Player-Facing Pointcrawl Part 2: Theory and Practice
Introduction
Hello, Gentle Reader! It's time to take up quill and ink and return to the task of creating Player-Facing Pointcrawls. If you have no idea what I am talking about, you can read part 1 here.
Quite a bit of digital ink has been spilled on the topic of pointcrawls since I wrote the first entry in this series, probably most famously Sachagoat's continuation of their Reinventing the Wilderness series. I have some thoughts on some of the things in this series, and I had a chance to put my player-facing pointcrawl theories to the test when I ran a Black Wyrm of Brandonsford game for some kids at the school I work at, but before we get into all that I want to talk about why I'm doing this in the first place.
Why Player-Facing Pointcrawls? The Theory.
The truth is, when this idea first popped into my head I just had to get it written down. I drew some sketches on a cocktail napkin and tried to explain it to my wife. I sent some early thoughts and a map to some OSR friends of mine and ranted to them about it. I wrote a blog post and people liked it. I didn't really explain why I think you should do this beyond "players like to look at things, too!", though.
So here is my attempt to rectify that. I probably should have done this in part 1, but better late than never!
Essentially this has to do with the strengths and weaknesses of Hexcrawls and Pointcrawls. Now, I will be upfront about the fact that I am pretty firmly on Team Pointcrawl. I worked on Cairn 2e so no one is really shocked here, but I want to make it clear here that I don't dismiss Hexcrawls as a matter of brand loyalty or anything.
The truth is, I think people in the OSR and NSR default to Hexcrawls entirely too much. One of the main reasons I embarked on this whole mad venture was that I was dissatisfied with the vector mapping that Chance has GMs using by default and the most commonly proposed alternative was just overlaying a hexgrid onto the map and calling it good. The main problem with this approach is that a hex usually has at least one obvious and (sometimes) one or more hidden features, but that is not the case with the Hexified map of the Brandonsford wilderness. Instead of each new hex acting like a room in a dungeon, it's as if you're having to roll an encounter check every time you move the equivalent of 5-10 feet. Who has time for that?
So Hexcrawls were a no-go. There is, however, one thing that Hexcrawl campaigns can do that is really neat: give you a piece of hexpaper and let you slowly map the world as you explore it. This is hard to do with a Pointcrawl because, unlike with hexes on hexpaper, you have no easy way to establish a sense of scale when additions need to be made to the map. However, a blank hexmap doesn't really make sense for most regions in a game world because players should be able to talk to people who have taken common roads and trails and thus get a basic lay of the land. The best situation that calls for a player-facing hexmap in my opinion would be a campaign that takes place in a truly unexplored wilderness area. One that really requires players to venture into the unknown and trail-blaze rather than follow established roads and trails.
It has, of course, been contended before that the best hexcrawls are pathcrawls and this is a statement that I largely agree with. I will note, however, that even Dolmenwood, the undisputed king of hexcrawls, seems to produce exploration that is almost entirely defined by travel along roads and trails. At least according to Sachagoat, who found Dolmenwood's hexcrawl procedures frustrating because they seemed so focused on traveling off the beaten path and yet the actual design of the region discourages such activities.
I completely agree that there should be clearly established pathways in most settings and also that some things should lie off those pathways and not easily discovered, but I do wonder why you need to have the possibility of going in 6 directions when you have clearly incentivized only going 1-3 in any given situation?
If roads and trails are necessary to provide meaningful choice in hexcrawls, and trailblazing is the exception and not the rule, I'd rather stick with a system that has those roads and trails built in from the start. However, just like a bad hexcrawl essentially presents players with too many paths and not enough information to make meaningful decisions with, many Pointcrawls don't provide players with enough options to make meaningful choices about where they are going and what path they should take to get there. The best Pointcrawls are Pathcrawls, and that means that the paths between points of interest should not be afterthoughts.
The major difficulty with Pointcrawls is that they are generally not meant to be Player-Facing. If you're lucky, your GM will have a generic player-facing map that you can reference to get a sense of where everything is, but you generally aren't going to be able to write or draw on that. It isn't yours, per say, in the way that a blank hexmap that you have slowly filled in is. More likely, you won't even have a map. The GM will instead list out your navigation options in a sort of itinerary fashion. This is less than ideal as far as I am concerned. In fact, full confession, the major impetus of this whole idea is the fact that I hate having to listen to people list off step-by-step navigational directions.
