Hexcrawling with Outdoor Survival rules

[Deleted]

I'm slowly airing out some old sketches for house rules I'll be compiling into my Fantasyland campaign. Today: playing Outdoor Survival for your hexcrawls.

These have been half-playtested, so any comments would be highly appreciated!


MOVEMENT
In U&WA unit/character types are given strategic movement rates on the hexmap in terms of hexes covered per day. Certain terrain types reduce movement rate to various degrees. The golden gauge is 3 hexes per day for characters on foot.

In Outdoor Survival characters are given a daily allowance of movement points (6 to start), and spend points to enter certain types of terrain:




FOOD AND WATER
Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t give any rules for tracking food usage, or what happens if you actually don't have any. Outdoor Survival does, since that’s basically all the game is about. Each character has a Life Level Index Chart, with Water Index boxes and Food Index boxes. Characters who don’t have food or water that day move one box down on the appropriate index, and if the index says ‘Lose x Life Levels’ then they have to move down that many life levels (shown at the bottom of the chart):




Losing Life Levels in OS means you get fewer movement points per day. Once you get to Levl ‘L’, you’re basically sitting against the stump of a tree, waiting to die or be rescued, whichever happens first.

USING THE OUTDOOR SURVIVAL LIFE LEVEL CHART IN OD&D
Each PC gets a Life Level Chart. and keeps track of days without food and water just as in OS. At full health, all characters have 6 movement points, just as in OS, and spend them to move around the map as in OS. If you want to keep the movement rates strictly in keeping with U&WA (i.e., 3 hexes a day on foot), then simply double the point cost to enter each type of hex.

Upon losing Life Levels, two things happen:
1. Daily movement points decrease, as in OS.
2. Certain OD&D penalties manifest, as shown in the table below.

Life Level To-Hit Rolls Saving Throws Max Move Rate

A – – full (12”)
B-C – -1 full (12”)
D-E -1 -1 light (9”)
F-G -1 -2 light (9”)
H-I -2 -2 encumbered (6”)
J-K   -2 -3 encumbered (6”)
L-O -3 -3 heavy (3”)

BUT WHAT ABOUT CHARACTERS ON HORSEBACK, AND CREATURES WITH VARYING MOVEMENT RATES?
I have rules for these somewhere that take care of any theoretical movement rate (basically, 12" move = 6 daily movement points, and the conversion is scaled up and down from there), but I have to dig them up and give them a critical eye again.

Also, it's possible to make custom Life Index Charts to reflect each PC's individual Constitution, by adding more Food and Water boxes in between each Life Level loss. You can keep it simple and just have 3 types of Life Index Charts—one each for characters with poor, average and strong Constitution scores—or you can have one type of card for each possible CON score, by adding/subtracting a box somewhere for each score above or below 11.

[Deleted]

Linking to the thread on this topic at the OD&D74 boards: odd74.proboards.com/post/181500/thread

@starbeard said:

I've finally gotten around to finishing up some Life Level Index Charts for D&D.

In the end, rather than making one LLI chart for every CON score between 3-18, or even one chart for every CON score band in B/X, I decided to stick to the CON range in the LBBs (3-6 | 7-14 | 15-18), since that's what I use anyway.

To reflect low or high CON, the method I used before was to add or subtract food/water boxes, so that characters with higher CON could go more days before losing life levels. I recently decided to change this: now the boxes stay exactly the same, but CON affects how many life levels are lost at each interval. The overall results on survivability don't change much (or at all in some cases), but I thought this way was easier to handle for several reasons. For one thing, it makes converting LLI charts from one to another much easier. It also should help in keeping track of things, since I figure most parties will be eating or starving together, rather than staggering their life losses.

Here are my Outdoor Survival Life Level Index Charts, redesigned for Dungeons & Dragons (A4 format). I've attached the pdf, and for those who don't want to download it, there's a jpeg version below. The next step would be to design a combined LLIC + Character Sheet, the size of half a letter/A4 page.

Attachments:

OSDD Life Level Index.pdf (137.51 KB)

[Deleted]

Not bad! I don't remember if Gary tracked that using those rules, but there is no reason not to. Do you want to incorporate level somehow?

