Hex crawl sandbox settings can suffer from an overdose of non meaningful choice without enough information to make informed decisions. I think using a point crawl makes choices more interesting by constraining them to detailed specific choices.
You wouldn’t run a dungeon of rooms with six entrances connected to each other in a large grid because the complete openness without sufficient information doesn’t lend itself to meaningful and fun decisions.
I love hex crawls but the more times I’ve run them the more I think that they’re best saved for certain use cases. Specifically they’re best for campaign that covers huge distances and is concerned with surveying the unknown expanding outwards from a point as opposed to making decisions about which route to take. They also are great for low prep pick up games that rely on procedural content over planned description and pre-connected areas pe of game where you’re surveying an expanse of land to eventually catalogue what’s inside each sector of a region and for a feeling of completion as your explore each hex. Because the way things are connected and the nature of the paths in between nodes of a point crawl matters it’s preferable to prepare the connections between locations ahead of time. A hex crawl is path neutral and abstracted so it does have the benefit of being quick to randomly generate the connecting hex, random encounters, and other content at the table and then improvise connections. If I need to play a quick pick up game. But if I’m buying a prepared module for my use or making one for someone else, it seems nice to have the detailed paths and connections done ahead of time.
I’ve grown to be a big fan of point crawls and prefer them in most of my sandbox games for increasing interconnection.
Hex crawls give the illusion of complete exploration and offer a level of top down abstraction that makes navigation choices less compelling then they could be.
When people talk about the value of a good dungeon as a quintessential play structure of old school inspired play they’re usually talk about how it can be designed in a way that maximizes and increases player navigation choices. Strange interactive objects you can mess around with. Verticality. Loops. Multiple paths. Secret entrances. Shortcuts to much deeper levels.
However the other thing about a dungeon that makes it such a strong structure is the constraint it places on choices. Because there’s only so many routes and rooms a GM can create a lot of interesting specific content in the area descriptions that makes these choices fun by spending some prep time providing meaningful information for each of the choices.
There’s a reason that dungeons aren’t designed in one huge cavern with no walls and sightlines for miles, it’s too much to parse and run effectively. Like a computer’s memory a GM only has so much brain power to render encounters and location details. Breaking things into rooms allows the rooms to be described in more detail and for specific connections between rooms to be meaningful. This means that you can improve your sandbox setting by using the same principles used in good dungeon design. I’ve attempted to follow these principles in designing the sandbox region surrounding my Cinderstrom megadungeon.
Some psychological studies have shown people with more options are more likely to be unsatisfied with their eventual decision then those with a limited amount as they suffer from analysis paralysis . When I was a kid growing up in Nevada I didn’t get the concept of the casino buffet right away. I discovered to both mine and the nearby buffet patrons horror that there is an upper limit to how many plates of chicken alfredo a 9 year old can devour. You can spare your players this unpleasant experience by giving them a cultivated set of path options instead of an endless void.
A dungeon of 50 rooms laid out in a grid with all with doors leading to six other rooms wouldn’t be the most satisfactory for exploration. The overload of choices makes navigation a series of random choices with minor information.
Why are so many hex crawl sandboxes formatted this way then? The same joys of making travel choices based on relevant information and limitation shouldn’t be left at the dungeon exit.
Now generally in a hex crawl you’ll be able to tell the party what terrain is in each cardinal direction but if you’re in a great desert that extends all around their location, what meaningful choice do the players have in their choice of direction between South and Southwest? If they know the direction of their objective they can just always head in that direction, cutting through the “walls” and forgoing having to consider the terrain around them. You can have a “getting lost” rule but frankly I’ve never talked to players who enjoyed this, nor do they tend to reflect reality as someone that’s done a good deal of off trail wilderness hiking (I’ll cover this in a future post). Now a good GM can provide more meaningful landmarks and cues to make navigating more of a meaningful and interesting gameplay, a lightly used game path to the east, a towering iron spire that stretches to the heavens to the south, a mirror like glimmering to the south east. But they’ve just effectively created a point crawl on top of their hex crawl off the top of their head. The other three cardinal directions are vestigial organs if not given some kind of more interesting clue to what the direction holds. I say hack them off!
I had originally planned on creating a hex crawl for my megadungeon region but realized that if there was 49 hexes in the region and I wanted to provide details for each of the I would have to create 294 different path descriptions. This didn’t seem worth the effort to me, along with the delay in play of describing each of the 6 exits to the hex to the PC’s each time without being an overcomplicated bore. Some WOTC designers visited Gen Con undercover in 2005 and found that DM’s get about 2-3 sentences of describing a location in a monologue without player responses before eyes glaze over and people stopped paying close attention. Initial node descriptions in a point crawl need to be just as pithy as a dungeon room description.
Switching to a point crawl based sandbox most human navigation in fiction or real life adventure is a point crawl. People follow paths of some kind to get to destinations. Look at Lord of the Rings, the Dying Earth, or Conan and the very specific and fascinating paths they had to decide during in their adventures. The Fellowship of the Ring were on a point crawl to reach their destination to the East when they had to choose between climbing the snowy Redhorn Pass and braving the path through the feared Mines of Moria. It was only when the snows proved too thick on the Redhorn Pass that they felt they had to chance the darkness of Moria (which could be run as a point crawl connecting different dungeon areas itself to give the sense of megadungeon scale but that’s for another post).
On a hex crawl all of these atmospheric and interesting environmental decision points could be summed up within one six mile “Steep Mountains” terrain hex.
Even in an open desert or rolling plains trekkers follow ridges, saddles, gulley, and other preexisting paths of less resistance. In my experience the very specific path is the interesting play space between the points of interest not the abstracted general terrain type surrounding around them.
“Should we take the skull and ruby strewn arroyo through or the crumbling remnant of a black marble highway around?”
Again, all this said I think the freedom of the hex crawl structure is still a swell and serviceable sandbox campaign structure and has been used in many of favorite sandbox books like Hot Springs Island and Neverland. I’ve just become a bigger fan of point crawls lately and think all the sweet hex resources out there like these sweet wilderness hexes can also be used for populating nodes and path connections to make a sweet point crawl.
P.S You can always layer a point crawl on top of a hex crawl as I’ve done in the header image and use your hex crawl procedure to adjudicate what happens if players decide to go through the natural “walls” and just pick a direction where there’s no terrain to make it easier. It should take a lot longer then following an occurring path like a road, or stream, or dune ridge though.
