Advice needed: How to run PF2e outside of a Dungeon (Hexploration)

[Trashloot]

Hi,
Im about to start Kingmaker 2e and i don't know how to approach it. To me it feels like PF2e is the wrong game for this adventure path and i would really love to get your input on how you make the wilderness survival / exploration fun.

My issue is that PF2e has next to no ressource management. Food is super cheap, weighs almost nothing and can easily be found with subsist and forager. Water is similar but a bit trickier. You have infinite light. You quickly have no need to gather firewood and other survival necessities.
So how do i highlight that my players are crawling through the wilderness? (mechanically)

My other issue is that PF2e is designed in a way where you are always at peak strength. I was expecting some changes to the way healing works because infinite healing makes random encounters and hazards kind of pointless. The GM Core even says the following:

"PCs have many ways to heal themselves, so keep in mind that a damaging hazard
won’t always have a huge effect. They tend to work best if their activation might alert creatures in the area, lock the PCs out of an area, or cause a similar narrative setback beyond just damage or another condition easily removed outside of the pressure of combat."

But the AP uses random encounter like the AP was designed for a game whhere you recover slowly from damage.

And one last question: Am i crazy or is hexploration not compatible with exploration? Im so confused as to why exploration tracks time in hours while hexploration only tracks days. Maybe im overlooking something but there is also no good way to aproximate how many hours you spend in hexploration. Mechanics like the hustle action don't do anything for hexploration and im not really sure how i can use exploration actions during hexploration. Am i missing something ? Do you decide if you either use exploration or hexploration? Or is hexploration a different mode of play?

[Perses13]

I haven't run Kingmaker myself but have done hexploration stuff before.

Hexploration only tracks days because its meant to be a subsystem to handle days of travel. The rules compare choosing a hexploration activity to choosing a downtime activity, so yes its separate from the normal exploration rules.

Most of my experience has been that the party only gets one activity per day, and so there's no need to figure out how many hours in hexploration because it just takes the whole day (minus sleeping and rest time at camp of course). If you have multiple actions per day and get into a situation where you only spend one activity that day hexploring, just subtract half the time you'd normally give the party to explore that day. (For instance, if the party recons a hex and finds a dungeon, they'll switch from hexploration to normal exploration mode halfway through the day)

If the party got ambushed while traveling in hexploration, I'd also still ask them have what exploration activities they were doing (Defend, Search, etc.) as normal.

[demlin]

Hexploration: Yes you are correct. I'm using 8 hours for one day full of hexploration. If there's an encounter that takes longer than 10 minutes, I subtract an activity or more depending on how long PCs stay out. If you run it in Foundry, that's automated for you.

Survival: Long story short: it's not fun, don't track it. I've yet to encounter a mechanically great survival system. You want to get from one interesting PoI (Point of Interest) to the next one quickly.

Random Encounters: See them as an improv prompt. When I roll 6 Boggards, I'm thinking about how I can connect them to another PoI on the map or how it fits into the main storyline. If you are having trouble coming up with something on the spot, pre-roll them and make about 3 sentences of notes. Encounters at night can be deadly if you roll a medium encounter and no one notices it. I don't use hazards unless they are complex.

[Trashloot]

Thanks for the great answers so far :D.

On Hexploration: So it is meant to feel like you are switching from one game to another? Like when you leave the overworld map in an rpg and load the regional map? That feels a bit unimmersive but i guess i give it a try.

demlin wrote:

Survival: Long story short: it's not fun, don't track it. I've yet to encounter a mechanically great survival system. You want to get from one interesting PoI (Point of Interest) to the next one quickly.

I honestly like survival stuff like Forbidden Lands. But it also feels like such a shame to just ignore it. Survival is still a skill on our character sheets. If you ignore survival stuff, the survival skill is only used for tracking. And this would be a big blow to the class fantasy of Druids, Rangers and Barbarians.

I think i want to try and make survival matter.

[Perses13]

One thing I've always wanted to try is but haven't just because its a little more work is hiding the hexploration stuff from the players and just using it on the DM side to track things. Similar to how the Alexandrian talks about hiding hexes from the players in hexcrawls.

Because I agree with you that it feels more immersive to say "Alright so you want to travel there, it'll take you two days and then another two to find what you're looking for" than "Alright it takes you two hexploration activities to get there and another two to reconnoiter."

[demlin]

Hexploration ties into time tracking and traveling on the main map. You as a GM will need to set time limits for completing chapters. If players play efficiently they will have more downtime to craft and earn money. During kingdom turns, players will be able to build roads to make travelling quicker.

I use Survival a lot for recalling knowledge, traversal or in skill challenges. There are a lot of free hexes so you can add your own content easily

It's also used frequently in camping if you're going to use that subsystem