Why did hexcrawling rules in D&D disappear? Looking at the 3.5e handbooks all you get is travel time in different terrain and different speeds which can easily be mapped to a hexgrid but there are no instructions for the DM on how to do this. Did they just assume that everyone had legacy knowledge about how to run this from having played in old AD&D, B/X and BECMI campaigns? If so it’s pretty dumb, someone who has never played D&D before will have no way of knowing how to run a hexcrawl and people seemed to forget about them until recently with OSR-stuff influencing RPGs from outside that scene.
Hexcrawling is best experienced with pre-2e rulesets, yeah.
>>96777749Easier to sell books if you make people think the only way to play is stringing together a bunch of self-contained modules, rather than the game teaching you how to make things for yourself.
>>96777749Honestly? Video games and general rise of impatience. Back in the 80s, the ONLY way to get anything like a hexcrawl was to join a hexcrawl where the players wanted and the DM had privilege to enforce strict time keeping rules and force players to manually wander the maze then the overworld back to the town while accounting for ever penny and second spent along the way.Now that video games do this or things like it way faster while also shinier, players and DMs alike don't really have the patience for it, so they sort of just start handwaving all of it. I'm very hard pressed these days to find even the "tougher" DMs not just handwaving a lot of the rules, like "if you don't end the game in town, your characters are lost in the wilderness!" turns into "Oh, it's 11pm? Okay you guys make it back out of the dungeon and head to town with no trouble. Let me add up your experience and I'll tell you what you got."
Attention Defecit modern gamers erroneously believe that traveling, surviving, and exploring are laborious wastes of time and unfun. This spans across not just TRPGs but also other mediums like Video Games and Film.One can call it the "Skyrim Problem".In Skyrim there's a general consensus that an hour of fighting dragons has more value than an hour of 'walking'. In this case walking includes exploration, discovery, engaging with the environment to overcome obstacles, wild encounters with enemies, etc.Clearly that's fucking wrong and only idiots would think it- unfortunately the idiots are in control through volume.D&Dogshit wisely appeals to them as the lowest common denominator to maintain majority brainspace when it comes to TRPGs. Good for business. Bad for gamers.Recurrent Spending is the goal of Hasbro and WotC. The kind of gamers who engage in creative things such as hexcrawls and making a game their own are not the same kind of gamers who voraciously buy the new books looking for more broken character options or pre-written modules and settings and adventures like >>96777919 says.>>96778169Not ending the session in town being a Lose State was always a retarded rule that should rightly stick to something like a board game, not an ongoing and living thing such as a campaign.
>>96778348>Look at me be a retarded nogames who only knows about D&D and all I know about that game is from other brain dead nogames who only know of 5eIf you played something other than penises you would know that D&D is the game that did hexcrawling.
>>96778494What are you even arguing about?I don't understand what upset you in my post to make you lash out like that in defense.
>>96778531If you are too retarded to read posts then you should go be a faggot somewhere else.
>>96777749The style of game that most people play has moved away from hex crawling since probably the early eighties. Some of the Dragonlance modules have hexcrawls that are railroads that just punish the players if they go the "wrong" way. The hobby moved more towards the fun house dungeon and "encounter design" and away from more freeform, sandbox play that hex crawling kind of requires.-or-Its possible they the 3e devs were the minority of people who liked, for lack of better term, plot or story focused games, but 3rd edition was so insanely popular that it kind of shifted dungeon fantasy from exploration being an important pillar to being a most vestigial pillar.
