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Hey all, my group is starting book three now and I'm looking for ways to simplify/streamline the exploration process. It seems to be a dull spot for my players, they would much rather go to a spot on a map and investigate than fill in blank hexes. Any suggestions for simplifying this?
I was thinking about giving the option to hire explorers with BP. Has anyone done anything similar? Right now, I'm thinking of giving them the map with just the hex type information on it and letting them chose where to go. Hidden sites will still be hidden until they discover them.
If this has been mentioned in a pervious thread, please linkify.
I did something fairly similar and asked how many hexes they wanted explored and then halved that number for the costing in terms of BP. It comes out a little on the high side, but their kingdom was truly ridiculous and made back the cost within about a month I seem to recall.
I kept the hidden hexes still hidden, but any major encounters and the like were foreshadowed so that they knew something was there, and mentioned that there might be hidden encounters that the explorers didn't notice, so they didn't get away from it scot free.
Let me know what you figure out
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You could ask your players to tell you their plan for each exploration trip ("We intend to go to hex 4E, then 4D, 4C, 4B, 4A, then come back home") and you roll for encounters for the whole trip, and fast-forward to interesting locations. "Okay, you spend X time getting there and find nothing of interest in 4E or 4D, other than a spectacular waterfall and fishing hole in 4D. That takes us to the 25th of Erastil. Sometime in the late-morning while exploring 4C, you notice..."
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You could ask your players to tell you their plan for each exploration trip ("We intend to go to hex 4E, then 4D, 4C, 4B, 4A, then come back home") and you roll for encounters for the whole trip, and fast-forward to interesting locations. "Okay, you spend X time getting there and find nothing of interest in 4E or 4D, other than a spectacular waterfall and fishing hole in 4D. That takes us to the 25th of Erastil. Sometime in the late-morning while exploring 4C, you notice..."
We've been doing it that way, I just want to get rid of most of the random encounters right off the bat. If they knew what the lay of the land was, they could just go to the places they wanted to go to and skip the rest. Already, the group is about a level ahead of where they should be due to the random critter XP.
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You could ask your players to tell you their plan for each exploration trip ("We intend to go to hex 4E, then 4D, 4C, 4B, 4A, then come back home") and you roll for encounters for the whole trip, and fast-forward to interesting locations. "Okay, you spend X time getting there and find nothing of interest in 4E or 4D, other than a spectacular waterfall and fishing hole in 4D. That takes us to the 25th of Erastil. Sometime in the late-morning while exploring 4C, you notice..."We've been doing it that way, I just want to get rid of most of the random encounters right off the bat. If they knew what the lay of the land was, they could just go to the places they wanted to go to and skip the rest. Already, the group is about a level ahead of where they should be due to the random critter XP.
Thinking about it more, I'll probably have the Narthropple Expedition and a batch of guards offer to come along with the PCs and do the "exploring" after the PCs have blazed the trail. I'll work out a BP cost to do so, probably 1 per 5 or 10 hexes. This will let the party get to where they want to go without having to spend an entire day to map out each hexes (which sounds very "un-noble" to me).