Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1013545Well, if I remember right the article in Strategic Review was 'Solo Dungeon Adventures'.  Its primary purpose was not random dungeon creation, but to allow solitaire play.

All we used from Outdoor Survival was the map.

EPT didn't have a random underworld generator, I'm not sure if Phil ever wrote one later.

Thanks. That is pretty much what I figured would be. And yeah its a solo dungeon gen system that Gary wrote.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1013588I think that is a perfect illustration of the sort of failure of imagination that holds people back. Your post could have been written about dungeons by changing one or two words, and the ecosystem of detailed dungeons and games about exploring them has to make up 90 % of the hobby.  A treatment of outdoor environments that works in this way is totally doable, and would be awesome.

The difference is dungeons tend to be narrow and constrained and have a theme and a densely packed set of elements to interact with on a focused time scale.

With the outdoors, you're just wandering around wherever running into who knows what, or just empty space for days, while you tick off resources. You can stock it with encounters, and I totally like the idea, but then it's not any different than dungeons as you said, at which point what's so special about outdoors.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1013575That's because it's: 1) a LOT of work, and 2) hard to make interesting. How exactly do you narrate that sort of thing? And each day? Often it turns out to just be repeating the same thing over and over.

GM: "You travel for the day. It is night."
Players: "OK, we make camp, mark off rations..."

...repeat five days in a row.

Any referee who is that fucking bad should feel so bad they burn their game materials and never play again.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1013619The difference is dungeons tend to be narrow and constrained and have a theme and a densely packed set of elements to interact with on a focused time scale.

With the outdoors, you're just wandering around wherever running into who knows what, or just empty space for days, while you tick off resources. You can stock it with encounters, and I totally like the idea, but then it's not any different than dungeons as you said, at which point what's so special about outdoors.

Shitty referees are a problem, have always been a problem, and will always be a problem.

The solution is don't be a shitty referee.

Quote from: Omega;1013484A question mainly for Gronan and Chirine ba kal.

2: Did early Tekumel have any random tunnel gen systems?

No, not that we ever saw. Nothing in his files, either. (I looked, for you.) He normally had something to hand; on more then a few occasions, he'd simply walk us through some place like the Red Fort that he'd visited. He had a lifetime of memories to draw upon, and never seemed to feel the need to roll on a random table for any of his locations that we visited.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1013588I think that is a perfect illustration of the sort of failure of imagination that holds people back. Your post could have been written about dungeons by changing one or two words, and the ecosystem of detailed dungeons and games about exploring them has to make up 90 % of the hobby.  A treatment of outdoor environments that works in this way is totally doable, and would be awesome.

Treating the outdoors as a dungeon can work very well, but for some reason rarely features in D&D. I think the outdoors part of B7 Horror on the Hill is one case that comes close, but the best examples are not from RPGs at all but related games, eg Fighting Fantasy gamebooks did a great job (The Forest of Doom, the Shamutanti Hills) and the boardgame Descent's Outdoor tiles match its dungeon tiles.

This is quite different from hex crawling structure, it's much more like using a nodes & lines design to create a slightly abstracted 'dungeon' environment via branching wilderness forest or hill paths, or streams etc.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1013575That's because it's: 1) a LOT of work, and 2) hard to make interesting. How exactly do you narrate that sort of thing? And each day? Often it turns out to just be repeating the same thing over and over.

GM: "You travel for the day. It is night."
Players: "OK, we make camp, mark off rations..."

...repeat five days in a row.

Adventure in Middle Earth does it right. The specific are too welded to Middle Earth but the general idea can be applied to any Fantasy RPG.

Basically the length of the journey and how wild the region being traveled in are used to generated anywhere between one or six events. The events have specific challenges in them but they are general enough that you easily riff off them to fit the specific circumstances of the journey.

You have a embarkation roll to see how well the Journey gets going, then the events, and finally this culminates in a arrival rolls to see how it ends. All the tables are evenly split between good results and bad results.

I found this methodology to be way better than any type of periodic encounter rolls. I can decide when exactly the events occurs along the journey it improves the pacing a lot. It straightforward to roll up (four tables one of which tells you how many events to roll) and very flexible.

Quote from: Krimson;1013606In Campaign Cartographer, hex maps aren't that hard to make.

Nor with Inkscape and my Hex Crawl Mapping Kit And they both free.

Quote from: estar;1013672Adventure in Middle Earth does it right. The specific are too welded to Middle Earth but the general idea can be applied to any Fantasy RPG.

Basically the length of the journey and how wild the region being traveled in are used to generated anywhere between one or six events. The events have specific challenges in them but they are general enough that you easily riff off them to fit the specific circumstances of the journey.

You have a embarkation roll to see how well the Journey gets going, then the events, and finally this culminates in a arrival rolls to see how it ends. All the tables are evenly split between good results and bad results.

I found this methodology to be way better than any type of periodic encounter rolls. I can decide when exactly the events occurs along the journey it improves the pacing a lot. It straightforward to roll up (four tables one of which tells you how many events to roll) and very flexible.

But then it's not really outdoor exploration, wouldn't you agree? It's more like you're on a road trip from point A to Z and skipping to the highlights, rather than a hex by hex crawl where you meander around to map out the environment.

