Are there any RPGs that invert the assumptions of old school RPGs and make romping over the overworld the bulk of the game and dungeons the occasional diversion with considerably more danger?
Something that has actual concrete and robust procedure for designing and stocking an overworld and exploring it (something that old school games are especially anemic on), to at least the same degree that dungeons have in old school games.
>HYTNPDND
I'd be happy to it it does what I'm looking for.
 Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
 DMT Has Friends For Me Shirt $21.68 |
Thalidomide Vintage Ad Shirt $22.14 |
Ryuutama maybe? Exploration is a large pat of that.
https://kotohi.com/ryuutama/
This actually looks pretty neat, I'll hafta look into it. Thanks.
forbidden lands
mutant year zero
same system, both focused on hex crawl and base building across a hostile landscape.
I'll have to look into Forbidden Lands again, thanks.
Isn't that just a hex crawl?
Yes
With traditional RPGs? No. They rest on the assumption that the overworld is most dangerous, so all the CP acquisition and threat distribution is built with that in mind. It's the domain of higher level characters, and not really to explore as much as to clear and cultivate for strongholds.
I want an RPG that doesn't have those assumptions baked in.
Okay, so what you want is very much like a hexcrawl, but you want the overworld to be the domain of low-level characters and you want dungeons to be certain death for all but high-level characters. Is that about the size of it? Or do you want an "overworld" of a larger scale than they typical hexcrawl?
So don't bake those assumptions in you fricking idiot
The. Game. Rules. Are. Built. On. Those. Assumptions.
I dunno how many more ways I can say this before you morons internalize it.
>something that old school games are especially anemic on
What are talking about? This was a core feature of OD&D.
http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/17320/roleplaying-games/hexcrawl-part-2-wilderness-travel
A core feature that gives basically no guidance as to how one should stock and distribute an overworld, sure. Look, I've read LBB, I've read AD&D, I've read Holmes, Moldvay B/X, etc etc. The ink there is almost entirely devoted to traversal rules and not toward exploration, much less how a GM might populate it or design it. I swear, the AD&D DMG wilderness stocking section is half a page at best while the dungeon stocking and designing procedures take a dozen.
And that's also not solving my principal issue: Gygax assumed the wilderness was the domain of high level characters and that it is too prohibitively dangerous for low level characters to tackle for more than a short jaunt to and from the local dungeon. Threats/encounters are not keyed to any predictable difficulty and monetary rewards are purposely lacking save for the odd lair. It is not meant to be the object of interest or reward for the majority of play. The dungeon, conversely, is. Threats are ordered by level, gold rewards are easier to attain, there's more concrete guidance for designing and stocking dungeons than you'll ever get about wilderness, it's clear this is the primary focus of the game and wilderness travel an afterthought to fill time between dungeons or towns/cities.
Take a level 1 party out into the wilderness for an extended period, see what happens.
I want something with the opposite assumptions (and the rules to support it), where the wilderness--creating it, stocking it, traversing it, exploring it, engaging with it--is the primary mode of play.
It kinda sounds like you just want the game to do it for you.
>so you need a dungeon?
>well here's the typical size of a level
>here's the depth you need to start
>here's a rough distribution of how many rooms ought to contain monsters and treasure
>here's what monsters are appropriate for level and how many
>here's what treasure is appropriate and how much
>here are all the facets of exploring a dungeon and a descript procedure for navigating it
>here are tables and tables of traps, descriptors, oddities, tricks, and interesting designs you can incorporate into your dungeon
>here is a handful of tables to produce random dungeon layouts you can use in conjunction with random stocking tables
>here's sample dungeon with a partial key for inspiration and direction
>here's a slew of modules we produced of dungeons that reflect what we had in mind
>so you need a wilderness?
>well start by drawing a map
>?????????
>i dunno you can move as many miles a day as your dungeon movement rate
> uh here's some random encounter tables that are so dangerous players won't bother risking it 90% of the time
Naw, I sound like I want actual rules to support and shape play. Dungeon centric play is what it is because the rules encourage it. And wilderness play is hazy and mostly held up by each tables' houserules because they didn't really care about it. It was a dungeon game to them.
I want a fantasy RPG without the assumption that we're spending 95% of playtime stuck in subterranean tunnels instead of the, y'know, teeming fantasy overworld.
the "further afield" supplement for beyond the wall is incredible and i highly recommend it.