[hengest]

I am in awe of this thread and don't feel I can contribute, but I will say that I like the idea of starving / dying of exhaustion as something fully outside of character level. You get enough from level in surviving combat -- let this be an example of "the king and pawns go back in the same box". Just IMO.

Edit: I know this could be taken to an extreme, but I think of hit points as HIT points...

[robkuntz]

Nope! We used active judgment regarding food and water consumption. We also composed a system for movement on/off new OSMaps as extensions. The latter is revealed in part on my upcoming DVD collection, in fact, but really needs to be explained in full sometime. One might also ask what Arneson did as he too used the OS Map.

[Deleted]

I had assumed that Gygax used what's basically in U&WA, and applied common sense regarding food and water. The U&WA rules have a lot in common with OS, including the same basic chances for getting lost, types of terrain and movement costs, etc., but I don't know if that meant he was literally pulling ideas out of OS. My guess is it all would've looked plain as pie to anyone who was wargaming at the time. It'd be very interesting to hear how Arneson handled wandering around on the OS board.

I've thought about incorporating level, but in the end I decided to ignore it and see how it goes (honestly, not many PCs have ever made it to higher levels in my games anyway, for better or worse). I like the idea of the wilderness being the same for all characters, regardless of level. Poor outdoorsmanship will get you killed, no matter how tough you are.

I picture Conan as being just as hardy outdoors at level 1 as he would be at level 9, and its his Constitution that gives him his barbarian umph. However, gaining levels would still make him more skillful in the wilderness, in particular by making hunting a lot easier (all those attacks!). And as spellcasters gain spell slots they'll automatically become more roadworthy by turning into the camp's resident chuckwagon cook, conjuring up tasteless biscuits and sludge coffee for the rest of the cowpokes.

[robkuntz]

Hi Starbeard. To re-emphasize, Gary and I both created the system that we used, as the outdoor was only utilized after I became co-DM. In fact, i was the one organizing outdoor adventures to judge Gary's PCs in our shared campaign and I continued outdoor adventures for Greyhawk due to the players having climbed in levels from dungeon encounters, this while the DMing duties fell upon me (solely) and because Gary was concentrating on TSR/Writing:. See this link: lakegenevaoriginalrpg.blogspot.fr/2013/04/the-first-living-campaign.html

How Arneson ordered hex encounters is described in the FFC.

Cheers!

[Deleted]

Many thanks, Rob, as usual that really puts it all into a clearer perspective. I'll have to dig out my FFC and re-read the part about wilderness encounters, it's been awhile.

Out of curiosity, were you using the Outdoor Survival board right from the beginning, or were there ever adventures with other boards or maps during that early period? Was there ever an 'official' transition to a more permanent map for Greyhawk and El Raja Key? And was the idea to use the OS board introduced through Arneson's game, independently, or was it just basic wargaming knowledge for people to pilfer it whenever generic terrain was needed? Really, I wouldn't be surprised if it was commonly pulled out whenever someone needed standard hex terrain: the board is high quality, it was easy to get a hold of, and after a session or two the game itself would probably get shelved anyway.

Sorry for all the questions! I just find all of the wilderness stuff from the Lake Geneva days and the emerging campaign environment very inspiring.

[hengest]

This thread does continue to be inspiring. I am following with interest.

Reminds me of two things:

1) the spoken intro to "Tales from the Darkside" from the 80s:

Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality.
But...there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real,
but not as brightly lit... a darkside. (Thanks to Wikipedia for the text and italics)

Anyone remember this?  With any fondness?  I was a little kid, so it made a big impression on me.

2) The quotes that I can't find about Finnegans Wake being the night version of Ulysses, and how of course things make less sense at night.  I never got a lot from FW and less from U, but it's a cute idea.  Hexcrawl (day) -- dungeons (night).  (Of course, days of overland travel will involve night, too...right, right...)

[Admin Pete]

Love the "Tales from the Darkside" 

[captaincrumbcake]

I appreciate the thought behind this.
The one thing I might add/offer to the discussion is the X-factor. X being, magic!

Assuming that a party , out crawling through the wilderness, is above the standard dungeon levels (1-3), then the accessibility of spells from clerics (especially), magic users and (finally) druids, will greatly influence a party's progress and sustainability.

