Appreciate you taking the time to review and comment on my Travel Rules.
At one point you state, "Then use GM fiat to place them along the journey where it seems fictionally/narratively appropriate."
I focus on running sandbox campaign where the players can experience life as the characters they make. As a result, I never consider what is narratively appropriate. Instead, I look at the circumstances and, based on my decision, what could happen as if you were there witnessing the action.
However, your comments did highlight that I didn't do a good job explaining how to place encounters. I explain the flexibility in the process but not some of the factors the referee should consider when placing encounters.
My intention is that after the referee has the list of encounters in hand. They look at the travel route and what surrounds it in terms of geography, creatures, and inhabitants. Then place those encounters in a way that make sense given that.
My advice for using something like Enemy Abroad would to be look for threatening creatures or NPCs near the route of travel. And those would wind up being the Enemy mentioned in the encounter description.
One the main reasons I created these rules is come up with a way to account for the actual landscape (natural, fauna, and human) that the party will be traveling through. Rather than rely on a generalized depiction used by traditional random encounter systems.
I also need to add if a result doesn't make sense for the route. If there is nothing that would count as a Enemy Abroad or any of the other results then reroll until you get something that does fit the route.
Hope that clarifies thing and appreciate the lengthy review and assessment.
Woah, hey Rob - thanks a ton for stopping by. I've stumbled across various bat in the attic posts for *years*, then eventually read the whole series when I was trying to understand wilderness travel a few years ago to run a GURPS game; it got recommended here https://gurpshexytime.blogspot.com/2014/11/central-hex-crawl-link-repository.html
Your "how to build a fantasy sandbox" series is hugely influential in how I think that open worlds should work; I'm so glad that you took the time and effort into making it exist. When you launched the kickstarter, i backed it immediately :D
Reading your travel system next to the fantasy sandbox work, it makes way more sense.
It's GM fiat *sort of*; but only in the sense that you're synthesizing the random encounters with a *very carefully built and highly detailed* setting according to your own judgments about how it should work. Reminds me of https://idiomdrottning.org/blorb-principles in a really good way.
Overall, I really like the system and I think it's the right direction
Also, a minor correction is that the rules state a night's rest clears ONE level of fatigue. I do admit in most circumstances, this doesn't matter, as you have an encounter and get a night's rest afterward. In the time I have been using these rules, there has been more than one occasion where it did matter. Either multiple encounters happened in succession or the party wasn't able to get a night's rest before the next one occurred.
Finally, this subsystem is one of the newer additions to my Majestic Fantasy rules and will go through a few more iterations to smooth out the mechanics.
The one game I've run where hexcrawling was actually a big part of the game was Mutant Year Zero and it was a lot less onerous than most of these subsystems, closest to the one in TOR than anything else. (Which makes sense, because both games are published by Fria Ligan.)
I wonder what you'd think of the travel rules in Forbidden Lands, which would be a tweaked fantasy version of the system in MYZ.
> I wonder what you'd think of the travel rules in Forbidden Lands, which would be a tweaked fantasy version of the system in MYZ.
I've glanced over the system, but haven't read it in depth. Looks like each day has 4 travel watches, each PC gets an action per watch. You travel less far per watch based on terrain, and every watch you're making a navigation roll or you have a mishap. Encounters vary by time of day, and how long a day lasts varies by the season. Then, we also roll random encounters 4x per day while moving, and wrap the day up by making camp, which is another roll with a different making camp mishap table.
There are additional subsystems for hunting (which is separate from fishing, which is also seaprate from foraging)
All of this stuff is hooked into character stats, like a characters Survival or Scouting and the abstract Food resource.
Seems pretty heavy to me, and it seems like the end result is that we're sometimes generating mishaps like this:
"Your clothes are damaged. Your boots break or your robe snags on thorny plants or sharp rocks. You must roll for the effects of cold. Your clothes can be mended by making a successful CRAFTING roll."
or
"You manage to pierce your own finger with the hook, instead of hooking a fish. You suffer one point of damage to Strength. Re-roll if fishing with a net."
or
"Your campsite turns out to be very uncomfortable to sleep in. No one in the group gets any SLEEP at all until you have found a new campsite."
Which, maybe it plays better than it reads, but this seems like a lot of rolling/tedium in order to produce pretty boring procgen content. I'd rather skip it and be at the dungeon!
Love the analysis! Personally, I've always considered travel to be the integral part of Adventure (grown up on The Hobbit and alike), so in this analysis I'd endorse the ACKS example. Other than that, Rob Conley's rules look quite good and would make more sense for a more light-hearted game if I'd DM it.
If anyone is struggling with ACKS travel rules, I'd recommend the following:
A) Preroll weather for each month in advance. Usually Koppen codes don't vary much across a single region, so you can be safe just making a macros online and rolling 30 times, then noting if there is any important weather (rainstorms, high winds etc.)
