Reflections on a Hex Crawl

Something different today, a break from the ongoing Guide to Goblins series, prompted by wrapping up my long-running, 2+ year campaign back on June 6th. In the aftermath of that campaign, I've been thinking a lot about what worked and what did not work. So consider this a bit of a campaign retrospective, a glimpse into my home campaign, rather than a history article or something in my normal genre of post. Sorry to disrupt your regular flow of history, reviews, and targeted GM advice (and, recently, goblins) – consider this a more general set of musings on GMing.

Some basic concept layout before jumping in: as you might suspect from the theme of this blog, I usually try to run campaigns around historical eras or events. This campaign was a hex crawl based on exploring the frontier, inspired by the Wild West. The genre was a Western, and I was drawing both from Westerns as a genre piece and from the real history of the American West. I used D&D 5e as the system. The basic story is the classic Western railroad narrative: the party was a survey team, mapping a course for a road out in the frontier, which in practice meant a hex crawl through the map.

Characters

The Good: Deep and Engaging PCs

I am blessed with truly some of the best players in the world, I'm convinced. The collection of PCs that my players came up with this time around was fantastic. By the end (after some deaths/players leaving their old PCs behind), we had a divination wizard seeking to start a cult out in the frontier, an Old World (fantasy Britain) young scholar seeking to learn about the cultures of the frontier, a character from a faraway culture to the south who had been chosen by a god that they did not particularly want to have been chosen by, and a goblin (the people already living in the frontier) who ultimately came to want to unite their people in a grand army to oppose the road being built.

Each of these characters was deeply rooted in different parts of the story and the themes of the world and, more specifically, the campaign – something I talked about the importance of in my Build Better Backstories post. Most particularly, the core theme for a lot of these characters was one shared by my campaign, by a lot of Western genre media, and by a lot of historical figures who wrote about the American West: the idea of becoming a new person and starting a new life.

We deal a lot with the connection between events and people in my campaigns. I've been setting campaigns in the same, persistent homebrew world for almost 8 years now, allowing me to reference myself and build a complexity to my world that I'd be hard-pressed to abandon. As a history teacher, I talk a lot about how historical figures are fundamentally shaped by their times and by foundational events. In history, you cannot fully appreciate the end of WW1 without knowing the history of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, for example. In other campaigns, I try to make sure I draw NPCs from backstories to show up in the campaign. Not here! Here, our PCs could try to escape their pasts and build new lives for themselves, rather than seeing the events of their pasts return and return.

The Great: Companions, or the Dreaded DMPC... done well?

This theme was echoed by the two NPCs who ended up traveling with the party for the majority of the campaign. One was a teenager running away from home to go on a grand adventure, and the other was a former assassin trying to start a non-violent life. The former actually could escape her past, and bounty hunters which initially plagued her dropped away as the party moved further from her hometown--truly creating a new life for herself. The latter experienced the difficulty of creating a new life, as she struggled with the violence inherent to both life in a frontier region and the violence commonly baked into D&D as a system.

Yet both of these characters were, in some ways, breaking one of the cardinal rules shared for DMs: you are not a player. You don't need a PC. The former assassin was with the party from Session 1. She had a complex emotional arc through the entire campaign, and was, in some ways, the emotional center of the campaign itself. She had one of the more explicit ties to the theme of building a new life, though I'd argue all of the PCs did in the campaign as well--just some less obviously than others. She had intense personal connections to two of the PCs that varied and evolved over the campaign (with the runaway teen having more complex dynamics with the other two, as they highlighted different focal topics of the campaign).

Were these DMPCs? The dreaded character who steals the PC spotlight and bogs down the game as the DM rolls against themselves in combat? I'd argue no, and from my players' reactions to these characters, I'd agree.

I'd definitely use this model of the combat-irrelevant, thematically resonant companion character again in a future campaign. Having a persistent companion really helped enrich the way that the PCs interacted with the world, as it made it more difficult to get into a bubble of their own morality.

The Bad: Not Enough NPCs/Recurring NPCs

The thing I wish I had done more of was provide more people for the PCs to cross paths with. I was focused on threats, making the world feel dangerous. This meant enemies and beasts and monsters. The people lived in towns that the party hopped between as they explored. Or, they were relevant for a half session--a farmer here, a merchant headed in the opposite direction there. There were only two short-term companions for the party: a scholar who hired the PCs to escort him, and then the son of the ex-assassin character who ultimately tried to kill her and was part of her narrative arc.

But ultimately, I wish that I had done more NPC travelers. It would have been more historical, as westward travelers often joined together in massive caravans that then would slowly break up as they headed to different end locations (especially true on the Oregon Trail). From a game perspective, the lack of people who would join the party for two or three sessions meant that my Major Companion NPCs were the only voices that the PCs ever got from the world. Everyone else was just someone in passing; having more short-term traveling companions would have meant better exposure to what people in the world thought about the PCs and their actions. As it stood, people mostly did not know who the PCs were and so could not comment on them.