>>96778348skyrim's a dogshit example, there's like a billion mods focusing entirely on survival with tens of millions of hits and even vanilla console babies jerk off the notion of not using fast travel as if it was a badge of honor. the real problem there was the utter lack of agency in every other facet of the game, but that's a topic for another time
>>96778348>Attention Defecit modern gamers erroneously believe that traveling, surviving, and exploring are laborious wastes of time and unfunAs a GM, it absolutely fucking is a waste of time to roll a bunch of meaningless encounters that add nothing of real value to the campaign, do not serve the goals of the players or their characters, and survival can be boiled down to a few skill checks, and anything more is, again, a waste of time.The players and their characters already have enough to overcome without a bunch of glup shitto enemies that they'll beat in one or two rounds that only serve to waste their resources so they don't have them for the actually important encounters.I am not here, once a week, for 3-5 hours, to roll on boring ass random tables so they can stab some wolves. The PCs are the protagonists, and have more important shit to do than kill random wildlife over and over. They have places to go, people to save, and evil to thwart. Unless you're one of those retards who thinks sandbox games are actually good (in which case you're a retard), random encounters have no place in TTRPGs and travel can be boiled down to keeping track of how much time they choose to take based on pace and how many resources they drain rather than Going "OOPS YOU FOUND MORE POINTLESS WOLVES TO STAB!".
>>96778169This is a weird parody but 10/10.
>>96778348>In Skyrim there's a general consensus that an hour of fighting dragons has more value than an hour of 'walking'. In this case walking includes exploration, discovery, engaging with the environment to overcome obstacles, wild encounters with enemies, etcWhere is this consensus? Virtually everyone who likes Bethesda games from Morrowind onward talks about how much they like exploring the world.Half of the people who play Skyrim specifically are women who run around picking flowers.
>>96777749Tracking overland travel like that takes away from the awesome 4 hour long combat encounter you could be having where you get a chance to show off the build you made based upon combining aspects from 27 different splat books
>>96778348you know this is right because there's so many mad responders lol
>>96777749This has been said before but it was mainly three things.First it was D&D and other systems getting lazy and just brushing past it and often guessing you use old systems for hexcrawling over expecting to add it to the each system themselves.Second was them just "fast tracking" everything and basically it just PCs having encounters along the way. Especially with all the "on rails" campaigns being made.Third was more and more DMs being lazy and unable to make fun hexcrawls. Especially compared to videogames making exploration, crafting, etc. So people have a raised expectation and most games would failed to meet that and people started to remove and skip past that part.
>>96779424how can one opinion suck so hard it's retards like this anon that caused this shift imo>>96777749with the mass introduction of comic nerds to the hobby in the early 80s because they wanted to play super heroes just like anon above, only in a medieval game and this is the way a large part of the demographic skewed to the point of the hexcrawling getting forgotten and left by the wayside.3rd edition is inexcusable though for not providing 3-5 more pages in the dmg just giving a simple hexcrawling structure and a dungeon crawling one copy pasted from adnd or becmi because as you said they have all the rules about random encounters, traveling speeds depending on terrain type and difficulty etc.
>>96777749because they were always boring dogshit and no one used them even when they were included
>>96777749Because D&D arose from wargaming and while people at the start found just dungeon crawling to be a natural and satisfying activity and didn't even think to try much else people, including Gygax himself, eventually had the idea that in a game with a game master who could arbitrate the result of any and every action taken by the other players and who was in charge of everything in the entire game universe apart from the handful of PCs, doing things other than just wandering around dungeons would be fun.That led to the hex crawling you asked about, and then people did other stuff too. Then a lot of people found that other stuff to be more rewarding than just dungeon or hex crawling and it became a less important thing to include.
