No Empty Hexes

Continuing yesterday's conversation, let's just talk about how to best generate the wilderness.

I recognise that there are many who strongly resist the use of hexes, or any means that "parcels" the wilderness into areas ... but I must point out that with movement upon the earth's face, we've been subdividing the surface for the last 300 years.  Surveying has existed since the ancient Egyptians, but it didn't become common practice until the late 17th/early 18th centuries ... so it's right to think that for those in the so-called game world, anything other than measuring ground with chains to see who's farm is whose, or putting up markers, little subdivision of land takes place.  But this is all the hex is: a means of parcelling a large space of land so we can assign characteristics to it, and so that we can identify one parcel from another.  And so that our accounting of the land can apply to what character's can do or see in a day, those parcels have to be fairly small.

For those who still insist on creating maps in this century using pencil and paper, when there are far greater resources that are available, I understand that making a lot of "hexes" is demanding.  Squares are far easier, since they merely need a straight edge, and for best results, a T-square.  Draughting tools for making hexes are more complex and inconvenient.  Not for me, however.  I have "hex paper" on demand, as much as I want of it, so for things like this I find it very easy to apply.  Moreover, since a hex is more nearly like a circle than a square, the center point of any hex is equidistance from its bordering hexes, which cannot be said for the square.

All that is such a waste of time to say, because it convinces no one, but yeah ... I somehow feel before plunging into this that I should explain why I'm using hexes, and not straight lines.  Though why, I can't guess.

But okay, so, the players enter a hex.  Forgetting the hex's topographical and other details, I'll need to explain the point of adventuring in this fashion ... that is, what exploring accomplishes that a pre-fabricated adventure, or a dungeon, does not.  Forgive me if I descend into pedantry at this point, but the internet has plenty of ink and I do feel we need to fully grasp the game's structure beyond the nonsense storytelling/collaborative/lore and "epicness" jargon that we're spoonfed online.

The dungeon's function is to deliver experience and wealth into the party's possession, while presenting situations that are engaging and include a reasonable measure of risk.  This last stipulates that for the party entering, there is a high likelihood of success, better than one might obtain at a craps table; in fact, better than betting on red on a roulette wheel.  Were I to rate the odds, there ought to be a 20% chance that one character dies during the effort, 6% that two die and 1% that everyone dies.  But this doesn't include the possibility of someone losing an arm or a hand, beings struck blind, losing a valuable magic item, losing a considerable number of resources and, naturally, making an enemy that will continue to pursue the party until, in fact, someone is actually killed.

Worse odds than this and there's little reason for players to enter the dungeon.  It's just experience and coin, after all, which only goes so far as a motivation.  If players aren't entering dungeons, its either because they have no reasonable expectation of surviving as a group, OR, the demand for money in the game world isn't high enough to make the risk worthwhile.

Along the same lines, the wilderness ought also to exist to provide things the players want.  It's not there to look like a real world, it's not there as "flavour" and it's fucking useless if it's empty.  Each and every hex has to provide the players with something.  Otherwise, like a gun hanging on a wall in a play that never gets used, it shouldn't be there.

I feel this needs to be hammered upon, because the Gygaxian poison from the 70s continues to run rife through this culture.  Gygax, and most of the creators of his era, were lazy.  So lazy, in fact, that where it came to a game world, he and his intellectual kin kicked the can down the road by suggesting that the board from another game entirely be used to fill in the hole created by their laziness.  That game was Outdoor Survival.  Here's the map board that was suggested for use as the D&D "wilderness."

Apart from the extreme crippling incompetence of the era's proposal, something for which everyone attached to the original books ought to have apologised for the rest of their lives, please note how ungodly empty this map is.  This made sense for the Outdoor Survival game, which I've played ... though admittedly, it's just a longer, more dimensional version of playing the children's game Candyland.  And as I pointed out yesterday when I discussed the wilderness generation page in the original DMG, when Gygax proposed to randomly generate an outdoors, his system basically presents an even emptier version of the above.