It also would have been better for several PCs and their arcs. As I mentioned, one of the PCs was trying to start a cult: more short-term NPCs would have meant more potential recruits, which in turn would have meant more chances to expose the whole cult plotline at the table. Another PC, the goblin, should have experienced more of the fear and hostility that many people in the world felt about goblins--instead, that came from just one of the permanent companions, when it would have been better if it was a more major and consistent plot point.

Ultimately, it also cheapened the major villain of the campaign. I had brought in a friend to play the villain (a great trick I learned from a DM friend in college as a way to distinguish and enrich your antagonists), but ultimately, his real-life schedule got incredibly busy, and so that main villain just was absent for a big swath of the campaign. Having a solid 20 sessions with no appearance from the "BBEG" really weakened the campaign, and having more recurring NPCs (alternative recurring antagonists, as well as temporary or recurring traveling companions) would have helped center the campaign better.

The Focus / The Trouble of a Hex Crawl

The Bad: I Felt Like This Game Had No Plot

The problem of the vanished antagonist exacerbated a key problem that I think the genre of a hex crawl campaign has: there was really no plot. It is part of why this campaign lasted so long. There was nothing to use to "end" the story.

Now, I know that this is also a whole style of campaign. Some players and some GMs absolutely love a sprawling, sandbox style of play. This is by no means putting those players/GMs down; it is simply not my preferred vibe for a TTRPG. I like a strong narrative. There still can be a whole lot of player agency in a campaign with a strong driving force. Still, I (and, from my past campaigns, I'd say most of my players) prefer games where I as the GM have a plot in mind. Something more intense than "go exploring with surveying the road as an excuse." Typically, I try to build out an act structure, with each act having a slightly different tone, a different antagonist, and highlighting different themes. This campaign? Well, it felt very... same.

It did not help that I completely blew the pacing. We spent way too long in "Act 1," so by the time we were in the geographic zone of the world where I was planning to make a shift in theme and tone, everyone was starting to get tired. A player had to drop out because we'd spent a year and a half in Act 1, and in that time, new responsibilities in real life meant she couldn't keep playing in a regular campaign. My own more demanding new job meant that I struggled to keep up a weekly campaign, and we had to move to biweekly, sapping some of the campaign's energy and momentum. After 18 months of a campaign that felt very much routine and static rather than dynamic and evolving, I just did not have the energy to start a whole new 20-month act. So I cut and sliced and pared down "Act 2" as a geographic area, and I wrapped the whole thing up narratively without even introducing all the major NPCs I had planned from my early stages of pre-planning. This also did not help the feeling of a fairly aimless style of play.

In short, I think there are good ways to do hexcrawls. I think some GMs excel at making exciting and engaging open-world campaigns that do not have a strong plot driving force. That is not my style of GMing, and it wasn't even really the intended vibe of this campaign. It was just the intended style of Act 1, but Act 1 dragged on for so long that it became the dominant style of the whole campaign. And the campaign suffered for it.

And after a sprawling campaign like this coming on the heels of my previous, also long and sprawling campaign (that actually did have a much tighter plot, but was still an ambitious and sprawling storyline), I am so ready to run something that is tight, narrative, well-paced, structured, and like 5 sessions max.

The Good: This Game Had Themes

While this game was lacking in plot or aim, I do think this campaign was chock full of themes. I've already mentioned the theme of being able to build a new life and escape your past in the frontier. That idea of newness and rebirth, standing opposed to the idea of rebuilding what already exists, was major and came up repeatedly. Some towns and some NPCs believed in recreating the "Old World"--with all its inequities and problems and injustice, but also with its laws and justice and even its democracy at times (as the frontier is a frontier of a newly independent fantasy realm that had formed a republic). Others sought to use the freedom of the frontier to create something entirely new--which, often, created its own problems. Competing visions of the future, whether to look backward for inspiration or reject the past, whether it was even possible to move beyond who and what you were and the systems you were a part of; that's some thematic conflict.

Another key theme, somewhat related, was the idea of justice versus freedom. Freedom and liberty were represented by bandits and outlaws, on the one hand, who robbed the party in our very first session; on the other hand, some towns they visited were ruled with iron fists.

I could go on to talk about some of the other themes of the game, but these were the big ones, and in many ways, all the themes tied back to this idea of looking to the past for inspiration or trying to make something entirely new and better. I think that those themes were present, recognizable, and recurring in different forms. That thematic question worked and was a really interesting question to grapple with throughout the campaign in differing manifestations.

The System

The Good: D&D as it was designed

D&D is built to be a game of hex crawls, dungeon delves, and fighting a lot of encounters between long rests. I almost never run it that way, but I finally did with this campaign. It worked for the most part. While I still homebrewed a ton on top of the system, for once it felt like I was actually working with D&D rather than against it.

