I started a hex crawl at D&D yesterday. In short, instead of centering your planning around a dungeon and some loosely sketched surroundings, in a hex crawl, you divide a large outdoor area into hexagons and then define what is or could be in each hexagon. The hexes are more shallowly designed than a dungeon, but usually more involved than a dungeon room.
Of course, you can also have dungeons in hexes. They’ve got to be shallower than some 100-room megadungeon if you’re creating them from scratch, unless you have a ton of time.
I’ve found the format appealing for a while because hey it’s Open World. But I have an instinct that’s opposed to it for that same reason.
It feels like because it’s an open system, you’re going to have to come up with more anticipated stuff than you would if your PCs were in a dungeon. What if they go off the map? Even if they don’t, there’s plenty of undefined places to go within a hex, which is typically several square miles. You can’t plan all of it.
You can’t (and shouldn’t) plan everything in a dungeon, either, but while you may make it a sandbox, it’s more or less a closed system. That’s comforting to me, for no real reason.
To me, the Final Fantasy-style airship is a nightmare because players can go anywhere, and you have to have the entire world defined or get ready to say what’s on a continent you haven’t thought about. Still, though, it seemed like a novel experience.
So then I thought about
real-world airships. Those deliver a novel experience, but they’re “limited use.” So, I threw one of those in there.
In the end, the hex crawl worked well. I didn’t have to improvise any more than I normally do. (And I do like doing that and think it’s important and what makes it not a slow video game — I just want to avoid being put in a spot where you have to pull the “you just can’t do that” emergency brake.) I was, again, actually overprepared despite thinking the opposite. I think the players visited four hexes, plus an airship. So you definitely don’t need to plan for every hex on the map. Probably just the ones they’re near.
I tend to think of the interconnected mess of the rooms of a dungeon making things richer. While that is true in a sense, it also clamps down on variety somewhat. I think some people are OK with dungeons being a collection of completely unrelated things, but I think it makes every dungeon seem the same when you do that. It feels fine when things in one hex have nothing to do with its neighbors, though!