Thanks, I'll have to check that out as well. Any specific points that make it stand out to you?
What else would you want in an Overland travel system? Just tweak the tables to produce encounters you want (you should do this anyway) and add "abandoned treasure" to the list of random POIs, though why there would be treasure lying around for any idiot to find escapes me.
>Dungeon centric play is what it is because the rules encourage it.
No. Dungeon centric play is a mechanical representation of a dramatic situation. Wandering through fields lacks anything like that drama. That's the point: going hiking is a slow and mindful thing, but it's essentially ungameable.
What you seem to want is a dungeon that looks like a wilderness. Discrete areas, procedures for doing notable things in those areas, and a farmlike distribution of not-too-hard monsters to kill and eat/loot. That's utterly unlike what a wilderness is, which is mostly empty.
So are caves and tombs and shit but that didn't make a certain group of people in the 70s talk themselves out of making a game about exploring caves and tombs
Like, what the frick are you talking about?
Caves, tombs, and fantasy dungeons pack the peril and decision making into a nice tight space. Both in terms of space and time. Hence drama.
Do you really want to dig into fatigue, pack weight, whether you forgot to pack something, and the occasional hard choice days or weeks apart?
I say this as someone who's done a lot of Overland travel for work: the shitty pacing is what makes it ungameable.
Video games seem to have figured it out.
Scattered points of interest with links between them.
Space abstracted away and compacted, which in TTRPG terms could be changed to time abstracted away, space remains the same, because we're not constrained by having space be continuous without gaps.
Ah, right. That's called a pointcrawl.
Use this document with B/X.
There's a 1/6 chance that there's a POI in a hex.
Done.
This still doesn't have the level of specificity produced by the dungeon procedures (I'd actually argue a fair number of these tables are complete fluff that don't interact with the mechanics whatsoever) or solve the issue of B/X assuming wilderness is for Expert play and extremely dangerous.
I want something with the opposite assumptions entirely: that wilderness is the default setting of play, with mechanics as descript as dungeons to generate and stock, and mechanics to support and reward engagement with it rather than rote traversal of it (to get to the next dungeon).
I've said the main things it's missing three times now, and demonstrated as much in the post you replied to. It's as deep as if Gary had said for dungeons "Alright make a map of your dungeon, you move your movement rate squares per turn...make the rest up I guess."
>Just tweak the tables to produce encounters you want
So completely rewrite the tables from scratch is what you're saying, because most encounters are not geared toward starting play in any biome.
And this still doesn't solve the issue of the rules themselves not providing reward for actual exploration and rules to generate wilderness to the same level of specificity as the dungeon for play.
I say old D&D doesn't do this well (it doesn't) and assumes you'll use the dungeon most of the time (it does), everyone comes out of the woodwork to say "No it does! And here's my home brew hexcrawl procedure and blog posts from the Alexandrian to prove it!"
I want a game that itself is designed with wilderness play firmly in mind, not your attempt to finagle B/X or OD&D into a game where wilderness isn't a largely useless one page afterthought.
then just use a campaign setting book, bro. Gazetters for Basic D&D comes with LOTS of information in any type of overland.
>I want a game that itself is designed with wilderness play firmly in mind, not your attempt to finagle B/X or OD&D into a game where wilderness isn't a largely useless one page afterthought.
See any Gazetter, or any other campaign setting for D&D. you're just complaining without bothering to check.
>History
>Geography
>Ecology
>Society
>Economics
What more do you need to play your "special game", DNA samples?
>physiology
>architecture
>martial tactics
>trapping techniques
What else do you need to play a “dungeon crawl”, some sort of fun game or soemthing?
Actual brainlets itt, you can tell they’ve never played anything outside their shitty war games. Some of the best ttgs are about fricking mercantile distribution, and you think you can’t make travel engaging? Lol. Lmao, perchance.
I have a system designed around wilderness travel, but it’s probably not what you’re looking for (it’s a solo game so you build shit on the fly instead of pre-mapping everything). But something that inspired me was one of AngryGM’s long-winded blogposts:
>theangrygm.com/getting-there-is-half-the-fun/
A lot of what
says is reiterated there, actually.
>Some of the best ttgs are about fricking mercantile distribution
Name five.
Brass: Birmingham
Hansa Teutonica
Concordia
Great Western Trail
Orient Bazaar
play more games
Ah, I see, you sneakily started talking about boardgames while I wasn't looking.