In fact, it is feeling D&D's bones actually work for me that has made me extra committed to playing a different system in my next campaign. It feels good when you have a system that is designed to do the style of campaign you are running. When long rests are a resource that is not easy to come by, when the party actually needs to track things like rations and encumbrance, the game works. Ensuring that they had enough food for their journeys may have felt like bookkeeping, but it also drove them to engage meaningfully with a town that was undergoing a famine; disrupting their access to food, putting them in danger of hunger, felt far more real than just saying "oh yeah, this town is in a famine... but you all are fine!"

So next time, when I want to run something that is not a combat-focused campaign of dungeon delving, or where resources are effectively unlimited, I will want a system designed for that. Because it feels better to be working with your system than against it every step of the way.

The Bad: D&D does not do survival

I know some GMs enjoy killing PCs. They even have TPKs. They enjoy making such a challenge that the PCs often fail. On the other hand, some GMs think that no PCs should ever die except in extraordinary circumstances because of player investment in their characters. I am somewhere in the middle; deaths should be impactful, but there also always should be a risk of death (particularly in D&D, a combat-focused game, because otherwise, you lose some of the stakes of combat).

I planned this campaign to be extra lethal. I integrated diseases from the fantastic Malady Codex series and built my own using their rules. (Definitely more on this later; at some point, probably a few months from now, I want to do a whole series on disease, coming at the question from a historical perspective as well as a game design one). Rests were limited to only safe town havens so that I could actually meet D&D's requisite combats per day metric. Requiring rations and water tracking meant that I intended to have PCs running the risk of starvation or dehydration. Nature itself would pose a threat, with tornados and landslides being a threat. My enemies would be ruthless, as the PCs fought against a harsh and unforgiving world. I even built a new death mechanic to replace saving throws that I intended to be more punishing--less of a death spiral, but with a higher chance for lethality.

And not a single PC died. Or, rather, one PC did, but only after the player had switched characters because they'd grown bored of their original idea, and so the death happened essentially off-screen (with the player's permission). People got diseases, absolutely, but none died. PCs came close to starvation and running out of food, but always managed to find, steal, or hunt enough to avoid dying. I knocked PCs out in combat, yes, got them below 0 HP, but our healer always managed to revive them (and here, the new death mechanic did not really help me; if anything, it hindered the lethality because it gave more opportunity for intervention – I'm not sharing the death mechanic's details because it did not work as intended). 0 deaths in my "far more highly lethal campaign" is disappointing! Not because I wanted to create a GM-Player antagonism, but simply because I had warned all the players beforehand that this would be more lethal than my usual games because of the genre. This was meant to be the Oregon Trail, with all the "you have died of dysentery" screens that the Oregon Trail entails. And with a grand total of 0 deaths for any cause, I definitely failed in creating that atmosphere of pervasive danger that should have been present on the frontier.

D&D 5e just has too many ways to cheat death, from spells to medicine checks to rests to pretty large HP pools. Maybe I was just being too nice, but the "wilderness survival" element of my hex crawl just did not work. If I were ever to try this sort of campaign again, despite the ways in which D&D worked for me this time, I'd try a different system to capture this missing piece of the puzzle; maybe Free League Publishing's Forbidden Lands.

The Verdict

This campaign was... ok. It's not the best game I've ever run, even if it is the game that has most fit with what D&D is "supposed to do" as a system. A lot of that was not the system's fault, unlike some of the things that have fallen flat in previous campaigns due to trying to shove D&D to be a different genre than it was designed for.

Instead, it was the fault of over-ambition, of trying to create a sprawling open-world sandbox game as Act 1 of some behemoth of a magnum opus campaign; and then, probably predictably, feeling burnt out after 2 years of the same story before getting into the shift into a more tightly focused Act 2. I am ready to run something small and tightly focused. In college, the school year schedule meant running 30-session campaigns with a tight three-act structure. I'm not looking quite for that level of dictated scheduling, but I am ready to run something that lasts under 12 months from start to finish. I'm tired of sprawling epics.

I am incredibly grateful to my players, whose characters and engagement with the world and themes of the campaign were the redeeming features of the campaign to me. When I felt burnt out and without a plot, my players carried us through sessions of just interpersonal character dynamics. Obviously, players are the key to any game--this is a collaborative medium after all--but particularly with this campaign, y'all really carried my investment in the campaign when I was ready to throw in the towel. Thank you for sticking it out!

Still, I'm ready to stop with the ambitious "type of campaign I don't normally run" thing. I'm going to get back to my wheelhouse as a GM--something with a strong narrative, a vaguely political or political-adjacent premise, and something that is not entirely open-ended.

Thanks for reading these retrospective musings! Next week, we're back to talking about goblins--specifically, we're diving into a common depiction of goblins as subterranean miners. Sorry for the diversion.