B) Curate your own regional tables. ACKS tables are grand for procedural generation, but a bit too non-specific for my tastes. When I'm DMing it, I pick a region (usually around 16 hexes total, though may differ depending on terrain) and pick a single hex type for it - i.e. Outlands. Then I reference the monster rarity table (which is a d20) and pick monster types according to it - in Outlands, it would be 10 Common monsters, 5 Uncommon ones, 4 Rare and 1 Very Rare. Then I roll the encounter tables this many times and get a d20 encounter table for the region. This saves time referencing, as you can put the much smaller table on the DM screen and prepare the lairs (if applicable) in advance.
C) If you're travelling the inhabited lands, abstract the Hauling part altogether - it's assumed you're visiting local hamlets for buying food and drinking at the wells.
Hey Fritcher! I see in my analytics that I'm now getting some Russian traffic; can I assume you're to thank for sharing this piece around?
> If anyone is struggling with ACKS travel rules, I'd recommend the following...
These are both great suggestions, and abstract well to whatever rule system you're playing. If you have time to pre-roll, it makes the at-table experience *way* smoother. Once you have your subset of pre-rolled encounters, it also lets you have a much easier time figuring out if anything is connected and *also* lets you add back rumors to this sort of stuff back in town.
I wish I could shove this post under the noses of many of these designers and ask, "Did you really follow these exact procedures in your own playtests? How many times? Are you OK asking GMs to roll this many times as part of a journey?" I always suspect Shadowdark of wearing the emperor's new clothes and your worked example makes me point more emphatically.
I don't see The One Ring included in your roundup. Its travel rules have a very strong reputation. It shares one or two features of your sketched ideal, including showing players a copy of the map and having them tell you what hexes they travel through. It's not an OSR/d20 system, so it might be an orange mixed in with the apples. But you have one quasi-narrativist system in there and TOR's closer to the OSR end of the mechanical spectrum.
I didn't want to go as deep as I could have or normally do; mainly because in order to get a rich understanding of how it would actually play, I'd need to understand it's assumptions about character growth, journey length, and how advanced characters usually are before they start undergoing big journeys. Also, the dice rolling system makes is *really* hard to have an intuitive grasp of the probabilities involved.
TOR's dice conventions generate deeply unintuitive probabilities, which always sets my antennae to swiveling. You pray that the designers did their diligence at anydice.com and wish they hadn’t locked the percentages in a black box. I wish every game designer included an appendix detailing the probabilities of their bespoke dice conventions and the mechanisms they undergird. It would help GMs in their most important task at the table - pacing - and serve as transparent proof of their design intent and sturdiness.
I do remember from playing TOR 1e that managing your Hope played a big part in managing success during play. Hope can be spent to improve the chances of success on a roll. I didn’t see any of the characters in your example using Hope, but players in an actual game might. You’ve never played TOR, so I don’t expect you’d have a feel for if and when Hope might be used. Is there an OSR game that allows players to spend metacurrency to influence travel? Not sure you illustrated one in this magnum opus.
If you want a little more grist for the mill, the TOR Journey system changed between 1e and 2e in part to reduce the amount of die-rolling going on. It seems like very few designers are happy with their first attempt at travel rules! (TOR 1e and 2e are designed by the same person, I think, with different publishers.) I only played a little 1e around the time it came out. Dedicated fans suggest that the subtle changes between editions produced outsized changes in play. Nothing seismic, but a genuine, quiet shift. This could be an opportunity to see how one designer’s approach to travel rules changed over several years?
EDIT: I heard anecdotally from folks whose sense of design analysis I trust that TOR 1e's design did a great job of producing the feeling of the books, including its travel rules. The 1e Journey rules apparently play and feel a little differently with large groups of PCs, say, a fellowship, versus small groups like a pair of hobbits and their loathsome companion. So when you look at the results, you might need to be asking whether the mechanical experience has produced LotR-like experiences at the table. The largely OSR designs you've examined so far don't have the same sort of external benchmark. (B/X doesn't really count unless you perhaps go the extra mile to suggest that it's trying to replicate the feel of the "Outside Survival" board game by Avalon Hill. I don't think that extra mile's worth the penalty to our die rolls.)
SECOND EDIT: It occurs to me that access to TOR 1e might be tricky. If you can't find it (or don't want to), another option is Adventures in Middle Earth, a 5e conversion of TOR 1e. I've never looked at it, so can't advise on its quality.
Well, Dave, as the author of Shadowdark, I can tell you the overland travel rules are not what I wanted them to be. It's really the only sub-system in the book I'd re-write if I could. I spent too much time fussing with the B/X precedent and not just writing a new set of rules from the ground up as I should have done.
On that note, I've got a much better version of Shadowdark's Hex Crawling rules coming out soon that I've been working on for some time. I'll make them freely available. I started from scratch on them.
Beau gave me some great thoughts on the new rules via the Reddit post he shared of this article. I'm not sure if the comments here allow outside linking, so I'd direct folks to Reddit if they wanted to check out the document themselves.
I wanted to add my voice to the list of people grateful that you reviewed their systems (I made the Simulacrum ruleset, and quite enjoy your blog).