TTRPGs are just board games with funny voices.
Yeah, my point was that it’s so ingrained into players’ heads that the meat of an RPG = combat, when war games are only a fraction of the type of tabletop games you can adapt for roleplay.
"It's got to be more specific" doesn't tell us anything.
What do you want? Rules for randomly tile generating areas of forest at a ten foot scale? More random encounter tables? (You should be ashamed if you can't do these yourself) More treasure? (Even more trivial, just put treasure in the wilderness).
Let me put it another way. What interesting things happen in a wilderness, specifically, that rules could help you achieve? What does a good wilderness exploration look like to you?
>What interesting things happen in a wilderness, specifically, that rules could help you achieve? What does a good wilderness exploration look like to you?
Exploration needs to be rewarded in its own right and needs to be the basis of player engagement, with concrete procedures for fostering that in the same way gold for XP and racial/class abilities centered around the dungeon encourages dungeon delves.
As is, wilderness travel is either handwaved (3E to 5E) or too punishing to be a goal in itself (OD&D to AD&D). I want rules for generating an overworld that are tied into a new assumption that players are meant to engage with this and are rewarded for it.
Which requires rethinking how those games do POI, as the assumption is it's either gonna be a new settlement to use as a home base for dungeon delving or a dungeon to delve in. It's not as simple as "well put gold in the wilderness" when every other part of the game (including how we think of the wilderness) is tethered to the dungeon still.
The anons later done touch on what I feel like D&D would have to do on its terms, turn the overworld into a megadungeon in some capacity. But I'm also looking for systems not married to D&D that might've built their games without those same assumptions that have to be adjusted or refitted to make overland adventure the main event.
You ever been cave diving or exploring? It's not filled with orcs and chests of treasure either. A fantasy RPG, by its very definition has to invent the intrigue and "drama" and goodies to transpose over a semi historical real world.
See these are the kinds of considerations I feel like have to go into making a game about the overworld. It's not just "well put the dungeon stuff up top," it's fundamentally reapproaching the game on the new consideration that the wilderness is the main setting, and turning what that entails into as rewarding a game.
I'd like to see the system anyway.
So let's pull from that. You want exploration for its own sake. Well, that's simple enough: put rewards out there, make every hex or point a net gain, XP for map markers, etc.
What we (you) need to know is what you actually want players to do.
At present the loop is
>go further
>resources tick up
But that would be boring and gay. So we need things in those hexes to encounter. Dungeons are not desirable so... what is desired? Do you want combat? Towns? People, even?
I hope you appreciate that your continued habit of saying what you don't want is unhelpful.
Revisit what you actually enjoy, stud a wilderness with it, map it by hex or flowchart, and there you go. None of this is related to what game you play, really. It all stems from your mindset being a "not this" instead of a "this."
>just give them XP for traveling lmao
Okay, and how does that impact the paradigm Gary set up? If traveling gives XP for its own sake, why bother acquiring goodies or battling monsters, let's just walk in circles to level up. What's that, we should devise some kind of system to prioritize what kind of exploration is meaningful to necessitate reward while still providing enough reward to drive the new focus of the game?
Huh, the more and more we talk about this, the less and less it sounds like we're talking about Gary's game and the more it sounds like we're inventing an entirely new game with entirely new considerations. Funny that.
>I hope you appreciate that your continued habit of saying what you don't want is unhelpful.
And I hope you appreciate your habit of advising "lmao just use D&D with homebrew" is a fricking dead end.
If I am effectively making my own game wholesale by adding all these facets Gary and the gang didn't like, didn't entertain, or didn't think of, then why the frick am I using D&D at all? Why not just scrap D&D entirely and make a new game without all the baggage I don't want?
Hence me asking from the outset if other games entirely set out to do just this, so that I don't have to spend my day inventing a new system over the old one instead of prepping to play games.
> these facets Gary and the gang didn't like, didn't entertain, or didn't think of,
You know Outdoor Survival? Play it. it is the original D&D hexmap, you idiot
>ERM IT'S THE ORIGINAL HEXMAP IDIOT
They took the map and literally none of the rules of the actual game. The frick is your point?
