Blob Crawl

Smallworld

Hex crawls in D&D don't work for me. I've tried a few times but ultimately I keep running into the same issues.

I've learned to write good dungeons, but overland travel is a struggle.

The Clue Problem 

Clue is great. The logic-puzzle structure blends luck and skill in a tense and satisfying way. Crafting the perfect suggestion to gain as much information as possible is fun.

Unfortunately, between the fun of making suggestions, you have to move between rooms. Let's say you exit the Billiard Room and head for the Conservatory. You roll your dice to determine how many squares you move... 2. Everyone else takes their turns and you go again, roll the dice and it's a 1, ugh. Everyone goes again, then you roll a 3. You're still not in the Conservatory.

It's been three game turns since you chose what to do and for the last 10-15 minutes you've been inching toward your goal, with no new choices and no new information. Boring.

This is the Clue problem.

Tomb of Annihilation or Psalm 107:40

Hex crawls and their associated travel procedures easily fall into this. I do not want to spend weeks (in game-time or real-time) grinding across the wastelands of Chult. Random encounters with "1d6 Giant Lizards, sunning themselves" are very dull compared to a plot to infiltrate the rival village and lead a coup or the sinister puzzle-dungeon of the jaberwockies. The fights you find traversing hexes are rarely the DM's best material and don't often advance the schemes of the players.

One of the big problems with hexes, is that there are usually too damn many of them. Travel becomes a tax and entire game sessions are consumed by inconsequential skirmishes. I don't know about you, but I don't get to game often enough for this to be acceptable.

Scaling Down
If too many hexes is a problem, why not just draw fewer of them?

Hexes shine in games where they simulate the movements of multiple units across a wide field but they break down at small scale for a couple reasons.

One reason, is that hex connections are too schematic. With fewer distinct territories, how each one connects to those around it becomes more important.

I'm talking shit, but Niklas makes rad stuff.

Look at how everything is connected. Are their interesting routes? Strong points? Loops?

A Tale of Two Risks

One of my favorite board games as a child was Risk. I would beg any available adult to play with me and I loved trying to conquer the world. However, once I got a little older and had other teen-aged friends to play with, Risk grew predictable and tedious.

Once you've played a few times, the patterns are clear. Someone holed up in Australia, someone else starting out small in South America and building up slowly. Players in Asia and Europe are screwed, just waiting to be knocked out and go watch a couple movies while the actual contenders grind it out. The bottlenecks and cul-de-sacs of the board enforced bland repetition.

When I was in high-school, I got Lord of the Rings Risk, Trilogy Edition. The new board design incorporated a lot of looping paths, there were more attainable continents and dead-end turtle strategies didn't work. Every game was different. There were frequent reversals of fortune. Risk was fun again.

Watch out for those sea routes.

Ten years ago, Justin Alexander wrote a series of posts about "Jaquaying" dungeon layouts. In his manifesto on dungeon design, he advocates looping, and interconnected areas to create "dynamic flexibility which allows multiple groups to have unique experiences" and "allows each individual group to chart their own course." For most readers of D&D blogs, this has become pretty standard stuff.

It's not a consideration I see talked about much in the context of overland movement, but it ought to apply.

Too Many Exits
Routing and dynamic loops are not the only thought pattern to borrow from dungeon design. When I map out a dungeon, I try to ensure that each branching point presents a reasonable number of options and enough information to make a real choice.There are good reasons that every room in a dungeon does not have six doors.

Pick a door, any door.

With hexes, you're locked into six directions but six choices is usually too many. It's a lot of work for a DM to come up with six meaningful options with the right clues to allow a real decision. In play, it takes a long time to describe each option and it takes too long for a group of players to choose between so many alternatives. Everything bogs down.

Putting It All Together
I want the dynamism we've learned to build into dungeons at an overland scale. If Risk can do it, so can D&D. With a little forethought and flexibility on the front end, I should be able to make a map that implements the lessons of board games with the tools of dungeon design.

What about pointcrawls? And pathcrawls? Good solutions both, but I want to slay the dragon in my own way.

I have a simple solution: don't make your "hexes" all the same shape. Figure out the number of places you want to include in your campaign, figure out what should be connected to what and draw them like a fantasy Risk board. Think about it like mapping a dungeon.

Rough first draft of my latest project.

Add impassable areas as needed to define the space. Mountains  and cliffs look good on maps.

If sea travel will be a feature of your game, draw the zones to suit your desired travel times and areas of control (like Diplomacy or Axis and Allies)