A minor correction: armour doesn't by default apply an additional set of travel modifiers. If the system you're using does, then you'll wind up applying some, but I feel that's on that system rather than these rules (i.e. I view this as an OSE issue rather than a Simulacrum issue; in my own game armour has no effect on small parties unless it's heavy). The price for aiming towards a more universal ruleset is that it can wind up taking on more rules than you might have intended when glommed onto X or Y game that makes assumptions you did not. A similar situation exists with weather modifiers, where I have none (a lot of people dislike weather, I've found, so I don't include it by default, but they might be in play and then there's suddenly a ton of extra rolls I never anticipated).
For the custom danger modifiers, I like them because of the worldbuilding aspect. Such and such forest is patrolled by elves, while those hills over yonder are infested with critters. You deliver this info to the players through rumours and what not, and it gives a sense of the world being a bit more dynamic. But as these modifiers are always assigned by the GM as desired (i.e. not systematically), if you find them cumbersome your choice can simply be "everything is the same: no such modifiers apply anywhere" and you're still using the system as designed.
"It’s unclear how rollover points interact with getting-lost checks and random encounter checks." This is covered under "Entering a Hex". You only ever roll when you enter a hex. Until you've spent all the points, you're not there yet and no rolls are made for entry. I'll add further clarification on this in an updated draft.
"why do 1-entry-cost hexes have a special case for specifically encounters?"
This was due to making the odds of an encounter work out. Because you can normally cover four 1-cost hexes per day, such hexes needed to be more forgiving in terms of encounter odds per hex so that they don't wind up being more lethal overall solely due to the number of hexes of them you can move through (and thus the number of rolls made). Without the exception, clear hexes actually become the most dangerous standard terrain on a per-day basis.
As for the raw number of encounter rolls, this is something I've been mulling over, too. The system was originally built around a game based on short-term forays with plentiful hexcrawl content, and so I wanted every hex to matter (and since every hex had content--tribes, treasure, oddities--there tended to be further interactions per hex that broke up the monotony of encounters). That is: enter a hex, see if you get lost, roll encounters, big break to deal with hex content, maybe the players search for more content, and only then onto the next hex. But as my players increasingly climb in level they've 1) increasingly explored the hexes within reach, so that hexcrawl content is no longer being encountered in those places, and 2) been both able and willing to go on increasingly long journeys into the wilderness. I find myself less and less interested in rolling that many encounters; what worked at low levels with short-term venturing forth is becoming burdensome. I'm considering revising the system specifically for lengthy trips by moving to fewer, more meaningful encounter rolls in such cases, but I'm not sure how to do this as of yet.
Anyways, once again thank you for the time spent on this. I hope this clarifies some things, and I look forward to more of your posts.
Great post! I'd like to see you address the original hexcrawling system of the OD&D LBBs in this post, if possible. Intriguingly (and quite contrary to your remark in your reply to Tony) they seem highly lucid and well-written to me; many of your complaints about their descendants are forestalled. (OSR Simulacrum's rules seem to be entirely based on the OD&D rules.) 5-mile hexes; movement is based on points; armor and encumbrance are irrelevant. The single encounter check is explicitly rolled at the end of the day; the roll for getting lost at the outset of each day, and what happens is quite clear (and clarified further by reference to Outdoor Survival). The one ambiguity is when exactly the movement points are paid, with a few implications in the rules that it's when *leaving* a hex, which conflicts with Outdoor Survival, where it's explicit that one pays to *enter* a hex.
Howdy Anon, thanks for stopping by and glad you enjoyed the post!
It's sweet to hear that the rules in the LBBs were coherent; I've only read interpretations (via S&W), never the original text, so I'll have to do that. I'll see if I can borrow a buddy's on Thursday.
What you've outlined seems really promising. Getting lost at the *start* of the day means you have enough movement to get lost with, checking for encounters at the *end* of the day resolves the "which table do I use" ambiguity. Great stuff.
S&W is a very weird interpretation of OD&D in some ways (c.f. the single save). I guess that's the whole reason for other OD&D clones like Delving Deeper. The original text is incredibly wonky in some places, but in other cases the rules are superior to any version that succeeded them (and AD&D sort of expects you to already have them in order to fill in some notable gaps in those books, as it turns out).
Anyway, yeah, I think it's clear that the Outdoor Survival-derived procedure is superior, simply because Outdoor Survival was most likely heavily playtested before release. I mean, it's all about hex movement, it couldn't very well have a shitty hex movement mechanism and still move copies.
Thanks again for the post! I don't know of anybody else doing this type of lucid, detailed analysis of OSR rules, and it's really useful.
The word "distracting" here is used as a binary - it imagines content as either "distracting" or "not distracting". Compare this to how I used it in the ACKs summary: '[...] It does not seem good if you’re trying to use this system to generate “what happens along the way” as you travel from Point A to Point B. It’s way too heavy and way too distracting for that.'