We already established that hexmaps are a thing and there were rules for traversing the wilderness using them. What part of that undoes that LBB, B/X, and AD&D consider the dungeon to be the primary setting (and give ample procedure for designing and running one, with enough actual mechanisms for reward to encourage players to do it) and the wilderness the secondary setting (with barely a page to discussion on it) that is the domain of higher level characters. It's not encouraged by the rules, the tables, or the modes of progression and reward and is largely just an obstacle between settlements and dungeons.
I swear to god, you OSR homosexuals have only one reply, and its one I've already addressed at least five times.
I think you're confusing my point with others: it doesn't matter what your base game is. Mini Six, GURPS, D&D, CoC, even Storyteller could all do this.
This is the first time you've mentioned that fighting monsters and acquiring goodies are desirable, and I feel like we're turning a corner.
So you would like to fight monsters and acquire goods (which sounds very D&D) but in a wilderness setting.
Are you interested in logistics, or not?
Do you want encounters with people to be common? Important?
Is scale mapping important? Do you like the idea of players being lost or misled?
Should improving terrain (making camps, roads, magical markers) be important?
Do you want vehicles? Mounts?
You could apply all of these questions to regular dungeons, and answering them still wouldn't get you the dungeon delving experience.
There's a core missing for all of the things you're suggesting to exist in the context of.
That thing is what OP is looking for.
Until he can articulate what that thing is, I can't tell him how to get it.
don't bother, anon. OP is a nogame homosexual who just wants to complain.
I wanted to see if a purpose built system already exists for this first.
>So you would like to fight monsters and acquire goods
At least in part yes.
>Are you interested in logistics, or not?
If it serves making travel and exploration meaningful and rewarding, then yes.
>Do you want encounters with people to be common? Important?
There definitely ought to be other settlements and people ought there.
>Is scale mapping important?
I'm conflicted on this one because while I feel like it's important to conveying a sense of worldly scale, I don't think the beancounting miles is inherent to the fun. You could just as easily tell the player they can travel X number of hexes a day and have the scale be conveyed in the composition of the world itself (borders, climates, landmarks etc etc).
>Do you like the idea of players being lost or misled?
I've personally not seen the point of it in old school D&D beyond making wilderness travel more frustrating. I also like the idea of landmarks and distant objects driving the wanderlust, so the idea that I can see something in the distance that looks cool and then end up wandering a days journey off course on a die roll with that always on the horizon seems both unlikely and not fun.
>Should improving terrain be important?
Not entirely sure what you mean on this, but terrain definitely ought to be a factor in travel. I actually quite like what I've read out of Ryuutama in that the more difficult the terrain the more reward for surmounting it.
>Do you want vehicles? Mounts?
Absolutely yes. It's a small thing, and most games usually just represent it by increased movement and carry capacity, but it's great for conveying a sense of great distance crossed.
I definitely feel you can't just paste the trappings of the dungeon on the surface and that's it.
I wanted a system recommendation. "Lmao, homebrew B/X until it does something completely different" is a shit recommendation.
6 mile hexes broken into 1.2 mile hexes, most levels of encumbrance factor 1.2 into nice whole numbers, which corresponds to the number of subjects you can move ie unencumbered you can move 20 subhexes a day or 4 hexes, down to 5 subhexes or 1 hex, prior to terrain movement modifiers
Most movement rates at the different levels of encumbrance translate into a number of miles per day that 1.2 factors into to produce a whole number, which is how many hexes you can move per day
This is what is recommended in Into the Wild, btw, you could do 6 mile hexes
That subhex scale of 5 vs 6 is something I thought about while mapping a whole planet, in a fantasy world if you’re willing to suspend belief just a little bit you can have I think it was something like an icosahedron with triangles 2 or 3 150 or 216 megahexes wide, you have 5 of 1 side of the equilateral triangles equal the circumference of your planet, which leads to a planet around size of the asteroid Ceres, which happens to be a sphere and is very close to the minimum bound for a body to form a sphere. In this way you get a somewhat believable, relatively small world.
It does sound like Ryuutama is something for you to consider. However, you still haven't cracked - I think - what will make this game fun. What would a great session of this game be like? What will the players enjoy? What do the characters do except watch all this scenery go by, and maybe get small crumbs of combat for gold?
I don't mean to be directly antagonistic but I think perhaps you've come in with more unspoken or unconscious desires than expressed ones.
Remember: page count and rule depth doesn't always mean focus or quality. Some activities are best left to a more freeform approach, or are merely aesthetic "feel" issues.
