Hey folks, for this post I want to talk about some thoughts I have about game design, and particularly about some mechanics that used to exist (or so I've heard) in Dungeons and Dragons that have fallen out of favor over time. I'm going to primarily look at this through the lens of encounter balancing and the "Adventuring Day" from the DMG, and then I'm going to talk about why I, as a DM who has only ever played or run D&D 5e, think that these mechanics are actually really cool, and deserve to be played with more.
Recently, thanks to some wonderful articles and rules over at The Alexandrian, I've been experimenting with Hexcrawls as a mode of play for Dungeons and Dragons 5e. This journey was spurred by a post I saw in a D&D community in Reddit lamenting that Hex and Dungeon crawls have fallen out of fashion as a mode of play over the last couple of decades. I only started playing D&D around 2020, so those old modes of play were pretty foreign to me. For those who don't know, a hexcrawl is a mode of play in which the party is traveling through or exploring a wilderness environment. It's played on a hex map, and the group moves from hex to hex rolling for random encounters, and potentially finding locations in each hex which can spur further encounters and exploration within a single hex.
The takeaway from these posts (aside from introductions to the mechanics themselves) has been that a lot of important game mechanics have disappeared over the years. There are different ways this shows up in game, but one example that I always come back to is the often maligned "Adventuring Day" found in the Dungeon Masters Guide. For a standard adventuring day, the party is expected to experience six encounters that will force them to expend resources. This is somewhat impossible to work into the more narrative focused mode of play that many people my age associate with D&D.
Some might say "that's an issue of perception then, if this mode of play is better, people should just be playing the game right", but I think it's fair to say that Wizards of the Coast has done nothing to push back on the changing perception of their flagship game. For thousands of people, D&D isn't "a TTRPG where you fight monsters, roleplay, and go on quests", it's "a collaborative storytelling game where you roleplay, tell stories, and encounter various challenges". I'm not saying either of those perceptions is wrong. There are elements of the latter that are, in all honesty, much better than just "fight monsters do quests", but what's important to note is that most of the mechanical challenges built into Dungeons and Dragons as a game system are reliant on the assumption that you'll be going on quests, and fighting monsters.
If we go into the game expecting "we will follow a plotline, save the day in the process, and do a lot of RP in the meantime", it becomes hard to stretch your suspension of disbelief far enough that fighting several dozen people in a day makes sense, especially at lower levels. Why not just go back home and sleep overnight? If there are six encounters worth of wolves roaming the roads around here, how does civilization function? These and other questions make it difficult for new players and DMs (myself as a new DM included) to reach the point that the game's actual mechanics start to have an impact on the narrative.
We fight one or two groups of enemies, rescue the lost child, and then we head back home without having felt mechanically challenged. It can certainly still be fun to play pretend as wizards and knights, but without that aspect of mechanical challenge, we're not experiencing a lot of the ways that D&D as a game excels. If every combat is solved by the use of everyone's once-a-day abilities, and then we make camp for the night, the game can only work as a vehicle for narrative. There's no danger because the most powerful abilities make a fight balanced according to the rules fairly easy to get through.
Before I get back to the point of this post (Hexcrawls, in case you've forgotten), I'd like to talk about some of the proposed solutions, and why for me they fall a little flat.
First: pump up the difficulty. If you're going to have one or two encounters per day, make each one a life or death struggle. This certainly can work, but it has the downside that short rests are still rarely (if ever) engaged with, and they make classes like Warlocks demonstrably weaker. If every caster is blowing their hardest hitting spells in every fight, the Warlock's ability to get those slots back on a short rest is underwhelming.
Second: make long rests a scarcer resource. Gritty realism, an optional rule in the DMG does something to accomplish this by making long rests take a full week, and short rests take a full eight hours. While a lot of people are fans of this solution, to me it feels about as good/bad as pumping up the difficulty. While it's somewhat less mechanically intrusive, and still leaves Warlocks with their stand-out ability, I think it changes the tone of the game. The pace of in-game time slows down, downtime becomes an expectation for long rests, and unless you're going to integrate those more long-term activities into your regular loop of gameplay, we're back to asking questions that break immersion. Why, if I'm just sitting in town for a week, can't I do X? Is my character really forced to sleep for a week straight just because they expended some spell slots?
Of the two options, I prefer to pump up the difficulty. Especially at low levels, it can bring a lot of that "sense of danger" back to the game, but it does so by giving players more stuff to swing at and kill, which they tend to like. Of course, more enemies means combat can slow down, but there are plenty of solutions to this problem (all enemies are grouped and groups act on one initiative, homebrewed rules for minions, prerolling or using averages, etc.).
What does all of this have to do with hex (or dungeon) crawling? According to the things I've read from players of older editions, the answer is that "how do we have enough encounters" has been a solved problem for decades, and the answer is some kind of "crawl" as a mode of play. I'll take each type in turn and explain why I like them, but the general idea is that crawls create resource scarcity, and by their nature answer a lot of the immersion questions that narrative-focused play can raise.
In a dungeon crawl, resting at all is difficult and potentially dangerous. If a random encounter might happen every 30-60 minutes, you're risking up to 16 encounters to even TRY taking a long rest, and that's assuming you can find a suitable place to rest without leaving the dungeon. On top of that, the fact that there are so many encounters, and that you're in an environment which will have static encounters and non-combat encounters means that even going through a small number of rooms will have you easily reaching towards six encounters. Add in the assumption that "just leaving" will lead to the dungeon's enemies restocking, and suddenly the game has a purpose: we're here to get treasure (maybe a specific item), and get out before we run out of torches, food, and HP. There's tension, if the group hears a large enemy approaching, rather than immediately deciding that it's a fight to the death, they might decide that running is the only way they'll have enough resources to survive this dungeon and get their loot.
Hexcrawls, on the other hand, spread action out over the course of many days, but do so in a way that makes a scarcity of long rests feel much more natural. If a troll shows up in the middle of the night, or a group of wolves, or you can't find a suitable location to make camp, not having a long rest makes intuitive sense. Using Justin Alexandrian's rules as my guide, my players were making encounter checks a minimum of once every four in-game hours. With a 25% chance of an encounter on each check, they certainly weren't encountering something every day, but especially once they started taking actions to increase the number of checks and scout the area around them, they were finding enemies and other encounters frequently enough to keep everything tense and interesting.
I don't have a neat conclusion to these stories, both dungeon crawls and hex crawls are tools that I now plan to integrate into my normal portfolio, and I plan to run at least a few campaigns explicitly focused on hexcrawls as a mode of play without pre-planned plots. It's a lot of fun both for me and the players, and beyond that it feels more natural and balanced than anything I've been able to pre-plan without these tools. I'm sure I'll post updates and continued coverage of this mode of play, but for now, that's all I've got to say.
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