So here, I'm commenting on *how distracting*, not whether it is or isn't. If the random content was not distracting at all, it would be pointless. The players would be totally ignoring it.
So, once we shift the frame to "how distracting is the right amount of distracting", we can have thoughtful analysis. Maybe spending one hour resolving some random encounters is a good palate cleanser between dungeoncrawl, and so it's a welcome distraction. If you're spending 4 whole sessions resolving what happens on the way from Karn Buldahr to Torthan's Tomb, you're getting *extremely* distracted. You're probably spending more time playing through procedural content than being in curated towns and dungeons combined. For me, that's *too* distracting. I want to reiterate that this is in the context of *going somewhere*. If you're just exploring to find out what there is to see, then playing the procedurally generated stuff is the goal, and so it's not distracting at all.
2)
> It produces a choice: do we pursue our goal or do we take this detour. Choices are good.
I don't think choices are intrinsically good! There are a lot of pitfalls with choices - having too many choices and feeling overwhelmed, being asked to make choices without a whole lot of information to go on (pull the left lever or pull the right lever), making choices that don't produce meaningfully different outcomes, etc. See https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/31509/roleplaying-games/the-art-of-pacing
Another important one is being presented with choices that muddy the focus of the game: my favorite version of this happening is in the second Kingkiller Chronicles book. Kvothe travels from the University to Maer and *describes* how along the way they were assaulted by pirates and survived a shipwreck. Just mentions that it happened and gets back to telling the moment-by-moment story. He did this because the pirates and shipwreck, though interesting events, were not the **focus**. It wasn't the part of the experience that the author, Rothfuss, wanted to zoom in on.
The way you take systems and explore them, rules-as-written, completely fills me with joy. I am currently grappling with how many beloved systems are in fact, quite incoherent in their design (And for this reason have many "default" house rules).
I would love to hear your thoughts on point-crawls vs hex-crawls. I know this is sort of a semantic debate, but for me the difference between the two is on whether the "exploration" is the focus. That is, in a point-crawl, the players know the points-of-interest and pick them out on a map (much in the way you described the ideal travel system at the end).
In a hex-crawl, the players know what is in their starting point and perhaps the surrounding areas (based on visibility), and the focus is on moving to each to find out whats there. There's also a focus on how far you can travel in any given day, as opposed to knowing where you end up and just pre-calculating the trip ahead of time.
In both cases, I completely agree on having things pre-generated to ensure the content is "worth" playing.
In any case, as always, please continue to write. I look forward to each new post.
Hey Tony, thanks for stopping by, the praise, and the encouragement ❤️. Glad I could bring you some joy!
> I am currently grappling with how many beloved systems are in fact, quite incoherent in their design
There's a big piece of me that wants to scream in frustration (and I did with DFRPG), and another piece that recognizes that the lack of clarity in the original books (and the ones going forward) has created generations of game designers as folks tried to interpret rules and change what was obviously broken for their own games, and then publish the results.
Still doesn't stop me from trying to eventually write my version that will be Totally Clear I Promise
> I would love to hear your thoughts on point-crawls vs hex-crawls....
I think you've nailed it, as well as why it's important to use a system built for point-crawling for point-crawls and one for hex-crawling for hex crawls. Beside what you've mentioned, I think hexcrawls ought to be denser - either ahead of time or by having more random encounters (and random encounter variety). The players are wandering around, seeing what there is to see, and so there really needs to be stuff to see. If 5/6ths of the hexes were totally empty, it would get boring fast.
Likewise, if you wanted to travel 8 days away to somewhere and you need to play through 16 random encounters to get there, it's very distracting!
Thanks for the response! Happy to hear we agree on point vs hex-crawls (especially on how there's no point in wandering around an empty hex-crawl!).
It's awesome to hear that you're working on your own Rules Explicit system. I would love to playtest it whenever it gets to that phase. I have already taken your "Find a Buyer" and "Determine Market Price" rules from other posts and added them into my current ongoing game.
Thank you again and I hope to read more of your posts soon!
I absolutely love this. You're doing God's work.
Thanks, Dave!
Appreciate you taking the time to review and comment on my Travel Rules.
At one point you state, "Then use GM fiat to place them along the journey where it seems fictionally/narratively appropriate."
I focus on running sandbox campaign where the players can experience life as the characters they make. As a result, I never consider what is narratively appropriate. Instead, I look at the circumstances and, based on my decision, what could happen as if you were there witnessing the action.
However, your comments did highlight that I didn't do a good job explaining how to place encounters. I explain the flexibility in the process but not some of the factors the referee should consider when placing encounters.
My intention is that after the referee has the list of encounters in hand. They look at the travel route and what surrounds it in terms of geography, creatures, and inhabitants. Then place those encounters in a way that make sense given that.
My advice for using something like Enemy Abroad would to be look for threatening creatures or NPCs near the route of travel. And those would wind up being the Enemy mentioned in the encounter description.
One the main reasons I created these rules is come up with a way to account for the actual landscape (natural, fauna, and human) that the party will be traveling through. Rather than rely on a generalized depiction used by traditional random encounter systems.