>It does sound like Ryuutama is something for you to consider. However, you still haven't cracked - I think - what will make this game fun.
I do have some reservations about even Ryuutama, like the DMPC and again a lack of much ink for robust world gen.
Full disclosure, I'm coming at this as a DM. I want to run a game that has great support for generating a world for the players to explore, and with procedures for play, and play itself that expects and encourages players to explore (a thing which I feel classic D&D makes in practice punishing outside of a dungeon).
>What would a great session of this game be like?
Players deciding what they want to do, noodling around in a sandbox I've made, finding neat shit, maybe having a scrap or two, feeling rewarded, and always ending with something on the horizon to go after next time.
>What will the players enjoy?
I want the excitement to come from exploration foremost. Interesting places to traverse and find, and things to gain from finding them (whether it be XP or treasure).
>What do the characters do except watch all this scenery go by, and maybe get small crumbs of combat for gold?
All the things one expects from a fantasy RPG: fight or parley with monsters, find glittering goodies in ruins and monster hoards, find settlements new and old to trade with or gather rumors from, establish settlements, interact with factions, etc etc.
>I think perhaps you've come in with more unspoken or unconscious desires than expressed one
I'm grasping at straws because I do not feel the games I have played adequately model the experience I want (or require so much work to reconfigure to be making an entirely different game).
Honestly, the OP is a touchpoint for me, early CRPGs like Might and Magic, Ultima
etc and the sense of unfettered worldly exploration they provide (that I've never felt in the actual FRPGs that inspired them).
>Inb4 just go play those games
I have, I want to bring what they provide back to the tabletop.
You see, when you put it like that, that just sounds like a hex crawl again. Perhaps with an undercurrent that you feel you'd like more support in world generation because you're not confident in your own imagination.
If anything, maybe you're looking for /later/ D&D if D&D at all. 3.5 had a lot more inspiration for biomes and even planar travel. A feeling of opportunity on the horizon stems merely from good GM communication about options and a solid vision for an explorable world. No random table is going to spit out a world worth seeing without your sense of expression.
It definitely seems like the game system is irrelevant to your issue, and your hangup is emotional.
A hexcrawl with what? Everyone keeps popping in to say "herm, that's a hexcrawl" without addressing that D&D doesn't produce what I want with a hexcrawl or not.
I've already laid out why and how old D&D discourages wilderness exploration and why attempting to "fix" that ends up with your reworking the entire game rather than just how your present it. Old D&D is the dungeon game. Everything else around it is in service of the dungeon game. New D&D isn't concerned with either, because it's a "story" game where everything is window dressing for the "story". Neither is what I want.
With all /tg/'s HYTNPDND circlejerking, I didn't think the response to "who does exploration better than D&D" would draw only two actual answers and a legion of moronic D&Drones insisting D&D just works for every usage.
>A feeling of opportunity on the horizon stems merely from good GM communication
A hexcrawl by the common 6mile usage doesn't even provide this, moron. 3 miles to the horizon, all you can see is in your hex. There is no horizon.
>No random table is going to spit out a world worth seeing without your sense of expression.
Who said I was asking for that, you mongoloid? There is a chasm of difference between no support at all for world gen (OD&D, B/X, AD&D) and even the most rudimentary tables for biome and POI generation. Asking for better than "i dunno, draw a map and make it up" is apparently asking for them to make the setting for me.
>errrrm, your hangup is emotional
Eat shit.
A hex crawl isn't dependent on the game, or related to it. Your perceptual problems aside, consider whether games deliver the combat experience you want. The skill /conflict resolution mechanics you want. The general milieu.
D&D isn't for everything... Except it seems to do everything you say you want. Combat for profit, fantasy trappings, rules for exotic terrain and fauna. You absolutely could do the same things in Mini Six because fundamentally the stuff you want springs from the meta, not the rulebook. Except maybe in the case of borrowing premade stuff (monsters, rules for lava, tables for mountain encounters) that you could steal from a dozen more systems or make yourself.
Good post, but wasted because you've done more work setting up this homosexual's game than he has. He won't learn if he doesn't teach himself.
Deep exploration of a small island or valley would be a good place to start.