Haste (See M&M p.26) will enhance a group's move rate.
Purify food & water (as above, p.31) will enable a group to partake of just about any water source or carcass lying about without fear of disease.
Create Water (p.33) solves a lot of issues. (A single level 6 Bishop can keep a party of a dozen & its horses, in water every day.)

Other spells are available that will make the hex-crawl experience far less threatening. But simply the latter two above can keep dying of thirst and hunger a non-issue.

Clearly, mid-to upper level characters will have the advantage in wilderness exploration. Which is why, iir, low levels were usually restricted to dungeon play until they got more advanced.

[Deleted]

Yeah, magic is a big factor. On the one hand, back when I played around with earlier versions of this I found cleric types preferred to be stingy with the purify and create spells, in favour of 'more useful' spells in case they got into trouble with monsters, and I've never really incorporated druids into OD&D. Still, even then it became evident very quickly that clerics very quickly become game breakers for wilderness travel. I don't really want that to be the case, so some curtailing is necessary.

The most basic way I can see to do that is to be stingier with spell interpretation:

• Purify becomes purify food OR water, and requires the food/water to be of the amount and type normally needed. Death cap mushrooms can't be purified, because they aren't 'poisoned food', they're naturally poisonous. Carcasses also would have to be foraged for, in which case the party might as well just forage for food that's already good. 
  
• The create food and create water spells become very powerful once they've already been around for a couple of levels. I might just have to nix the part where they double power every level—if you want to make twice as much food, cast the spell twice. Either way, the sustenance will disappear if not consumed within an hour.
  
• A few spells probably don't need restricting. Wind walk from Greyhawk is extremely useful for getting around (it lasts a full day), but the cleric can only take one person with him. Teleport only works on the caster and can be very dangerous, and a haste spell will only last for half an hour, at most adding, say, 5% to daily movement, probably not enough to make a difference at this scale unless there's a collection of magic-users desperate enough to waste all of their spell slots keeping it cast all day.
• Druid PCs would just have to be rare or unavailable. Even a single low-level druid would allow a party to outright ignore most, if not all, environmental adversities.

Another option is to make spell memorization in the wilderness much more difficult. I've already played around with this idea in a few different ways, and usually like the results. Here's one version I never got around to testing before my game got stalled: I might tweak this a bit and try it out next time I get a chance to start the game again, hopefully in a couple of months.

[robkuntz]

Not all wilderness is supposed to be travelled in, really. This is abstracted in OS and even more so in D&D. I live in the mountains of Corsica and you just don't want to just lightly go out there, even provisioned or informed. Whole teams of experienced mountain climbers have died here, so can one imagine inexperienced "adventurers" in a fantasy setting treating going into such a clime predicated by game movement speeds (OS) and food and water alone? Nope. So in the abstraction, at least in my case, OS and U&WA serve as a base only. There are just some places in My world, and in Greyhawk, that are inaccessible except by x-tra normal means or by other guidelines not incorporated into what is readily apparent in the "game sense".

@starbeard : I will answer your other questions as posed up thread when I finish writing 1,500 words I have tasked myself with today.

[Deleted]

Mount Washington, NH, is a US park and people die there on a yearly basis. It can be 70 and sunny when you set out from the bottom and by the time you reach the top it's a blizzard.

[robkuntz]

Yep. That's how six died in the mtns. of Corsica. They were warned by a party descending that the weather was drastically changing and ignored the warning.

[robkuntz]

May 2, 2016 19:53:41 GMT -5 @starbeard said:

Many thanks, Rob, as usual that really puts it all into a clearer perspective. I'll have to dig out my FFC and re-read the part about wilderness encounters, it's been awhile.

Out of curiosity, were you using the Outdoor Survival board right from the beginning, or were there ever adventures with other boards or maps during that early period? Was there ever an 'official' transition to a more permanent map for Greyhawk and El Raja Key? And was the idea to use the OS board introduced through Arneson's game, independently, or was it just basic wargaming knowledge for people to pilfer it whenever generic terrain was needed? Really, I wouldn't be surprised if it was commonly pulled out whenever someone needed standard hex terrain: the board is high quality, it was easy to get a hold of, and after a session or two the game itself would probably get shelved anyway.