I also need to add if a result doesn't make sense for the route. If there is nothing that would count as a Enemy Abroad or any of the other results then reroll until you get something that does fit the route.
Hope that clarifies thing and appreciate the lengthy review and assessment.
Woah, hey Rob - thanks a ton for stopping by. I've stumbled across various bat in the attic posts for *years*, then eventually read the whole series when I was trying to understand wilderness travel a few years ago to run a GURPS game; it got recommended here https://gurpshexytime.blogspot.com/2014/11/central-hex-crawl-link-repository.html
Your "how to build a fantasy sandbox" series is hugely influential in how I think that open worlds should work; I'm so glad that you took the time and effort into making it exist. When you launched the kickstarter, i backed it immediately :D
Reading your travel system next to the fantasy sandbox work, it makes way more sense.
It's GM fiat *sort of*; but only in the sense that you're synthesizing the random encounters with a *very carefully built and highly detailed* setting according to your own judgments about how it should work. Reminds me of https://idiomdrottning.org/blorb-principles in a really good way.
Overall, I really like the system and I think it's the right direction
Also, a minor correction is that the rules state a night's rest clears ONE level of fatigue. I do admit in most circumstances, this doesn't matter, as you have an encounter and get a night's rest afterward. In the time I have been using these rules, there has been more than one occasion where it did matter. Either multiple encounters happened in succession or the party wasn't able to get a night's rest before the next one occurred.
Finally, this subsystem is one of the newer additions to my Majestic Fantasy rules and will go through a few more iterations to smooth out the mechanics.
Again appreciate the review.
Got it! Thanks for the correction - I edited the post to reflect it
Interesting.
The one game I've run where hexcrawling was actually a big part of the game was Mutant Year Zero and it was a lot less onerous than most of these subsystems, closest to the one in TOR than anything else. (Which makes sense, because both games are published by Fria Ligan.)
I wonder what you'd think of the travel rules in Forbidden Lands, which would be a tweaked fantasy version of the system in MYZ.
Howdy megazver!
> I wonder what you'd think of the travel rules in Forbidden Lands, which would be a tweaked fantasy version of the system in MYZ.
I've glanced over the system, but haven't read it in depth. Looks like each day has 4 travel watches, each PC gets an action per watch. You travel less far per watch based on terrain, and every watch you're making a navigation roll or you have a mishap. Encounters vary by time of day, and how long a day lasts varies by the season. Then, we also roll random encounters 4x per day while moving, and wrap the day up by making camp, which is another roll with a different making camp mishap table.
There are additional subsystems for hunting (which is separate from fishing, which is also seaprate from foraging)
All of this stuff is hooked into character stats, like a characters Survival or Scouting and the abstract Food resource.
Seems pretty heavy to me, and it seems like the end result is that we're sometimes generating mishaps like this:
"Your clothes are damaged. Your boots break or your robe snags on thorny plants or sharp rocks. You must roll for the effects of cold. Your clothes can be mended by making a successful CRAFTING roll."
or
"You manage to pierce your own finger with the hook, instead of hooking a fish. You suffer one point of damage to Strength. Re-roll if fishing with a net."
or
"Your campsite turns out to be very uncomfortable to sleep in. No one in the group gets any SLEEP at all until you have found a new campsite."
Which, maybe it plays better than it reads, but this seems like a lot of rolling/tedium in order to produce pretty boring procgen content. I'd rather skip it and be at the dungeon!
This article is great. It reminds me of one of my favorite articles about historical logistics. It discusses the "tyranny of the wagon equation", or how since your pack animals also need to eat you end up needing more and more pack animals to transport your food. https://acoup.blog/2022/07/15/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-i-the-problem/
Acoup is fantastic!
Love the analysis! Personally, I've always considered travel to be the integral part of Adventure (grown up on The Hobbit and alike), so in this analysis I'd endorse the ACKS example. Other than that, Rob Conley's rules look quite good and would make more sense for a more light-hearted game if I'd DM it.
If anyone is struggling with ACKS travel rules, I'd recommend the following:
A) Preroll weather for each month in advance. Usually Koppen codes don't vary much across a single region, so you can be safe just making a macros online and rolling 30 times, then noting if there is any important weather (rainstorms, high winds etc.)
B) Curate your own regional tables. ACKS tables are grand for procedural generation, but a bit too non-specific for my tastes. When I'm DMing it, I pick a region (usually around 16 hexes total, though may differ depending on terrain) and pick a single hex type for it - i.e. Outlands. Then I reference the monster rarity table (which is a d20) and pick monster types according to it - in Outlands, it would be 10 Common monsters, 5 Uncommon ones, 4 Rare and 1 Very Rare. Then I roll the encounter tables this many times and get a d20 encounter table for the region. This saves time referencing, as you can put the much smaller table on the DM screen and prepare the lairs (if applicable) in advance.
C) If you're travelling the inhabited lands, abstract the Hauling part altogether - it's assumed you're visiting local hamlets for buying food and drinking at the wells.
