Latest in my weekly review posts, but this one gets into questioning why this adventure was turned into a hexcrawl and if we wouldn’t benefit from more variety in OSR adventure formats.
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I suspect the change came about because a great many tables won’t run railroads. A linear adventure, even with the best of planned encounters and points of interest along the way, is still a railroad.
I wouldn’t touch it because I don’t want to have to do the work to change it to a form I’d actually use – that’s the designer’s job. I’m certainly not going to inflict a railroad on my table, either, so somebody has to do the work for it to not be a railroad, and I’m certainly not getting paid to do so.
I don’t care if it ends up a hex crawl or a pointcrawl or pathcrawl or depthcrawl or any other form of crawling structure. There has to be choices for the players – and information informing those choices – as to which way they want the PCs to go next. The choice could be between two destinations or five destinations along as the players have choices.
I have to agree with pladohsghost. Linear adventures are just bad game design, at least from my understanding. Especially in that example. What do we do if our characters cannot find a reasonable way to cross the bridge? Does the GM validate my unreasonable idea? Do we just wrap up the game since we can’t continue? And how would not be able to go around be justified? Is there a fissure that goes around the whole world and a single bridge to cross it?
Hexes and hexcrawl rules are an abstract way to resolve moving around a realistic space. Maybe we can find other ways to do this, although I find hexes to be perfectly serviceable, since they are so simple and allow players to focus on other things. But linear adventure definitely ain’t it.
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While I always chafe at linear adventure design, I think hex-crawls are often an unnecessary solution to a problem the designer isn’t interested in fixing. Hex-crawls have become an aesthetic trapping of the OSR especially in modern products. It’s ‘the thing to do’ to align your product with that scene, sort of like black and white art. I say this as someone who immediately ran a hex-crawl as my first OSR adventure, because how else was I going to provide a sandbox?
While I don’t know that the answer is to make this adventure linear, I think some adventures could do with just handwaving travel or not making a procedure of it altogether. Hex-crawls (and even point-crawls) are only interesting if travel is interesting. In a game like Mythic Bastionland, the hex-crawl generates the game’s events, so it absolutely is worth engaging with. If the meat of the game is found in the locations themselves and not really in the spaces between, the travel procedure falls flat.
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My personal preference, and the way I design things, is pointcrawls with actual player choice.
But, I think the point I’m trying to make is that we shouldn’t pretend there aren’t tables that are happy with linear adventures, and if that’s the type of game someone runs at their own table, that’s what they should publish. I don’t think they’re inherently bad or negative, just different from what I and many others in the OSR like. But there’s no rule saying you have to make it a hexcrawl if you’re publishing it for OSE.
This particular adventure could still use work even as a linear adventure, but it makes more sense in that form than as a hexcrawl.
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I agree with your post in general! Not every OSR adventure needs to be a hexcrawl. Not even every open-world, choice-heavy adventure needs to be a hexcrawl. And while my preference is not for linear adventures, I feel like I’ve read plenty of TSR-era modules that were very much linear. But, for the purpose of this post, I can think of one very good reason to make an adventure a hexcrawl instead of a point crawl—It’s easy to turn a hexcrawl into a pointcrawl, but not so much the other way around.
(I responded in slightly more detail, while going off on my own tangent, on my own blog)
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