What’s in a good RPG map, and all the ways I got mine wrong.
Great post. Agree on all counts and some excellent advice about building locations.
Great post !
I’m always torn on the zone level thing, and it’s always the place where having a leveling system feels like it eventually runs against a sandbox. I love playing sandbox, I have huge area like this full of mystery, wonders and blanks, and I run it as a huge hexcrawl. Obviously, that’s too many hexes, so I tend to just have a very vague idea of what’s there and when I know the players will go somewhere or are moving in a particular direction I prep a little and fill-in some blanks/hexes.
But it’s very hard to decide ahead of time where things will be higher or lower level, especially since I don’t have any particular limits for this campaign and it could very well go from level 1 to 20 which is way too large of a range for hexes. Either I include all the ranges and some zones will basically never be interacted with (good luck doing anything related to a zone 15-20 as a level 2), or the hexcrawl portion is a more limited lower range (say 1-10) and all the higher levels are specific locations, dungeons, villains, etc.
So far, I don’t really decide the level of any given area as long as I’m not sure the players are even going there or near it. Obviously there’s a general idea of what areas are more or less dangerous, but since i’m always making interesting encounters that stay fun for their level, it does feel like I’m going to have to scale things along with them.
How would you handle this? Do some areas basically become “useless” at some point? Let’s say my players get to level 8, and I have an area near where they started that logically should be around the 1-5 range, then are the plots, encounters and things in it stuck there and incredibly easy? I guess some interesting and more challenging plots and locations can always be inserted anywhere, and the stuff that was planned to be low-level becomes more of a background that the players ignore or quickly stomp through.
These kinds of problems make me want to give a limit of 10 to this campaign, at least in the hexcrawl form. Beyond level 10 it feels like it’s going to be very difficult to keep the crawling/travelling part challenging and interesting while also making sense. Can’t have bloodstorms, hordes of zombies and super villains everywhere when travelling or the inhabitants would have all died a while back. So if they reach 10 the campaign would transform into more a high-stakes thing and the travelling part would be mostly skipped, I think that could work?
Thank you for reading!
On the first question mark: it’s enough to have a general idea of what areas are more dangerous and convey that to players, like you do. You should know what is making an area particularly dangerous and make sure to not scale those specific sources of danger down to the level of the players. Other than that, this is not a videogame, it’s not like every monster and NPC in the area should scale with the danger level of the area or the level of the players. We always need less content than we think anyways: roughly speaking, in d&d 5e we only need 1 fun encounter per hour of session. Not everything needs to be a challenge.
About areas that become useless: in my experience that’s not a problem. When there is nothing engaging for players in a location, the adventure will call them somewhere else. Sure, don’t force them to go through 50 super easy random encounters on the way. Read the room, like a DJ :D
Which brings us to your last point: skipping travel at high level. In general, I would adopt the opposite perspective: not “skipping boring content as needed”, but rather designing sessions so that players go from one interesting thing to another, with transitions and downtime in between. I realize this does not fit the model of the hexcrawl, but the truth is I don’t know how to fix hexcrawls: by construction they have so much filler content. I can’t make that fun. After the first one or two sessions the plot is in motion and you can directly prepare what serves the story rather than preparing the content of the surrounding hexes.
Thanks for your response :)
I agree with most of what you said, I think my case is not entirely applicable however, since I’m playing hexcrawl in PF2e. I understand your dislike of hexcrawl and it is a difficult type of game to run, you can’t really run it in a traditional way with a prepared plot, even though the plot will emerge gradually. My hexmap doesn’t really have any filler, but playing a hexcrawl does require the players be invested and interested in exploring and discovering things, and learning about the land around them in detail, even if it’s not directly important for the plot. It’s a very different kind of tone and not suitable for all plots and types of players.
It’s less about “forcing” encounters or having boring contents, it’s simply that when there is a large level-range in a region where players might go in any direction and explore anywhere, even your map is full of interesting stuff like mine, I can’t really set/prepare the levels ahead of time too much or a lot of the stuff prepared will have to be adjusted or thrown out because it doesn’t match the level of the players. So I don’t really include levels in the stuff I do prepare long-term, I just setup a web of interesting interconnected stuff all over the place, and the precise level of encounters/stuff to do is prepared just ahead of the players. I can still say something like “those mountains are very dangerous for your level” and if they do go there, I’ll set it at higher level than them in a way that makes sense and where it’s clear it’s going to be very difficult, but if I set it up long before they ever go there and arbitrarily decide “this mountain is a level 10 area” then it won’t just be difficult they’ll be killed in seconds, so It’s better to adjust as I go I think while keeping a relative safe/dangerous vibe to places.
Anyway it’s not that important, just a pretty common frustration of the hexcrawls I like to do which focus on exploration is that systems where levels matter a lot (like PF2e) make it harder to run and you kinda have to scale things relative to the players at least a little bit. All of what you said still applies!
Out of curiosity, how do your typical session prep and the typical session look like, in terms of encounters and story? How much of it is tied to what’s in a hexagon and how much is “freeform”?
im going nuts here, there seems to be an implication of a blog post or something, but im only seeing a map