Sorry for all the questions! I just find all of the wilderness stuff from the Lake Geneva days and the emerging campaign environment very inspiring.

Starbeard asked:

"Out of curiosity, were you using the Outdoor Survival board right from the beginning…"

Yes. As I noted, however. One of the first outdoor adventures was me judging Gary in the "El Raja Key" environs. He rose in level fast and caught up with Robilar, etc. in level in the GH campaign (after we combined, then called the "Shared Campaign")

"…or were there ever adventures with other boards or maps during that early period?"

Planar maps yes. Created by me mostly (Demon World, Fomalhaut, Lost City of the Elders, etc); but for strict material realm stuff, no. We used the OS map but also see hereafter…

"Was there ever an 'official' transition to a more permanent map for Greyhawk and El Raja Key?"

Not a transition, but there was an area map (8x11 landscape view), color, based off of Arneson's initial C&C Society map. This was used by both Gary and I for expanding world reasons, but did not have a mileage/inch measure. This was used for the WoG boxed set but with modifications. Some of those removed place names I still retain as noted on my DVD forthcoming.

Kalibruhn's map was created late 1974 early 1975; up until then I was using the OS map but then transitioned to my world map. El Raja Key was my castle (thus, as with Greyhawk, it became attached to the campaign name (a misnomer, but I had not yet started crafting the world in whole until as noted above)).

"And was the idea to use the OS board introduced through Arneson's game, independently, or was it just basic wargaming knowledge for people to pilfer it whenever generic terrain was needed?"

Yep. Through Arneson.

[Deleted]

I hand-drew a 17 x 22 inch map of Conan's Hyborian Age and hand drew a staggered square overlay with 1" squares. A city, and one square around a city, was "civilized land," as were certain major roads, etc. Off the civilized land we used the Outdoor Survival map.

[robkuntz]

There's nothing civilized about the Hyborian Age... But staggered squares are cool and not often used anymore as an alternative to the hex.

[Deleted]

Easier to hand draw a staggered square than a hex.

Man, did we do a lot of work back then. If you wanted it, you had to do it yourself... no computers, no printers... sheesh.

[Deleted]

Of course there's nothing civilized about the Hyborian Age, that's the point!

I should have underscored my point, which was that there was "tamed" outdoors land around cities and roads that people could travel (except for stray bandits and the like), and "wilderness" where I used the Wilderness encounter tables. I have encountered a considerable number of people who told about repeatedly getting first level parties wiped out by outdoor monsters in the mile between the town and the dungeon, and have had to point out many times that "outdoors" is not the same as "wilderness." This is an example of how I made the distinction.

[robkuntz]

"outdoors" is not the same as "wilderness." Unless you are in FR's Waterdeep where right outside the city are bands of ogres, etc. That the city is 100,000 souls and yet within a mile of it ANY monster could exist in such a system is, well, fantastic in its own right...

[robkuntz]

May 4, 2016 9:18:14 GMT -5 @gronanofsimmerya said:

Easier to hand draw a staggered square than a hex.

Man, did we do a lot of work back then. If you wanted it, you had to do it yourself... no computers, no printers... sheesh.

Yeah.  But we learned things that others did not and thus can define things that others cannot; but yet we can still leverage today's or yesterday's tech in combinations, or separately, because of this.  As Heinz Foerster said:  "Always create more choices"... (paraphrase)

[bestialwarlust]

Even though I work with computers for a living in the IT industry I still draw my maps by hand. I find it's faster than trying to learn a mapping program.

[robkuntz]

May 4, 2016 10:37:22 GMT -5 bestialwarlust said:

Even though I work with computers for a living in the IT industry I still draw my maps by hand. I find it's faster than trying to learn a mapping program.

Yep!  Hand drawing a map speeds right along through the ability to make instant erasures and changes.  Very open and intuitive interface system the Mind + Eye + Hand.  I usually make copious notes, outlines, diagrams and illustrations as well for my written works (my current BOOK has over 250 pages 11 x 17 hand written notes, diagrams and such).  All of this becomes preserved in readily accessible forms (at least for me, takes me a second to hold two pages side-by-side, but 30 seconds just to boot the computer to get at those same files, and this becomes even more unwieldy if I start comparing, say, 6 pieces at once, etc), which allows me to easily sense the progression/digression points (or departures points that may have been missed/not understood then).  

