Point crawl or pointless crawl?

It's been a while, eh? I think I'm going to start using the term 'infrequent' for this blog, though I don't think it's ever been anything else.

I've been trying out different wilderness exploration mechanisms for a while. When I first started writing Treasured Possessions, a couple of years (and a bit) ago, there was a simple list of locations, four of each category such as "forest", "water", "construct", etc. and it worked fine for me. In fact, the whole basis of Langwick, the #Dungeon23 location I spent 2023 writing, was based on a 12-point map using exactly that chart.

Earlier this year, I took that table and some other generators and wrote Exploration Cycle, using mega-hexes rather than points. Each hex has a terrain type and also a number of points (1-4). I didn't explicitly say to join those points together, and I've never played it that way, but there was an idea in the back of my mind that it could look something like the hexes from Magic Realm.

Cut to a couple of weeks ago and I'm preparing for the first live play test of Treasured Possessions and I want to create the area around a village for the characters to explore. The mega-hexes from Exploration Cycle feel too big, they're for discovering whole landscapes so maybe I could revert to some kind of point crawl? But I also want to figure in the encounter clock I'm using now, so that random encounters are triggered after an amount of travel.

First draft: pick a card for each time you move, when the total is 28 or over (a card is an average value of 7, so this is roughly every fourth card), generate a random encounter and reset the clock. That seems fine, but I only have eight points on my map for the starter scenario, so there's not much chance of bumping into anything. At the same time, saying "draw two cards for every move" seems weird. I could reduce the total required, but my plan is that you do this when you are in hostile territory and if I do that now, it doesn't leave me much scope later on.

I saw a blog about dice-drop mechanisms a while ago, and I can't remember where I saw it (I looked, but no luck, if anyone can point me to it I'll put a link in, it was about a sci-fi game? EDIT: Found it at Skeleton Code Machine). The core mechanism was you drop your dice, where the dice land are the points and the number is what they are, but the difficulty/length of the route between the points is the sum of the two dice on the points. Wow. Putting to one side the multiple uses of one roll, which I love, this introduces the idea that not all routes are the same. Whether the number indicates distance, danger or some combination of both, routes can be different. If you go all out and show those number to the players, then they can also make choices about routes to arrive at a location. That's nice, it's like local knowledge. Maybe in some circumstances where they're not familiar with the landscape, they can learn those numbers by talking to the locals instead?

Second draft: you already draw a card for each point, to tell you the type of terrain, based on the terrain you are currently in. It's intended to build an environment as you play, and you shouldn't end up with desert/snow/lava type adjacent points. The table only uses the face values of cards, so why not use the suit to decide the number of encounter cards to draw when passing between them? Like this:

Suit	Spades	Hearts	Clubs	Diamonds
Number of encounter cards	1	2	3	4

That works, right? Some routes are more likely to lead to encounters than others, let's generate a map and see how it works out...

I like that, I've written features in some of the locations, rather than terrain types because I'm using it for a scenario, but I know that the ruin is in the forest, for example. There are choices about how to get to the caves from the grassland - go via the hills and you've got a total of four encounter cards to draw, but if you go via the swamp you'll draw six. We can think about what makes the route between the swamp and grassland more dangerous if we want to flesh out the mechanical effect.

It helps that my 365 project for 2024 is a set of encounter tables, one per day which equates to a 52 entry (deck of cards) table for each of the seven terrain types I'm using. As an encounter is triggered, I ask the players to draw a card and then look up on the encounter table. Of course, we're not quite 2/3 of the way through the year, so I skip ahead if the entry is blank until there is one filled in.

The other thing that I think helps, is that very few of the encounters I've written are of the "you are attacked by" variety. A lot are "this thing is here, what do you want to do?", whether that's an animal, creature, an opportunity to explore or an obstacle to overcome. If all your random events are an opportunity for combat, it kind of pushes your characters towards the murder-hobo route by subtly suggesting that everything is up for a fight but your peace-making skills might stop it.

For the version in the updated rule book, I changed it to 1-3 cards, rather than 1-4. I think I prefer that, but time (and playing) will tell.

Feedback so far has been good, one player said that it gave a sense of choice in the route taken (there is an expanded map from the second game), which is exactly the sort of experience I was hoping to create.