Hey Fritcher! I see in my analytics that I'm now getting some Russian traffic; can I assume you're to thank for sharing this piece around?
> If anyone is struggling with ACKS travel rules, I'd recommend the following...
These are both great suggestions, and abstract well to whatever rule system you're playing. If you have time to pre-roll, it makes the at-table experience *way* smoother. Once you have your subset of pre-rolled encounters, it also lets you have a much easier time figuring out if anything is connected and *also* lets you add back rumors to this sort of stuff back in town.
I built out a Cfa weather generator here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jxGF0U_LGy7LmVosO_rq58SyCUFQgpPjdfgNS8fTLLA/edit?usp=sharing
Oh actually it wasn't this article that got posted, but Knave 2e analysis. It was highly regarded by the grognards there.
Oh! Awesome to hear and thanks for digging in
I didn't share it but yeah, it got posted on RuOSR server.
I wish I could shove this post under the noses of many of these designers and ask, "Did you really follow these exact procedures in your own playtests? How many times? Are you OK asking GMs to roll this many times as part of a journey?" I always suspect Shadowdark of wearing the emperor's new clothes and your worked example makes me point more emphatically.
I don't see The One Ring included in your roundup. Its travel rules have a very strong reputation. It shares one or two features of your sketched ideal, including showing players a copy of the map and having them tell you what hexes they travel through. It's not an OSR/d20 system, so it might be an orange mixed in with the apples. But you have one quasi-narrativist system in there and TOR's closer to the OSR end of the mechanical spectrum.
I'll give The One Ring a read and report back. Maybe even edit in some analysis :D
Okay - The One Ring analysis is live! https://rancourt.substack.com/i/146342934/the-one-ring-e
I didn't want to go as deep as I could have or normally do; mainly because in order to get a rich understanding of how it would actually play, I'd need to understand it's assumptions about character growth, journey length, and how advanced characters usually are before they start undergoing big journeys. Also, the dice rolling system makes is *really* hard to have an intuitive grasp of the probabilities involved.
That said, I like what I see!
TOR's dice conventions generate deeply unintuitive probabilities, which always sets my antennae to swiveling. You pray that the designers did their diligence at anydice.com and wish they hadn’t locked the percentages in a black box. I wish every game designer included an appendix detailing the probabilities of their bespoke dice conventions and the mechanisms they undergird. It would help GMs in their most important task at the table - pacing - and serve as transparent proof of their design intent and sturdiness.
I do remember from playing TOR 1e that managing your Hope played a big part in managing success during play. Hope can be spent to improve the chances of success on a roll. I didn’t see any of the characters in your example using Hope, but players in an actual game might. You’ve never played TOR, so I don’t expect you’d have a feel for if and when Hope might be used. Is there an OSR game that allows players to spend metacurrency to influence travel? Not sure you illustrated one in this magnum opus.
If you want a little more grist for the mill, the TOR Journey system changed between 1e and 2e in part to reduce the amount of die-rolling going on. It seems like very few designers are happy with their first attempt at travel rules! (TOR 1e and 2e are designed by the same person, I think, with different publishers.) I only played a little 1e around the time it came out. Dedicated fans suggest that the subtle changes between editions produced outsized changes in play. Nothing seismic, but a genuine, quiet shift. This could be an opportunity to see how one designer’s approach to travel rules changed over several years?
EDIT: I heard anecdotally from folks whose sense of design analysis I trust that TOR 1e's design did a great job of producing the feeling of the books, including its travel rules. The 1e Journey rules apparently play and feel a little differently with large groups of PCs, say, a fellowship, versus small groups like a pair of hobbits and their loathsome companion. So when you look at the results, you might need to be asking whether the mechanical experience has produced LotR-like experiences at the table. The largely OSR designs you've examined so far don't have the same sort of external benchmark. (B/X doesn't really count unless you perhaps go the extra mile to suggest that it's trying to replicate the feel of the "Outside Survival" board game by Avalon Hill. I don't think that extra mile's worth the penalty to our die rolls.)
SECOND EDIT: It occurs to me that access to TOR 1e might be tricky. If you can't find it (or don't want to), another option is Adventures in Middle Earth, a 5e conversion of TOR 1e. I've never looked at it, so can't advise on its quality.
Well, Dave, as the author of Shadowdark, I can tell you the overland travel rules are not what I wanted them to be. It's really the only sub-system in the book I'd re-write if I could. I spent too much time fussing with the B/X precedent and not just writing a new set of rules from the ground up as I should have done.
On that note, I've got a much better version of Shadowdark's Hex Crawling rules coming out soon that I've been working on for some time. I'll make them freely available. I started from scratch on them.
Beau gave me some great thoughts on the new rules via the Reddit post he shared of this article. I'm not sure if the comments here allow outside linking, so I'd direct folks to Reddit if they wanted to check out the document themselves.
