[PF2e] Wilderness Travel

My players are currently in a hexploration mini-campaign¹ and that means wilderness travel. Now, I'm not crazy enthusiastic about Paizo's Hexploration rules as they did them in their Quest For The Frozen Flame adventure path. I find it a bit unclear on a number of issues that impede carefree implementation of the subsystem.²

So naturally I homebrewed a system which I like better, and I've included it here, for your enjoyment and shameless copying.

The Map

I'm using 3-mile hexes for my game. Why? Because 3 miles is what a human being can walk in an hour, about-ish. It is also, conveniently, approximately the distance to the horizon for a person of average height on a flat plain. Let me redirect you to this excellent blog by Mythlands espousing the many advantages of 3-mile hexes.

So, assuming a 8-hour travel day on an unimpeded path, the party could walk 8 hexes a day. Since every hex brings a chance for an encounter or a dungeon, this very naturally leads to a situation where there is more than one encounter per day. So using 3-mile hexes immediately solves another problem many Hexcrawls have where spellcasters can go nova in every encounter, greatly increasing their power.³

Traveling

That last line means to say that, if there is a road, it reduces travel time by 1 hour, to a minimum of 1 hour. E.g. a mountain hex with a road takes 2 hours to traverse instead of 3.

I'm not making any difference for overland speed because it feels needlessly complicated. The only thing I might do is to say that if the PC's are mounted, travel time on roads is halved and they could travel 2 hexes in one hour when on a hex that would take 1 hour to cross on foot. But we'll tackle that when we get there.

Exploring

When moving into a new hex, the PCs immediately see any features that are obvious, such as a castle on a hill towering over the surrounding lands, or a town that is on the road (Untrained Perception DC 10).

The PCs might then Explore the hex further, which costs as much time as it takes to traverse it. Exploring the hex might reveal hidden features.

Every PC who is actively exploring may participate in a Perception roll to discover hidden features. I mostly just use Simple DCs to establish how hard something is to find, but level-based works fine, too. If the PCs roll a critical success, give them a hint on how to safely enter the location, the dangers that lurk inside, the solution to a puzzle within, etc.

Random Encounters

I still do this the classic way of having a random encounter table for every terrain type, with or without road, and rolling on that for every hex to see if something happens there. But I'm starting to feel this is cumbersome, because it requires me to come up with a whole bunch of tables⁴ before I can even start rolling.

I'm wondering if I can't speed things up by rolling Number of Hexes Until Next Encounter (NoHUNE) instead. Like so:

And then a d12⁵ Hospitality roll:

Then as a GM I need only keep a few lists of Dangers per Terrain Type, a list of Friendly Encounter, and a list of RP/Skill Encounters. And I'll just cross off options as I use them.

Player Agency

Rolling for random encounters is interesting, but what I've always disliked about it is that it renders the PCs passive recipients of the gaming world. These are seasoned travelers, supposedly, but they keep running into one ambush after another? Nah.

So I'm stealing (and modifying) the distance-to-encounter idea from Merric's Musing (who in turn took it from The Lord of the Rings RPG) to give the PCs a bit more agency. They designate one of their characters as the Guide, who rolls a Survival Check to establish their number of Safe Travel Points for the day.

Safe Travel Points are a resource the players can use, like Hero Points but for Hexploration. During Hexploration, the PC's may spend STP in a number of ways:

• Ambush: when bumping into a Random Encounter, the party gets to ambush it, instead of the other way around (I let the PCs pick starting positions on the battle grid).
• Avoid: when bumping into a Random Encounter, the party can spend 1 STP to not engage with it.
• Identify: when bumping into a Random Encounter, I tell the PCs the approximate combat threat based on XP Budget (trivial, low, moderate, severe, extreme) or if it is a non-obvious friendly/RP encounter. They can then still choose to Ambush or Avoid if they have STP left.
• Scout: when Exploring a hex, increase the degree of success of the PCs Perception roll by one step.

I'm still rolling for Random Encounters, but now the players have a means of engaging with the results of those rolls, rather than just being subjected to them as they stumble along the path.

Sidebar: If you want to switch things around entirely, you could instead rank your random encounters on a "Difficulty to Avoid" scale, and use the result of the Guide's Survival check to see what kind of encounters they can get around for the rest of the traveling day.

E.g., a Guide who rolled a 24 on their Survival check (beating the Expert DC of 20) is able to avoid the ragtag bandits lurking in the woods (requires beating a Trained DC of 15) but not the Bebilith hunting the outskirts of the Cursed Temple (requires beating a Master DC of 30).

The downside of this would be that it is again static, giving the players agency over some encounters (if they happen to run into them) and no agency over others, whilst not giving them any resources to play with.

Concluding

So there you have it. My homebrew hexploration system. Hope it gets you anywhere. It's barely been playtested (just my own biweekly game) so if you happen to use it, drop me a message to let me know how it was for you.