Behind the Scenes: Contemplating Hexcrawls and Pointcrawls for My Solo Games

Roleplaying games are a fascinating artifact that I hope survives for a long time. There are a lot of things that you can say about RPGs but I think the two I want to focus on right now are a pair of contradictory statements:

• Roleplaying games cut through the near infinite amount of abstraction presented by "real world" considerations by providing a framework that simulates a particular subset (usually combat and a few other adventurer subsystems). 
• Roleplaying games are an abstraction of "real world" considerations and not necessarily meant to represent any sort of 1-for-1 aspects and instead provide an escapist avenue beyond specificity. 

In other words, an RPG often takes an in-Universe reality and dissolves it to fluff text and a few abstract dice rolls and stats and then feeds this back into the in-Universe reality with the broad idea that anything outside this abstraction is in itself an abstraction. 

I am personally writing this like a college essay, by the way, because I am not sure if there is a better way to explain it. Maybe we can go with this. This IS not a cat:

That is a set of just a few quick shapes thrown together in Google Draw in under five minutes that represents the kind of "landmarks" we might associate with a cat  face: ears, whiskers, nose, mouth. It will not win any awards but at its core I think if I made that into an icon people might go "oh, that's a cat icon". It boils down the immense number of elements that go into an actual cat face (thousands of strands of fur, vast differences in eye color, whisker length, variations in bone and flesh structure, and so forth) into an abstraction that is in no way a cat face but which, in RPG terms, could be seen a rough "these elements" approach to describe a cat face in the way that STR, DEX, CON and so forth is a ludicrous way to describe a person but it also makes perfect sense in the context of RPGs. 

This kind of thought is what I have been giving over to how I might want to run hexcrawls. There are a lot of different flavors of abstraction but roughly speaking you see something like to represent, say, a mountain range ending at a forest with an old ruin on one side and then a small hamlet on the other side. 

It makes sense and in-Universe it can represent several sessions of fun. By several conventions, those hexes represent 5-mile or 6-mile constructions and each has one or so distinguishing features. There are arguments why this "6 mile" hex makes sense and in gameplay it is a good way to guarantee a certain story/plot-density. You can travel 2-3 hexes per day and so you get a few chunks of story per in-game day but you also get to travel some 100+ mile range to help things feel nice and epic. 

The problem is, that's as nonsense as my cat face above. Give or take a few half miles, this is roughly a six mile real world hex of Monte Sano State Park nearish my house in Huntsville, AL as snipped (kind of hastily, from Google Maps. 

In that 6 miles there is an entire state park. There are dozens of roads. Hundreds to thousands of houses. The park has dozens and dozens of miles of trails. There are shops and churches and schools. While this is, of course, a bit of a silly comparison because this is modern density it still shows that if you were take a dozen different parties and send them through that hex you have no reasonable reason to believe that any of them would ever crisscross. You can have entire towns and civilizations, there. Multiple dungeons could survive in that ecosystem. BUT, in that old school hex crawl, that would represent a single hex with a little mountain on it. And there are hex systems that consider 10- or 12-mile hexes to be the default. 

Without triple checking math, the area inside such a hexagon should be roughly 30 square miles. For another modern comparison, that is more landmass than Manhattan. Or, to stick to something a bit more Outdoors Survival, you could roughly consider Yellowstone National Park to be something like 10 to 12ish hexes by 9 to 10ish hexes. While I don't disagree that someone could hike across the park in 3 or 4 days (good weather permitting) it still fails to capture the true size of such a place. The sheer amount of things even a relatively wild place might contain. 

On the other hand, if you are mostly driving a story forward by key points then does it really matter that you are boiling it down roughly to six "hexagonal" directions around 6-mile segments and focusing only on one landmark per hex? Going back to the bullet list above, you basically get this compression

• A reasonable amount of distance to travel VS
• A reasonable amount of story to tell. 

Most other considerations about hex size are non-sense in the way that a dungeon as presented by a classic RPG scenario is beautiful nonsense. There are a surprising lack of real world examples of 20'x30' trapped rooms with 20-floors down to make way for a lich. We can gleefully understand the hex-crawl as simply a way of saying "This is the size of the page I want to use to write my story." 

What I am trying to work out is something that might emulate elements of a hex-crawl but also give the sort of flavor that a dungeon might when generated for solo play. As in, you have a certain density of movement but rather than it suddenly decompressing from 10' squares to 6 mile hexes it instead treats it roughly the same way as you might by gathering up certain "rooms" of varying sizes and shapes and they are connected by corridors and there are traps and hazards and occupants. 

Something like how Advanced Fighting Fantasy (and many others) use with a dice drop method... (taken from page 135 of AFF 2nd Edition):

The idea would be the start there with a twist of rolling more dice and removing 1s (1 = a null space where no paths or nor significant objects exist). 

• 2 = dead end
• 3 = a point along a path 
• 4 = a fork where a path diverges/converges
• 5 = a crossroads of 3-4 paths
• 6 = an area off any path but which itself has significance. 

I could shape that in a particular way by arranging things or the space to match my goal. A sheet of paper with an area drawn on it. Et cetera. 

Then, for each path I roll a second d6 to determine path difficulty with something like 1-3 = no difficulty while 4-5 is some and 6 is notable. 

Combine this with other methods to map out terrain shifts and significant points in more of a traditional hex map style system and end up with 2-3 "maps" that can be overlaid to create a story rich area that is variable as needed (long distances the relative scale shifts) and has the idea of being zoomed in and out (any given point can be looked at closer or the whole generated map can be part of a large map).