-Kelsey
I’ll edit a link to the convo and work-in-progress rules into the Shadowdark section. Thanks for the chat! Was lovely talking to you
Same! It was really great to talk to you, Beau! :)
I wanted to add my voice to the list of people grateful that you reviewed their systems (I made the Simulacrum ruleset, and quite enjoy your blog).
A minor correction: armour doesn't by default apply an additional set of travel modifiers. If the system you're using does, then you'll wind up applying some, but I feel that's on that system rather than these rules (i.e. I view this as an OSE issue rather than a Simulacrum issue; in my own game armour has no effect on small parties unless it's heavy). The price for aiming towards a more universal ruleset is that it can wind up taking on more rules than you might have intended when glommed onto X or Y game that makes assumptions you did not. A similar situation exists with weather modifiers, where I have none (a lot of people dislike weather, I've found, so I don't include it by default, but they might be in play and then there's suddenly a ton of extra rolls I never anticipated).
For the custom danger modifiers, I like them because of the worldbuilding aspect. Such and such forest is patrolled by elves, while those hills over yonder are infested with critters. You deliver this info to the players through rumours and what not, and it gives a sense of the world being a bit more dynamic. But as these modifiers are always assigned by the GM as desired (i.e. not systematically), if you find them cumbersome your choice can simply be "everything is the same: no such modifiers apply anywhere" and you're still using the system as designed.
"It’s unclear how rollover points interact with getting-lost checks and random encounter checks." This is covered under "Entering a Hex". You only ever roll when you enter a hex. Until you've spent all the points, you're not there yet and no rolls are made for entry. I'll add further clarification on this in an updated draft.
"why do 1-entry-cost hexes have a special case for specifically encounters?"
This was due to making the odds of an encounter work out. Because you can normally cover four 1-cost hexes per day, such hexes needed to be more forgiving in terms of encounter odds per hex so that they don't wind up being more lethal overall solely due to the number of hexes of them you can move through (and thus the number of rolls made). Without the exception, clear hexes actually become the most dangerous standard terrain on a per-day basis.
As for the raw number of encounter rolls, this is something I've been mulling over, too. The system was originally built around a game based on short-term forays with plentiful hexcrawl content, and so I wanted every hex to matter (and since every hex had content--tribes, treasure, oddities--there tended to be further interactions per hex that broke up the monotony of encounters). That is: enter a hex, see if you get lost, roll encounters, big break to deal with hex content, maybe the players search for more content, and only then onto the next hex. But as my players increasingly climb in level they've 1) increasingly explored the hexes within reach, so that hexcrawl content is no longer being encountered in those places, and 2) been both able and willing to go on increasingly long journeys into the wilderness. I find myself less and less interested in rolling that many encounters; what worked at low levels with short-term venturing forth is becoming burdensome. I'm considering revising the system specifically for lengthy trips by moving to fewer, more meaningful encounter rolls in such cases, but I'm not sure how to do this as of yet.
Anyways, once again thank you for the time spent on this. I hope this clarifies some things, and I look forward to more of your posts.
Great post! I'd like to see you address the original hexcrawling system of the OD&D LBBs in this post, if possible. Intriguingly (and quite contrary to your remark in your reply to Tony) they seem highly lucid and well-written to me; many of your complaints about their descendants are forestalled. (OSR Simulacrum's rules seem to be entirely based on the OD&D rules.) 5-mile hexes; movement is based on points; armor and encumbrance are irrelevant. The single encounter check is explicitly rolled at the end of the day; the roll for getting lost at the outset of each day, and what happens is quite clear (and clarified further by reference to Outdoor Survival). The one ambiguity is when exactly the movement points are paid, with a few implications in the rules that it's when *leaving* a hex, which conflicts with Outdoor Survival, where it's explicit that one pays to *enter* a hex.
Howdy Anon, thanks for stopping by and glad you enjoyed the post!
It's sweet to hear that the rules in the LBBs were coherent; I've only read interpretations (via S&W), never the original text, so I'll have to do that. I'll see if I can borrow a buddy's on Thursday.
What you've outlined seems really promising. Getting lost at the *start* of the day means you have enough movement to get lost with, checking for encounters at the *end* of the day resolves the "which table do I use" ambiguity. Great stuff.
S&W is a very weird interpretation of OD&D in some ways (c.f. the single save). I guess that's the whole reason for other OD&D clones like Delving Deeper. The original text is incredibly wonky in some places, but in other cases the rules are superior to any version that succeeded them (and AD&D sort of expects you to already have them in order to fill in some notable gaps in those books, as it turns out).
Anyway, yeah, I think it's clear that the Outdoor Survival-derived procedure is superior, simply because Outdoor Survival was most likely heavily playtested before release. I mean, it's all about hex movement, it couldn't very well have a shitty hex movement mechanism and still move copies.
Thanks again for the post! I don't know of anybody else doing this type of lucid, detailed analysis of OSR rules, and it's really useful.
Would love to see you take a look at Simulacrum's system for wilderness travel. http://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2020/05/making-wilderness-play-meaningful-system.html
Howdy Anon!