There's no "game" here.  It delivers nothing into the hands of the players.  It is nothing more than an extremely boring obstacle between where the players are and where they want to be, "filled in" with random monster encounters which, by the original rules, are ridiculously deadly to players while putting nothing whatsoever into the player's pockets.  You enter the 1st level dungeon and expect to fight, at worst, 7-12 orcs with one HD, with an expectation of treasure.  Then, on the way home, as a random encounter, you're beset upon by 2-20 wolves with two HD, with jack shit.  Why would anyone ever enter the wilderness?

The very idea of the wilderness was poisoned from the beginning by such half-assery, accompanied by a steady resistance and laziness that declares the wilderness impractical or otherwise undesirable as an adventure environment.  As I sit to start creating a random generator, I have exactly zero resources, accumulated from over 50 years of D&D, to draw upon.  Oh, there were "attempts."  The infamous, massively incompetent "Wilderness Guide" of 1986, which did wake me up to things the game definitely needed, but which that rule book absolutely whiffed upon.  I've read and sometimes owned other so-called guides, mainly from 3rd edition, which provided a terrific degree of random shit, without any organisation applied to it.  Basically, when the party was in the desert, you could slap some "black sand" in front of them for, again, flavour.  But beyond a short paragraph description, there were no game rules or metrics attached to it, so in essence, it was painting the desert black.  Hands in the air, now: Worldbuilding!

Very well, what does the wilderness supply?  Well, it need not be the same things as a dungeon. After all, there are things that can't be found in a dungeon: food, for one thing, that the players can safely eat. Wood to make tools, fresh water to drink ... horses, and grass for them.  Places where houses and storerooms can be built, places where men-at-arms and supplies can be held at the ready. A safe place to sleep.

There are, I believe, four things that the wilderness supplies to players, which contribute deeply to the fabric of the game beyond the necessity of passing through: threat, supply, knowledge and deliverance.  Each covers a wide range of possibilities, which the wilderness designer, whether or not randomly generating a space, needs to be aware of.

Threat includes everything that makes the players feel unsafe.  No matter where they are in the game world, there are always threats; but this concept includes not only the threats themselves but the means by which the players protect themselves against those threats.  This includes, naturally, the monsters that are present in the hex — and here I'm arguing that every hex has monsters, always and without exception, though most of the time due to circumstance, the size of the hex and pure chance, the players are liable to pass through a hex without seeing one.  But this needs to be clear ... if the players go looking for a monster, they will find one ... at least, until that monster and others are "cleared out" of the hex.  Because finding a monster, and knowing one is there to find, is a bloody point of this game!  The value is in the monster's presence; the players knowing they'll find it, or them, whatever form it or they take.  It's having a reason to be there in the first place, since some of the monsters that can be found will, as with a dungeon, have treasure.  Hell, so far, "Grimstone Hollow" may only be this lair of these hobgoblins.  So far, there's nothing the players have found to indicate this is anything more than that. 

Where the players camp, how they camp, what equipment they bring along and what vigilance they adopt, these too are part of this hex's presence.  At no time can players be made to think that if they're moving through wilderness they're safe because a little piddly die roll has to come up a 1 in order to attack them.  That perception goes on the fire.  The players must be taught that preparation is what will keep them safe, not the odds.  Take this exchange:

Players:  We turn in.

DM:  You turn in?

Players: Yeah, it's dark, we're not travelling at night.  We make camp and we turn in.

DM:  O ... kay ...

Players:  What?

DM:  Nothing.  You turn in.  Got it.

It's my temptation as a DM to explain, um, maybe they better explain what preparations they take beyond "setting a guard," who can be feathered with nine arrows from the darkness as said watch stands next to the fire, in plain view, bored, getting warm.   Is it worth making an encampment?  Is it worth trying to find a place where their backs are against a stone wall, where there's a gap in the rocks that covers their front, where some kind of alarm exists to warn the watch upon falling asleep?  I don't know.  If the "monster" out there smells the party, they'll come and look.  They'll look and decide.  They might go away, they might stay.  But it shouldn't be a "random monster roll" that decides one way or the other.  It should be what the player's camp looks like.  It can be a die, but not that die.  Not one the players think they can count on.