[robkuntz]

I fear we've strayed a bit OT (I get -1 exalt). Now... back to SB's hex crawling...

[Deleted]

I hand draw too. I'm apparently not that bad with drafting maps on the computer, and have been asked to do a map or three for colleagues in the humanities, but when I'm gaming the only time I head to the computer first is if I'm drafting up a very quick and dirty hexagonal map in Hexographer and don't care what it looks like. Anything else and it's just quicker and more intuitive to do by hand. I have the basics of an idea, and instantly I'm doodling it out, and the very act of doodling helps refine the ideas and I doodle some more. The whole becomes a creative feedback cycle. Much more difficult to get that kind of spontaneity with any graphics program.

[Deleted]

May 3, 2016 11:14:45 GMT -5 robkuntz said:

Yep. That's how six died in the mtns. of Corsica. They were warned by a party descending that the weather was drastically changing and ignored the warning.

Weather and poor terrain are definitely two of the big unsung villains of hexcrawling. Even comparatively 'easy' mountain ranges like the San Gabriels in California kill experienced hikers every year during the fall and winter months. The Mt Baldy trails will occasionally get a 45º slope, but honestly the vast majority of it's family weekend hike stuff. Still, hikers rigged up with snow climbing safety gear still manage to fall to their deaths every once in a while.

On a map, Death Valley looks more or less like a straight line North-South between two low mountain ridges. In between is flat, flat, flat. You'd think it was impossible to get lost in there: if you don't know where you are, just look in either direction and walk toward the end where it looks like the mountains stop soonest. And yet, people die out there every year because they think they can't get lost—and many of them are in cars with GPS systems. Their GPS gets a bad signal and sends them down one wrong road, or they look at a map and figure they can cut across the valley from one track to another, and they never find their way back out of the desert.

Once you've experienced complete exposure to natural weather for even just a whole day, whether it's rain, heat or cold, you develop an appreciation for how quickly things can go south.

[Deleted]

Thanks for those answers, robkuntz! I had always wondered if you ever played any outdoor type adventures before adopting the OS board, and how long OS stuck around before 'upgrading' to a more tailor made wilderness.

I agree that some terrain should just be impassable outside of particular circumstances. I treat all OS mountains as hills unless they've got clear mountainous peaks, and those ones are impassable without a trail and/or climbing gear. Even then, they can only be entered or exited on 1-2 faces, usually along the eastern side. The only reason to go up a mountain is to find something on the mountain itself, because the only way down is back the way you came.

I do the same for forests, with more leniency. Large groups just can't travel through them in any meaningful way, and even a small group like a party of PCs will have to find a path or a guide, or else their movement will be extremely slow and with frequent saves vs getting lost.

For weather I usually just apply my own judgement. For me, I don't really think more is necessary: I'm no expert at it, but I've camped out in enough different types of weather to have a basic understanding of what can go wrong. Every once in a while I try writing up some OS-style weather rules, but I've never really liked the end result much.

[robkuntz]

Yes. All very good. Since I have been living in mountains (and on a very weather-active cape no less) I have new respect for the combination of the two. I have considered sculpting a specific set of rules regarding same (yet another project to add to the immense heap that I have). I believe that separate books for different terrain types, done correctly so that the individual world in which they integrate would stay at the fore, would be most useful.

[Vile Traveller]

Even though I'm a professional landscape architect I still draw my maps by hand (mind you, I use AutoCAD and SketchUp for spaceships). Photoshop is best reserved for making hand-drawn maps look better, I feel. But let me just say that I have nothing but respect for today's computer artists; all of my cover artists have done their work mainly electronically (although I believe some of them start out with a more-or-less scribbly hand sketch). Look at Ganbat Badamkhand's stuff, for example:



But maps, I like hand-drawn. Hand-drawing hex-paper ... very therapeutic, now that I think back to my first Traveller subsectors!

Oh, wait ...