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Anonymous10/17/25, 23:24No.96777749
Why did hexcrawling rules in D&D disappear? Looking at the 3.5e handbooks all you get is travel time in different terrain and different speeds which can easily be mapped to a hexgrid but there are no instructions for the DM on how to do this. Did they just assume that everyone had legacy knowledge about how to run this from having played in old AD&D, B/X and BECMI campaigns? If so it’s pretty dumb, someone who has never played D&D before will have no way of knowing how to run a hexcrawl and people seemed to forget about them until recently with OSR-stuff influencing RPGs from outside that scene.
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Anon10/17/25, 23:24No.96777757
Hexcrawling is best experienced with pre-2e rulesets, yeah.
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Anon10/17/25, 23:49No.96777919
Easier to sell books if you make people think the only way to play is stringing together a bunch of self-contained modules, rather than the game teaching you how to make things for yourself.
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Anon10/18/25, 00:33No.96778169
Honestly? Video games and general rise of impatience. Back in the 80s, the ONLY way to get anything like a hexcrawl was to join a hexcrawl where the players wanted and the DM had privilege to enforce strict time keeping rules and force players to manually wander the maze then the overworld back to the town while accounting for ever penny and second spent along the way.Now that video games do this or things like it way faster while also shinier, players and DMs alike don't really have the patience for it, so they sort of just start handwaving all of it. I'm very hard pressed these days to find even the "tougher" DMs not just handwaving a lot of the rules, like "if you don't end the game in town, your characters are lost in the wilderness!" turns into "Oh, it's 11pm? Okay you guys make it back out of the dungeon and head to town with no trouble. Let me add up your experience and I'll tell you what you got."
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Anon10/18/25, 01:53No.96778674
The style of game that most people play has moved away from hex crawling since probably the early eighties. Some of the Dragonlance modules have hexcrawls that are railroads that just punish the players if they go the "wrong" way. The hobby moved more towards the fun house dungeon and "encounter design" and away from more freeform, sandbox play that hex crawling kind of requires.
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Its possible they the 3e devs were the minority of people who liked, for lack of better term, plot or story focused games, but 3rd edition was so insanely popular that it kind of shifted dungeon fantasy from exploration being an important pillar to being a most vestigial pillar.
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Anon10/18/25, 05:45No.96779723
Tracking overland travel like that takes away from the awesome 4 hour long combat encounter you could be having where you get a chance to show off the build you made based upon combining aspects from 27 different splat books
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Anon10/18/25, 06:36No.96779934
This has been said before but it was mainly three things.
First it was D&D and other systems getting lazy and just brushing past it and often guessing you use old systems for hexcrawling over expecting to add it to the each system themselves.
Second was them just "fast tracking" everything and basically it just PCs having encounters along the way. Especially with all the "on rails" campaigns being made.
Third was more and more DMs being lazy and unable to make fun hexcrawls. Especially compared to videogames making exploration, crafting, etc. So people have a raised expectation and most games would failed to meet that and people started to remove and skip past that part.
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Anon10/18/25, 06:57No.96779992
with the mass introduction of comic nerds to the hobby in the early 80s because they wanted to play super heroes just like anon above, only in a medieval game and this is the way a large part of the demographic skewed to the point of the hexcrawling getting forgotten and left by the wayside.
3rd edition is inexcusable though for not providing 3-5 more pages in the dmg just giving a simple hexcrawling structure and a dungeon crawling one copy pasted from adnd or becmi because as you said they have all the rules about random encounters, traveling speeds depending on terrain type and difficulty etc.
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Anon10/18/25, 07:00No.96780004
because they were always boring dogshit and no one used them even when they were included
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Anon10/18/25, 07:00No.96780006
Because D&D arose from wargaming and while people at the start found just dungeon crawling to be a natural and satisfying activity and didn't even think to try much else people, including Gygax himself, eventually had the idea that in a game with a game master who could arbitrate the result of any and every action taken by the other players and who was in charge of everything in the entire game universe apart from the handful of PCs, doing things other than just wandering around dungeons would be fun.That led to the hex crawling you asked about, and then people did other stuff too. Then a lot of people found that other stuff to be more rewarding than just dungeon or hex crawling and it became a less important thing to include.
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Anon10/18/25, 07:59No.96780170
>What do you mean "us four"? As far as I can see, there are only three men h-
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Anon10/18/25, 10:47No.96780639
>Why is modern DnD not doing things TSR games did?
No clue. Total mystery
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Anon10/18/25, 10:49No.96780646
>itt: never games flexing how hardcore hexcrawl is, unlike pozzed nu-RPGs, even if they have no fucking clue how it works in practice and said nu-RPGs being a baseline for longer than they are alive
Another quality thread on /tg/
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Anon10/18/25, 13:19No.96781251
It is my clear impression that most players simply don't enjoy hexcrawling or similar rules that put emphasis on travelling instead of the adventure locations. Back when I still ran 5e, my Tomb of Annihilation campaign almost fell apart because I made travelling through, and surviving in, the jungle a big deal, but the players just didn't like it. In other games and other systems it has been mostly the same. The one big (and unsurprising) exception is the OSR community.It's also hard to find a reasonable level of travelling. For example, I enjoy hexcrawling but I think I'd get bored playing Forbidden Lands. On the other hand, teleporting from location to location is retarded. Balancing people's different tolerances is hard. I'm currently running what is essentially point-crawl ("Your desired location is x hexes away, that's z rations, y random encounters," etc. Sometimes I just give them specific "random" encounters if the flavor fits or if I want to introduce new rumors or whatever).I think travelling is an absolutely essential part of games that focus on exploration.
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Anon10/18/25, 13:32No.96781315
Hexcrawl style play fell out of favor for Campaign style play in 2e when Campaign Settings became a major seller. Hexcrawling is for randomly generating a world. Campaign settings and Modules are very different worlds to inhabit. 4e's points of light setting should have been a hex crawl and Planescape should mark different versions of material worlds - those Storied and those Hex'dPeople wanted to inhabit Faerun or Toriel or Oerth
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Anon10/18/25, 17:40No.96782541
this shitty bean counting has never resulted in anything even remotely interesting so the people who actually play games instead of just fantasizing about them removed it
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Anon10/19/25, 07:52No.96787522
Pastel colors don't make good graphs