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".
>>96777749Hexcrawl style play fell out of favor for Campaign style play in 2e when Campaign Settings became a major seller. Hexcrawling is for randomly generating a world. Campaign settings and Modules are very different worlds to inhabit. 4e's points of light setting should have been a hex crawl and Planescape should mark different versions of material worlds - those Storied and those Hex'd People wanted to inhabit Faerun or Toriel or Oerth
>>96780454>i dont get the hate for theater kids.It's because they are never interested in any game mechanics or any sort of icky math. They really just want to write a bad TV show and act it out. The worst case scenarios, you get guys trying to do full on Shakespeare style acting (poorly) in the middle of what should have been a 2 minute scene+roll and turning it into a good 40 minutes.
>>96781236i am sorry for your creative bankruptcy. Emergent storytelling elements like random encounters arent boring in a system where you just curbstomp anything thrown your way that isnt the juiced up bbeg specifically tailored as the antagonist by the dm.I hate american comics. Why would i play a thinly veiled super hero comics storyline but its in fantasy gotham. Fucking dnd drones.Adventure has natural hazards and tackling them is fun. If you like your stupid brainless fun go on and enjoy your slop
>>96781729but they are. I have seen them express real interest for narrative mechanics or rules that help/allow for them to do cool shit. They just dont care about procedural mechanics like in osr games or powerwankery mechanics like those found in modern dnd. Yeah, they dont really care about math and i feel that this is the reason why they love dice pool systems, but what is the problem.Unless you resort to playing their systems you wont interact with them at a table. They just have fun in a different way.Hating people for having fun the wrong way is really something you should grow out off by your mid 20s at the latest. 5e kids on the other hand are mostly irredeemable and they have the highest chance of polluting your games
>>96782323>I have seen them express real interest for narrative mechanics or rules that help/allow for them to do cool shit. They just dont care about procedural mechanics like in osr games or powerwankery mechanics like those found in modern dnd. Yeah, they dont really care about math and i feel that this is the reason why they love dice pool systems, but what is the problem.That literally IS the problem. Every theater kid I've ever played with wants to "write" the story, not let it evolve organically out of the rules, physics, and otherwise the math of the game. If the theater kid is in the middle of the battle and says "Oh yeah, I got a COOL MANEUVER, I want to throw my bottle of acid on this pillar so that it collapses on the enemy!" and you tell them "Well, that pillar has 40 HP and a hardness of 10, and your acid vial does an average of ~8 damage," they look at you like you killed a puppy in front of them. All because they refuse to actually learn the real rules of the game that sets up the world their character lives in, and want to copy retarded stunts they saw in a movie one time to feel clever in an undeserved way.That's why they gravitate towards all these narrativist games. All of them are basically "roll a d6 and then decide how you ~feel~ about that." They're not real games, and these people aren't TRYING to play games, which is why nothing they produce ever feels like a game. It feels like a backdrop for their improve acting class.>Hating people for having fun the wrong way...This is a retarded statement that shows you don't really know what you are talking about. You can absolutely perfect the craft of any hobby, even playing games, and to do that means you need to realize what maximizes the value out of the hobby vs what doesn't. If I see someone playing a game incorrectly, and then steadfastly refusing corrections because "It makes me feel like I win when I take out all the rules that make me feel bad," then yeah, they're "having fun" wrong.
>>96777749this shitty bean counting has never resulted in anything even remotely interesting so the people who actually play games instead of just fantasizing about them removed it
>>96782522>No, no, my mechanics are a REAL game, their mechanics don't make a REAL game.People like you are so tiresome.
>>96782544>People like you are so tiresome.I imagine being on the wrong side constantly must be exceptionally tiring for you, yes.
>>96782565>No, my subjective taste is objectively right! STOP ENJOYING THINGS I DON'T LIKE! WAAAAAAAAH!This is you. This is what you sound like.
>>96782522so they are wrong because they want to play games with less realistic mechanics and you presume that there is an objectively correct way to play games and having fun doesnt matter if you re doing it wronganon, thanks for existing. it has been a seriously long time since i ve met an authentic honest to god tg retard like we re back in 2014.i dont have to explain to you that narrativist games arent what you describe and you have an opinion informed from anecdotes and memes from tg, not reality.
>>96779833Or maybe it stupid like you.