Hexes are a very coarse abstraction of the wilderness. You could run a detailed overland map that allows players to do things like
>cut through the woods to head off a raiding party on the main road
>ford a river to stage an ambush
>discover a mountain village where unusual equipment can be purchased
Conceptually, it would be a bit like a dungeon where the "walls" are permeable to greater or lesser degrees, and travel is measured in hours rather than 10 minute turns. More difficult to run in some ways, but potentially much more creative than going from room to room.
>why bother
Same reason that players delve into dungeons instead of grinding rats in the tavern basement.
In my OSE game, you don’t get your gp xp until you bring treasure back to civilization, coins have weight, and the DM has thrown in tons of trade goods that weigh a ton that we simply did not transport. The very first thing we bought were mules to minimize the encounter rolls we’d have to make during transport. We quickly adapted to fighting only 20% of the time and no longer try to 100% clear anything if we can talk our way past it and manage to stumble on a big haul
We’ve managed only a couple casualties incl. 1 retainer and are planning on buying riding horses just to have the option to flee wilderness encounters and minimize rolls
This is exactly the thing I'm talking about with B/X, OD&D and AD&D. Don't get me wrong I love the dungeon delve for what it is. But as the rules are written and the game is designed, the wilderness is kind of just a wrench to throw in between the dungeon crawls. And it's going to stay that way for most of your PC's career.
That's the heart of my asking if something else has the opposite expectations, because the world as the vector of adventure and the dungeon as the occasional foray into extreme danger seems more sensible and evocative of the fiction the hobby is based on IMO. I hate to trot out the old Tolkiengayisms, but Moria was just a place they had to go through to get back on the trail of their globe trotting wilderness journey, not the other way around. Tolkien aside, Vance's Eyes of the Overworld sees Cugel the Clever on a worldspanning journey, exploring alien threats and cultures and even different times. Conan's stories often see him traveling great distances and engaging in overworld campaigns and adventures and misfortunes.
I want that game. Where I'm not getting a horse so I can get back to the dungeon faster, where I'm getting it because I can see and engage with more of the world. And the game wants me to do that.
Set up encounters in a 1.2 mile hex that aren’t dungeons, you can make it work
There are rules for evasion, pursuit, and tracking. Not every encounter you roll is unsurmountable, you just don’t have a realistic chance of winning a fight every time. Your 3 basic options are fight, flee, or parley
Also, you may need to explore those subhexes for your lairs, dungeons, and features if my reading of Into the Wild is right. You don’t do any low level overworld exploration, you don’t turn up any features, eventually you’ll exhaust your options and have to start searching. Perhaps you’ll only get a vague mark on a map and have to search for it over an area of a few hexes
You get reaction rolls with your random encounters, we’ve had cases where some freak ass monster peeps at us while sleeping and runs off when caught at which point we immediately packed up camp and vacated the area, and other encounters that we rolled well and managed to convince lead to their lair, after which the lair was cased and partially robbed without a fight
While playing you don’t really know whether something is a random encounter or not, and it can become part of your world you can revisit later
>we immediately packed up camp and vacated the area
But why.
Next encounter roll is in 4 hours and it's unlikely you'll roll the same creature again
Well it was morning, I think the ranger we were with mentioned something about it having super hearing, and the DM could just decide he wants to force another encounter
>Desert of the sphinx
That's a pegasus, 0/10 bad map
isn't this more a matter of setting then the system itself?
I feel like many modern RPG adventures already distanced themselves from the classic dungeon crawling typically seen in older adventures, but if you want a more "exploring a vast world with different cultures" type of games I think deciding on what the different "kingdoms" of your world are is a good start.
basically, just use the world map as a focus and try to make everything into a grander scale:
>holy knights? they're the knights from the kingdom of the grasslands, where law and order is tightly kept
>thieves' guild? they're agents of the desert kingdom, which thrives in commerce and secret deals
>wizard college? they're magicians from the snow kingdom, a land that encourages magic training from a young age
so on and so forth.
I think to do a truly open world centric game, you need to go more granular than 6,3, maybe even 3 mile hexes.
Maybe even dungeonify the overworld.
For overland travel to matter at a human scale, the particular geometry of the environment has to matter for gameplay purposes, just like in dungeons.
But this is hard to do without ending up with a toy-world like in video games.
You need a weird balance between abstract and granular.
I'm thinking, maybe have "outworld megadungeons" roughly the size of a world of warcraft zone, or like an elder scrolls map, but abstract away the travel between points of interest?