>>96777749>What do you mean "us four"? As far as I can see, there are only three men h-
>>96779992That didn't help but often enough they were willing to learn when they got the chance, it was the theater kids and drama club rejects that hated the hexcrawl part of anything from what I have seen. (Though again I think the start was them not adding a few pages to explain how to hexcrawl since you need maybe no more than 3-5 for all the rules, and tables for it. Hell bet you still have space for some art of a party traveling
>>96780267i dont get the hate for theater kids. They were never the problem. maybe it's a us thing, or an internet thing. All the "theater kids" i ve known played WOD, Exalted, L5R, Fate, CoC and some were into Degenesis and Numenera for the lore and aesthetics. Most of them never played anything but White wolf stuff like vampire and werewolf.They didn't vibe with dnd, some tried it but didnt like it/get it and the rest hated the idea of playing it.either way the narrativist category of rpg fans is completely irrelevant to the conversation because they inflate the playerbase without playing traditional rpgs. They just provided an additional playstyle and game style to the hobby that has little to no crossover.The big divide is simple in traditional rpgs. Do you play as adventurers or as heroes? And all the comics faggots simply want to play as heroes.This means not bothering with the nitty gritty of traveling, adventuring etc. Just a fade to black and appearing in front of the big bad or his mooks ready to kick some ass the same way it is reproduced in modern media and the reason modern dnd is pretty much Marvel slop
>>96777749>Why is modern DnD not doing things TSR games did?No clue. Total mystery
>>96777919Hexcrawl don't teach you how to do things for yourself. It teaches you how to be the most literal-minded, table-checking faggot in existence.In other words: it's teaching a different kind of terrible behaviour
>itt: never games flexing how hardcore hexcrawl is, unlike pozzed nu-RPGs, even if they have no fucking clue how it works in practice and said nu-RPGs being a baseline for longer than they are aliveAnother quality thread on /tg/
>>96780642The 3 - 5e rulebooks already have rules for doing what a hexcrawl does with how long travel takes, how many resources you need to expend to travel, random encounters while traveling etc, it just doesn't organize it into a handy and simple procedure like a hexcrawl does. Making it procedural doesn't make you literal-minded, it just means the game is consistent and the DM doesn't handwave away shit. If everything should be handwaved the game might as well not have rules which no longer makes it a game, it's just pretend.
>>96779992>I want to waste everyone's time fighting pointless battles that don't contribute anything of value to the game!This is the actual retarded take. You have gathered 3-5 friends, sat down, and rather than do anything cool, fun, or interesting, you spend the entire session dying of dysentery, using bloated mechanics just to forage for food, and stabbing wolves for no reason. It's ridiculous to think that's a good use of your time. It's literally the TTRPG version of watching paint dry.
>>96780454>The big divide is simple in traditional rpgs. Do you play as adventurers or as heroes? more like>Do you want to wander around with no actual point to what you're doing, wasting your time, or do you want to have a real goal to achieve?
It is my clear impression that most players simply don't enjoy hexcrawling or similar rules that put emphasis on travelling instead of the adventure locations. Back when I still ran 5e, my Tomb of Annihilation campaign almost fell apart because I made travelling through, and surviving in, the jungle a big deal, but the players just didn't like it. In other games and other systems it has been mostly the same. The one big (and unsurprising) exception is the OSR community. It's also hard to find a reasonable level of travelling. For example, I enjoy hexcrawling but I think I'd get bored playing Forbidden Lands. On the other hand, teleporting from location to location is retarded. Balancing people's different tolerances is hard. I'm currently running what is essentially point-crawl ("Your desired location is x hexes away, that's z rations, y random encounters," etc. Sometimes I just give them specific "random" encounters if the flavor fits or if I want to introduce new rumors or whatever).I think travelling is an absolutely essential part of games that focus on exploration.
>>96780755>If everything should be handwaved the game might as well not have rules which no longer makes it a game, it's just pretend.Nobody said everything should be handwaved you extremist midwit. Just that there are certain parts of the game that are tedious and should be handwaved so the fun, exciting parts of the game can be focused on.There is nothing fun or exciting about fighting the same encounters over and over because "OH THIS IS WHERE THESE ANIMALS WOULD LIVE OF COURSE ALL THESE ECNOUNTERS ON THIS TABLE ARE BASICALLY THE SAME SHIT!" or "OH SHIT WE DIDN'T FOLLOW THE 300 PAGES OF INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO PROPERLY FORAGE FOR FOOD! I GUESS WE GET SICK AND SHIT OURSELVES!".
>>96781251Funnily enough I actually really enjoyed the hexcrawling in ToA, though my DM made sure that every single hex had something happen in it, even if it was just as minor as "you saw a bird, it was pretty".
