposal 2. Hand wave all inconsequential expenses and don't worry about this minutia. It's easier, and players don't really care as long as it feels fair and plausible. 

Proposal 3. Assume players have been throwing money around and making minor transactions all day, and just have the players deduce from their money the amount based on the lifestyle they choose to live by for each day they spend in a town or city, with a cap of Poor for a village. This is also fair and simple.

Proposal 4. Come up with your own fictional currency, like the shilling, farthing, doubloon, or whatever. Work out your own values for everything from the ground up. You can make something more intuitive and therefore easier to use, you won't have to track types of coins, you won't have to do any conversion, and it can give character to your setting, but it's probably effortful.

Recommendations

Proposals 2 and 3 together, or just eff it.

Custom Pokemon for Rom Hacks

I have an idea for custom Pokemon feature in a pokemon Rom hack, were I to make one. Let's face it, I won't. Note that I know nothing about coding. I assume that if you have a rom-hack making tool, there is probably a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) user-interface like RPG Maker with an option for writing code. Either way, I expect this to be laborious, possibly too laborious for something that players might dismiss as a gimmick that would also likely be incompatible with the games trading mechanic if the players somehow find a way to work that. I can also see players boxing the custom starter.

Here's the in-game premise for your custom pokemon: Your pokemon professor / researcher mentor character is studying genetic engineering of pokemon. Assume some deep lore that this pokemon researcher used to work with the guys on Cinnabar Island who attempted to clone mew and who made mewtwo. He wants a young pokemon trainers (like the plyer character) to gather data for his genetically created pokemon for him by training it. At the beginning of the game, he gives you a starter pokemon with specifications that the player chooses. The options are: Type, sprite, cry, a stat to be good at, and a stat to be poor at.

"What type is it?"

A1. Fire

A2. Water

A3. Grass

"What should it look like?" The game gives the player a list of options related to appearance. A custom sprite or re-purposed sprite applicable for the description chosen by the player will be applied to the custom pokemon at the end. By default, there could be 3-8 choices. Samples descriptions for choices are below which I'm basing on the 8 or 9 menu sprites that Gen 1 made for pokemon. Player choice affects back sprite, front sprite, menu sprite. 

B1. Plant

B2. Beast

B3. Serpent

B4. Bug

B5. Winged / Bird

B6. Cute

B7. Cool

B8. Aquatic / Marine

B9. Fissile or Egg

B10. Odd shape (pokeball shape like Electrode)

"What should it sound like?" This is the choice for its cry. For the in-game descriptions for the players to choose, I'm basing these on the descriptions the games used to give to moves from the beauty contests.

C1. Tough

C2. Cool

C3. Beautiful

C4. Smart

Next the game is going to ask you two questions to generate what kind of stats and move sets the pokemon has. For reference, this idea comes from Kingdom Hearts 1. 

"What should it be good at?" If the player chooses a pokemon good at attack, their starter will get a slightly higher Atk and Speed. If they choose to be good a Special, they get a slightly higher Special. If they choose to be good at Defense, they get a slightly higher Def and HP. 

D1. Attack

D2. Special

D3. Defense

"What should it give up in exchange?" This will offer the player two options for the stats they did not pick in the previous question. If they choose Attack, their pokemon's Attack and Speed go down slightly. If they choose Defense, their defense and HP go down slightly. If they choose special, their Special goes down slightly.

If Player chose D1, offer choices E2 and E3 now. If player chose D2, offer E1 and E3 now. If player chose D3, offer E1 and E2 now.

E1. Attack

E2. Special

E3. Defense

For it's stats, if you want to add a fourth option for speed, you could, but the more options you make available to the player, the more complicated this becomes for the designer. 

One possible way this all comes together is in your games pokemon database / index is this; You'll have a number of spaces reserved for the different combinations of your player's choices based on the type they chose, the stat they want it to excel at, and the stat they want to give up. Each combination gets its own list for moves learned by level up and moves learned by TM / HM / tutor. For each type (Fire, Water, Grass), 18 spaces will need to be revered for a total of 54 spaces. I hope you copy paste efficiently. The combination of choices will look like this for just one type:

Pokemon Index Numbers

152

153 Combination D1, E1

154

*NOTE: in the Combination above D1 is to be good at Attack, E2 is to give up being good at defense.

155

156 Combination D1, E2

157

158

159 Combination D2, E1

160

161

162 Combination D2, E3

163

164

165 Combination D3, E1

166

167

168 Combination D3, E2

169

For each combination, the first index number is for the first form, the second index number is for the intermediate / second form, the third index number is for its third / final form. The second and third index numbers have a higher base stat total, the move learn levels are delayed, etc. If breeding is an option in your generation, then the combinations would also have an egg group associated and breeding compatibility.

Next the game will apply the sprite and cry to that pokemon based on the players other two options. For the sprite's colors, the color pallet will depend on the type. If all pokemon in gen 1 games have 4 colors, [white, black, color 1 (or light grey) and color 2 (or dark grey)], color 1 could be blue for water, and color 2 would be a color that suits being paired with blue.

Finally, the game will ask the player to name their pokemons species and then offer the player to offer it a nickname. The game will apply the player's input to the index numbers for the combination the player chose. All indexes will have a generic description that based on the choices the player made for its stats, something like "A genetically created pokemon! It is strong but does not appear to be that smart / bulky." The player's custom pokemon is complete.

When the pokemon is added to the players pokemon roster/team, Stat IV's will be generated as per normal.

Now, for the Rival's pokemon! If the player chooses pokemon number 152, have the game give the rival pokemon 1xx. Work that out however you feel it's appropriate. If the player chooses to have high attack, maybe the rival should get a pokemon who sacrifices either attack or special but keeps defense. If the player chooses to have high special, maybe the rival chooses to sacrifice defense and keep special. Etc. Give the rival's pokemon a species name from a database of 10 to 20 pokemon names (Cait Sith, Balrog, Titanoboa, or good names, whatever). Choose a sprite and cry that the player did not choose and apply that to the index number. Call it a day.