First, it's *really* cool that osrsimulacrum read the blog and edited in their own analysis. I've read a bunch of their blog, and especially enjoyed their very thorough history of the OSR: https://osrsimulacrum.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-historical-look-at-osr-part-v.html (which links to the older articles).
I'll dig into their system and get back to you
Awesome, thanks for the thorough write-up. Great work!
Oh whoops - I forgot to ping you to let you know I had written up the section. Thanks for the recommendation!
I think procedural content is supposed to be distracting? It produces a choice: do we pursue our goal or do we take this detour. Choices are good.
A couple of subtleties:
1)
The word "distracting" here is used as a binary - it imagines content as either "distracting" or "not distracting". Compare this to how I used it in the ACKs summary: '[...] It does not seem good if you’re trying to use this system to generate “what happens along the way” as you travel from Point A to Point B. It’s way too heavy and way too distracting for that.'
So here, I'm commenting on *how distracting*, not whether it is or isn't. If the random content was not distracting at all, it would be pointless. The players would be totally ignoring it.
So, once we shift the frame to "how distracting is the right amount of distracting", we can have thoughtful analysis. Maybe spending one hour resolving some random encounters is a good palate cleanser between dungeoncrawl, and so it's a welcome distraction. If you're spending 4 whole sessions resolving what happens on the way from Karn Buldahr to Torthan's Tomb, you're getting *extremely* distracted. You're probably spending more time playing through procedural content than being in curated towns and dungeons combined. For me, that's *too* distracting. I want to reiterate that this is in the context of *going somewhere*. If you're just exploring to find out what there is to see, then playing the procedurally generated stuff is the goal, and so it's not distracting at all.
2)
> It produces a choice: do we pursue our goal or do we take this detour. Choices are good.
I don't think choices are intrinsically good! There are a lot of pitfalls with choices - having too many choices and feeling overwhelmed, being asked to make choices without a whole lot of information to go on (pull the left lever or pull the right lever), making choices that don't produce meaningfully different outcomes, etc. See https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/31509/roleplaying-games/the-art-of-pacing
Another important one is being presented with choices that muddy the focus of the game: my favorite version of this happening is in the second Kingkiller Chronicles book. Kvothe travels from the University to Maer and *describes* how along the way they were assaulted by pirates and survived a shipwreck. Just mentions that it happened and gets back to telling the moment-by-moment story. He did this because the pirates and shipwreck, though interesting events, were not the **focus**. It wasn't the part of the experience that the author, Rothfuss, wanted to zoom in on.
What a post! I'm mindblown right now. Great job my friend.
Thanks! Glad you liked it :D
The way you take systems and explore them, rules-as-written, completely fills me with joy. I am currently grappling with how many beloved systems are in fact, quite incoherent in their design (And for this reason have many "default" house rules).
I would love to hear your thoughts on point-crawls vs hex-crawls. I know this is sort of a semantic debate, but for me the difference between the two is on whether the "exploration" is the focus. That is, in a point-crawl, the players know the points-of-interest and pick them out on a map (much in the way you described the ideal travel system at the end).
In a hex-crawl, the players know what is in their starting point and perhaps the surrounding areas (based on visibility), and the focus is on moving to each to find out whats there. There's also a focus on how far you can travel in any given day, as opposed to knowing where you end up and just pre-calculating the trip ahead of time.
In both cases, I completely agree on having things pre-generated to ensure the content is "worth" playing.
In any case, as always, please continue to write. I look forward to each new post.
Hey Tony, thanks for stopping by, the praise, and the encouragement ❤️. Glad I could bring you some joy!
> I am currently grappling with how many beloved systems are in fact, quite incoherent in their design
There's a big piece of me that wants to scream in frustration (and I did with DFRPG), and another piece that recognizes that the lack of clarity in the original books (and the ones going forward) has created generations of game designers as folks tried to interpret rules and change what was obviously broken for their own games, and then publish the results.
Still doesn't stop me from trying to eventually write my version that will be Totally Clear I Promise
> I would love to hear your thoughts on point-crawls vs hex-crawls....
I think you've nailed it, as well as why it's important to use a system built for point-crawling for point-crawls and one for hex-crawling for hex crawls. Beside what you've mentioned, I think hexcrawls ought to be denser - either ahead of time or by having more random encounters (and random encounter variety). The players are wandering around, seeing what there is to see, and so there really needs to be stuff to see. If 5/6ths of the hexes were totally empty, it would get boring fast.
Likewise, if you wanted to travel 8 days away to somewhere and you need to play through 16 random encounters to get there, it's very distracting!
Thanks for the response! Happy to hear we agree on point vs hex-crawls (especially on how there's no point in wandering around an empty hex-crawl!).
It's awesome to hear that you're working on your own Rules Explicit system. I would love to playtest it whenever it gets to that phase. I have already taken your "Find a Buyer" and "Determine Market Price" rules from other posts and added them into my current ongoing game.
Thank you again and I hope to read more of your posts soon!