>>96782522This is equally a problem for sim players though. They'll balk at the 1-in-20 chance to automatically succeed at anything, despite the game being mechanically fine-tuned around that larger than life probability. "I should be able to kill him, he's pinned under me and I'm literally stabbing him in the neck", well sorry jimmy but that's an Attack and it only deals 1d6 damage to his 12 remaining HP, if this was real life he's dead but this is Golarion. >they're not real games because they have improvThe reality is that rpgs are always going to have a modicum of play pretend to them, even the most procedural of jttrpgs. You can't escape the gradient, which makes any "not real game" statements purely a matter of taste. You are, objectively, wrong.
>>96782589>so they are wrong because they want to play games with less realistic mechanics and you presume that there is an objectively correct way to play games and having fun doesnt matter if you re doing it wrongYes. They don't want to play games, they want to write TV shows. It's like you read absolutely nothing I said.
>>96782694no they dont.. they just like different games. those are games as well anon. wtf are you on about?
>>96782694Generally the players don't write the adventures, they play a role in something the gamemaster came up with. This is not writing fiction.
>>96782692yeah you can kill people that way in Brp, in gurps in traveller, etc just not in dnd
>>96782692>>they're not real games because they have improvYou would almost be correct here with your spiel, if you hadn't completely misrepresented it and attacked that strawman. The "games" theater kids play ARE improve, not "have elements of" improve. Even if we take the bullshit you said about the gradiant as fact, they have clearly crossed over a line where the work they engage with or produce are clearly thinks people can point at as improve and say "This is improve.">>96782706Pedantically correct and wholly uninteresting and uninformative. A "slot machine" is "technically" a "game" depending on the definitions used. Should we validate a slot machine as an equal to TTRPGs?>Well you could take a slot machine and compare it to dice and make a me-No no no, that's not a slot machine any longer. I mean the full stack of a slot machine with nothing added or detracted from it. Is that equal to a TTRPG?>>96782707>What are metacurrancies?If you don't study why they are wrong, you don't understand what to do right.
>>96782736>WAAAAAH WAAAAAH I SAID STOP LIKING WHAT I DON'T LIKE WAAAAAH WAAAAAH!
>>96782775I accept your concession.
>>96782820Literal npc talk for "I have an indefensible position, and I am a retard."
>>96782827If it's so indefensible, you should be able to successfully destroy it without misrepresenting it or resorting to ad hominem.
>>96782870>you should be able to easily prove to me that I'm wrong!>motivated reasoning? defense mechanisms? dunning-kruger? whats that?>he didn't convince me that I'm wrong, so I'm right! :^)
>>96782870Your argument is "my subjective taste is actually objective fact." It's not hard to argue that that is flawed thinking. Your entire argument is "no, only games that I say are games are actually games."
>>96782931Your "subjective taste" leads you to doing things that are not to your taste though. Theater kids don't want to play a game and all the definitional connotations that come with that, they want to write TV shows. So instead of writing TV shows, they come to games, shit on them, then write their "own" games which are just improv acting prompts.>no, only games that I say are games are actually gamesGames are a specific things with specific requirements to entertain the notion of them being a game. That's why people are so easily able to hone in on certain things when playing games as flaws, such as "this video game is really just a movie." They understand intuitively what elements a game is made up of and when those elements include foreign substances.So, absolutely yes, unless you want to square the circle of a slot machine being equal to a TTRPG in concept, then there are "games" out there that are not games and you simply have to contend with that.
>>96782711You rarely find coup-de-grace mechanics outside of sim games, precisely because it makes for a shitty game but a good reflection of reality.>>96782736>they have clearly crossed over a lineNo they haven't, lol. A game that contains more improv than mechanics is still a game. Even pure play pretend falls under that category, for example "let's have a game of cowboys and injuns". If you want to be purist about the term, you might as well disregard rpgs as a whole because they're not boardgames. They inherently have a degree of creative freedom to them, you're just not happy with games that hit a threshold you're not personally comfortable with. Also it's *improv, an abbreviation of improvise. There's no e.
>>96780755>, it just doesn't organize it into a handy and simple procedure like a hexcrawl doesSo let me get this straight:Hexcrawl games teach you how to do things your own way, right?And even if you HAVE THE FUCKING RULES FOR HEXCRAWL, you can't use it, because it's not in a pre-made, pre-packed MRE ration?Way to fuck yourself right in the ass with a rebar rod, faggot.