I think a wilderness centric game would need some overworld equivalent of "jaquaying"
Every point of interest should have several "paths" to other points of interest, and several other points of interest should be pointing to it.
Another thing it needs is discoverability.
There should be rules for what players can see in the distance that they can travel towards, what they can discover if they take a few turns exploring, and in general, they should always have a "next room" to go to, just like in the dungeon.
Or at least be able to take an action to see the "next room". A wilderness where there's nothing you see in every direction except for plains hexes is like a dungeon where all rooms have secret entrances, and the price for trying to find something is wandering monsters.
Playing around with topology of the map. Roads, shortcuts, transport, temporarily gated areas, etc.
Rules for quickly generating a battle map of the biome you're in.
More detailed foraging / survival rules.
Encounter tables arranged by difficulty, rules for assigning difficulty to areas, rather than levels.
General landscape generation procedures. Where to put mountains, plains, forests, in a way that creates interesting gameplay.
maybe I could take a stab at shitbrewing this
>There should be rules for what players can see in the distance that they can travel towards
You know why the standard hex is six miles, right?
>what they can discover if they take a few turns exploring, and in general, they should always have a "next room" to go to, just like in the dungeon.
That's what the hexes are for. Hexes have overt and covert features. You spend time (a resource) exploring them, and there's a chance that you might come across a point of interest.
This reads like that nu-SR screencap where the "designer" was telling that he was inspired by some other Nu-SR shit which includes basic stuff...
>maybe I could take a stab at shitbrewing this
is this low level bait?
For frick's sake, you brainlets haven't even tried playing a hexcrawl in the old-school sense.
>You know why the standard hex is six miles, right?
And?
You can only see objects 3 miles into the horizon, so you shouldn't be able to see the next hex in a standard hex crawl anyway.
So with a 6 mile hex, you can only explore stuff that's inside the hex, but you can't discover anything that's in the adjacent hex.
If your idea of "exploration" is to roll on a table assigned to a hex, then the map itself is superfluous. The players don't need to see it because they can't make informed decisions about it.
I don't see what the frick the size of a hex even has to do with any of what was said, numbers can be adjusted to whatever.
OP is entirely right, there is no TTRPG that does a good enough job of gamefying the overworld exploration with solid mechanics. I don't understand why there is always someone here to shit on anything people post even if they are obviously right and you don't have anything to prove otherwise.
Also, in some posts I have figures for blowing up a believable globe from a 6 mile hex, Welsh Piper has blog posts going down in scale for tactical situations
Some thoughts I’m having on this, you could scale down 2 or 3 times to find precisely where you are in your 1 or 1.2 mile hex, then roughly overlay a 5 or 10 feet square battlemap for fixed features
For random encounters to have more tactical depth more depth, simply generate at least one 100 by 100 or 400 by 400 feet battlemap with tactical features per terrain type, add more or start PCs in different parts as you go
The Carcosa Campaign for Lamentations of the Flame Princess? Is that going in the direction you are looking to go? I mean the overland is already done and stocked, but well....
But yeah, having the exploration the way around you detailed is a rare commodity among RPGs.
there are a few elements here
generating a map
filling that map with relationships
running a game where players move across that map.
assuming fantasy.
renegade crowns for wfrp2 covers the first 2.
further afield covers the second point (collaborative gameplay where the GM and players fill the map and generate the rumors that might bring them there. combine with 2+ threat packs, and suddenly you have adventure and scenarios running out of those generated locations).
forbidden lands covers the last bit about how to run survival while traveling.
forbidden lands also gives you a populated map if you want to start with something that already exists.
are you stuck on a reward loop? give XP for discovering new places and for "solving" that location. give XP for discovering lost lore, not for killing things or "showing up."
have XP translate into either stats or "base" upgrades. have players create safe houses at different points on the map so they can travel to and from them instead of always having to do giant overland journeys.
if anything, read the granville road scenario for ryuutama or the "delivery quest" scenario pack for beyond the wall because that's what you're talking about. scenarios.
Please post Hexmaps
That's a really cool way to do mountains
I'll probably get rid of the features and river and add this to a small icosahedral projection map, stop here and go back and look at gfc + Welsh Piper for stocking the hexes
See? This is what I'm talking about. Five minutes for some anon to type out based on the OP. Pity OP couldn't do it himself but sometimes "draw the rest of the fricking owl" is too tall an order.