Threats come from the terrain, too.  Slips, falls, maladies, bad weather, rain, dropped equipment, torn clothing, soiled or stolen food ... anything and everything that might happen in a wilderness is a threat.  These things too need to be accounted for.

Supply is king in this environment.  We're not entering a dungeon for an hour, we're crossing a considerable amount of land, during which time we need to sleep, rest, eat something and thus dwindle our resources.  And while the environment threatens that supply, it should also offer boons that help the players out.  A brook where it's practical to waste an hour or to and catch fish.  A berry patch.  A bee hive.  Naturally occuring salves that can be used to cure wounds, which can only be used here because they can't be feasibly stored.  Grazing animals, of course, that might be taken down with a lucky shot.  Their leather, though wet, can be dried out in a few hours to a day, and rinsed too if possible.  It can be used wet, though it's difficult to work with.

My sage abilities are designed to handle some of these problems, but suppose, like Arliss and Bertrand, that it's unlikely either has any scouting, foraging or hunting ability (they could take logistics, I suppose).  Even a dope can stumble into a deer, however; I know, because I've done it multiple times.  One time, I was just 8 feet from the deer when it stepped out from the wood next to me.  I didn't have a shot gun, I was fishing; it was June.  But the players always have weapons.  In a low-technological society, without guns, this sort of thing should be fairly common, just as it was moreso in Alberta in the 1960s and 70s than it is now.

Like with a threat, every hex ought to have something.  That doesn't mean it will be found; hell, it might be a gold mine, passed over and over with the players never knowing.  Specific resources have to be looked for, by persons who know how; but it's reasonable to assume that if I know how to hunt for mushrooms, and we're in a temperate deciduous forest, there are mushrooms to be found.

Knowledge is key to getting out.  Being able to cross a piece of land and find the tiny brook in it that leads to the creek, that leads out onto the plain.  Getting atop a hill to a viewpoint and being able to see the land two hexes away, to see if the hills keep going, or if perhaps there's the sign of a river below, or fields in the distance.  Seeing any distance in the wilderness is hard due to the terrain and vegetation, the weather and the height on which we stand.  Potentially, from a 200 ft. rise, I can see about 17 miles before the curve of the earth ... but the last third of that distance will be hazy and indistinct without aid (or even with, given the time period's technology).  The problem is, where 200 ft. rises occur, there are usually other such rises, and they get in the way.

Still, it gives a reason to climb out of the valley to see if this is a good place to look.  This means giving up the river-as-guide technique, where the river may lead a party on quite a merry chase before it reaches a civilised hex.

There are the various signs of life, too; things they leave behind: spoor, scents, kills, shucked skin, actual signs that say, "you've already entered our land, prepare to die," that sort of thing.  As players move through the land, they need to be told things that they can use to make intelligent decisions about where to go next.  It cannot just be a random choice of go left or go right.  They should regularly be given enough reason to believe that if they choose to go in this way, there's a better possibility of them finding their way out, or their way to whatever they're looking for.  And if using a random generator, this knowledge should adjust what does get encountered next, proving the legitimacy of the system.

Deliverance is, obviously key.  Somewhere out there, there are civilised people, with farms and things to sell, where there are taverns with beer and inns with semi-clean beds, at least a roof anyways, and something more to see than trees and rocks and rocks and trees and trees and rocks ... you know.  "Canada."

Desirably, by contriving these four guidelines to play, the wilderness ought to be constructed, even randomly, into a more intuitive, creative, meaningful place to adventure.  My personal feeling is that the environment ought to be as rich in combat and treasure as the dungeon, or perhaps there should be little difference between the two.