Today's post is about something I tried that didn't work. It was a cool idea in theory, but it didn't produce the results I wanted.
My basic idea was this: add a second dimension to hexcrawl terrain types. Rather than simply having plains, hills, forest, deserts, swamps and mountains you now have differing intensities of each. Forests become sparse forests, medium forests and dense forests.
I was hoping this would provide a bunch of extra descriptive variety while traversing the hexmap without adding any real noodly details to keep track of. One end of the scale is the most featureless, least difficult to traverse version of a terrain type and the other end of the scale is busy, intense, and difficult. You have three times as many types of hex but still only have to think about the same number of types of hex you were already using.
The problem ended up being that there were three times as many types of hex.
You see, I like a hexcrawl where the players can get lost. If you aren't actually exploring, aren't figuring things out on the fly then there isn't really much point in doing a hexcrawl. Being lost is a part of the experience that I want to create. Traversal itself being a challenge and the possibility of ending up somewhere totally unexpected are awesome and fun.
With a lot of different types of hex, it became too easy to pinpoint one's exact location on the map simply based on the visible surroundings. There was no being lost in the woods, because there are some sparse woods this way and some dense woods this way. There's now only one hex anywhere in the vicinity you could reasonably be in. It became completely trivial, which made the whole process feel like a waste of time.
I ended up throwing the whole idea out in favour of fairly bland hexes with spread-out points of interest to navigate between.
I guess the lesson to be learned here is somewhere between "keep it simple" and "make sure you playtest". If you don't, it's easy to get lost.
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