Not that I dislike either mode of play.

Quote from: Madprofessor;1013581I think it's less the work, and more that it is hard to make environmental challenges interesting, such as food, fatigue, exposure, terrain, etc.  However, dungeon adventures also often ignore environmental challenges, and are more a series of point to point interconnected encounters and options for movement with encounters, plots, factions and so on.  I remember long ago, our wilderness adventures being much the same, except with trails and roads rather than dungeon corridors. It works great. X1 Isle of Dread is kind of a case in point. In our case, Larsedangly is right, we dropped that style of wilderness play long ago and have not revisited, I'm not sure exactly why.

I think there is also a bit of the factor that what makes a wilderness adventure different from just a very large dungeon is (to a lesser or greater degree) those situational things and skill-based things that OSR gaming (usually reasonably) prefers not to have hard and fast rules for, and/or wants the situational modifiers and resolutions to dominate. Random event tables or DM's tools sections might help you come up with the scenario like "the PCs have wandered into a what they thought was a gentle valley, but it slowly becomes obvious that it is more of a steep, rough ravine where they can backtrack and skirt it, adding days to their travel time, or navigate steep slopes, leading to a rocky crag which they will have to climb (and challenging to be sure that monsters do not show up during the ascent)," but unless you want to do something like the 4th edition skill-challenges system, what else can a generation system provide to help show how to resolve the situation? Modules like Isle of Dread can give good examples, but other than a random terrain type table, I'm not sure what GM tools will help in a situation where it really is about an imaginative GM creating scenarios and imaginative players coming up with solutions.

Quote from: Gronan of SimmeryaAny referee who is that fucking bad should feel so bad they burn their game materials and never play again.
..
Shitty referees are a problem, have always been a problem, and will always be a problem.

The solution is don't be a shitty referee.

My general reaction to this is that you can't start out good at the game, and those people who are already good at the game barely need game rules at all, much less anything we could help the OP create. However, in this instance, 'just be a good GM' is really the only way to do this.

Quote from: mAcular Chaotic;1013689But then it's not really outdoor exploration, wouldn't you agree? It's more like you're on a road trip from point A to Z and skipping to the highlights, rather than a hex by hex crawl where you meander around to map out the environment.

You not skipping anything if there is named locale or feature along the route it will be encountered. The events represent the random shit that that happens during the journey. Otherwise you it just "You pass through 20 miles of woods without incident and camp for the night."

If the Woodland Hall happens to be within line of sight 5 miles into that journey than it would be "You break camp and journey travel for about two hours. To the east you see rising out of the woods Woodland Hall on top of a hill about 1 mile away down a path."

If the journey is truly aimless or a exploration of the unknown then you set its length equal to the amount of supplies the party is carrying and generate the events accordingly. So if the part has a fortnight of supplies and you roll four events. You have two weeks and the size of the map to play with to figure when to best trigger them.

And the events themselves are stuff like weather, unexpected obstacles (like fallen tress, landslides, etc), and opportunity to hunt, etc. Encountering a creature or other NPCs is just one of the 20 options that could occur. Quite flexible in how they can be implemented.

I wish there were some examples of this kind of thing. Either a stream, or a live play, or something. It's easier to grasp when seeing it in action.

Quote from: Omega;1013613Depends. Alot of space themed RPGs are essentially outdoor hex crawls. Occasionally with some spaceship exploration. some post apoc RPGs as well. Alot of walking the wastelands and ruins.

Dragon Storm as I've noted before has no dungeons. It is 99% hex crawl with an occasional passing through some ruins which arent mapped out. Managing your food and water is very important.

Id say the idea is very alive and well. Same with city-centric campaigns. Its just that there is alot of dungroncrawlers.

What's 'Dragon Storm'? I've never heard of it.

Quote from: Larsdangly;1013707What's 'Dragon Storm'? I've never heard of it.

It was the first hybrid of CCG and RPG. I designed and footed the bill for some of the cards way back. Its a full blown RPG, but it uses cards instead. Around 2000 it had moved to a non-CCG format. The game was prediminantly a hexcrawl. Though Susan and Mark, the creators, laid it out in a grid. I laid mine out in a hex pattern. Like this.



As noted you had to keep track of food and water each day of travel and skills like hunting were important as getting lost was fairly common.

Unfortunately as I note in my review way back. It got saddles with an RPGA like guild that ended up alienating fans, and it had alot of fans, and the game declined.

But yeah. Hexcrawler RPG.

DragonStorm was very innovative, I really had fun with it when it first came out. Defenitely worth going back and re-reading (I had not heard that it evolved away from the CCG aspect).
Also, the Adventure in Middle Earth definitely has something good going with "pre-rolling" the list of encounters and allowing the GM to weave them in on the fly.

When I was experimenting with hexcrawling, I pre-rolled a list of encounters for each Area/Group-of-Similar-Terrain-Types. As the PCs traveled through various areas, they would get the "normal" Random Encounter tests as given in the 0D&D/1e books, but instead of then having to roll on a table and maybe another table, and then again for % in lair, etc, to determine the "encounter" (burning valuable table time).... I would just use the one I had pre-rolled at the top of the list and crossed it off.