Thus, the Player-Facing Pointcrawl is meant to be the best of all worlds. A way to hand players a map that already has commonly known features and pathways illustrated. Something that leaves voids that players can explore and potentially fill in. Something that relieves their mental load and lets them plan their route, develop theories, and annotate to their heart's content. Something that, ideally, combines the best of both hexcrawls and pointcrawls and places exploration and discovery at the forefront of the play experience.
Here's how it worked in practice.
In Practice
This map is mostly complete. The one thing it doesn't have displayed are some Secret-level Fairy Roads that I will elaborate on below.
Note: This part of the blog post references actions that my players took when I put this theory to the test. I did my best to explain as much as I needed to in order for everyone to understand my examples, but if you find yourself lost you might find the module The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford and/or my play report of the session illuminating.
I'm not going to go into extensive detail about the logic behind how I constructed the above map since that's what the focus of Part 1 was. As a courtesy extended to those pressed for time, I will sum it up by saying that the process mostly involves identifying the major Landmark pathways most people would use to navigate the region by determining what Landmark points of interest those paths lead to, the Hidden destinations and the means by which the paths leading to them might be discovered, and any Secrets and the costs and or cleverness necessary to uncover them.
This is how it went when I put my method into actual practice. I used a beat-up handheld whiteboard that I found in a box in the closet of a classroom, in case you are curious. I don’t have it on hand to measure, but it was probably about the size of an 11”x17” piece of paper (close to A3). I used wet erase markers and added to it as they explored areas, but in ideal circumstances the players would have taken over mapping duties after a few POI.
The "Blank" Map
Look, I know I'm not Kyle Latino or JP Coovert. In an ideal world, maybe they would have taken on this project. On the other hand, if I can put my meager artistic talents on display for the whole internet, you can do the same for 3-5 players, right?
I started with with a "blank" map, which represented the mental map that players could have constructed based on information that basically everyone in the area could give them: Thick forest to the North that gives way to foothills and mountains, a trade road that leads to both the Dwarven Mine to the North, and other human settlements outside of the bounds of the map.
As you can see, most of the Points of Interest (POI) on the map were Hidden. As players interacted with people within the region they discovered other potential POI, though not necessarily precise locations. You might think that a mostly blank map with only one POI on it would have driven players to immediately go to that place, but placing it at the edge of the map meant that they really wanted to understand what else was along the way. They could see that it was a great distance and instinctively wanted to make the trip worth their time.
When my players left Brandonsford they knew the following pieces of information:
- A trade caravan was due in Brandonsford a week ago by way of the Nanlet Trade Road, but never showed.
- George the Hunter and his hunting party tracked the Dragon up the Northern Trade Road and into the pathless foothills all the way to a cave, but were brutally slaughtered when they tried to engage with the beast.
- A witch lives not far from Brandonsford, though the trail to her house is not easily found (the players managed to talk Ingrid into taking them straight there, eliminating the need for a search).
- Brother Dirk left Brandonsford to travel to Bradon’s Barrow, located to the Northeast, and retrieve his holy sword. He should have returned long before now.
- From George the Hunter, they learned that people sometimes disappear along the Eastern River Trail past the bridge to the western portion of the forest.
The most interesting bullet point is the last one, because I don’t think the players would have gained that information without the map. Once they discovered the existence of Brandon’s Barrow they were able to glance at the regional map, surmised that Brother Dirk must have taken the Eastern River Trail, and went to interrogate George the Hunter about any potential dangers along that route that he knew about due to his work as a hunter. Since a giant who kidnapped and planned to eat Brother Dirk would obviously have a big appetite, it only made sense that George would know about an area of the forest where people went missing even if he didn’t know the ultimate cause.
The ultimate realization of players here was that the region was like a series of long hallways in a dungeon with the potential for a great many secret rooms. It then became their goal to uncover as many as possible without wasting time trying to search every inch of the forest. They weren’t just saying “Okay, let’s move to the next hex” or “Okay, let’s go to the next point.” They were making plans and deciding how best to actually explore their surroundings.
Get Your (Adventure) Guide!
One of the ways that my players solved the issue of finding POI was to simply get people to take them there, which they did twice: once when they talked Ingrid into taking them to Vivian’s Cottage and again when they accompanied Brother Dirk to Brandon’s Burrow. The players seemed to feel a sense of accomplishment when the relationships they fostered with NPCs paid off, but not in the same way as actually discovering a hidden path and seeing what lay at the end of it.
For instance, when the party left Vivian the witch's cottage they noticed a path that circled around a pond in the back that led out of the clearing. They decided this must be a path the witch took to get around the forest and used a Trail Shaker to reveal the path. When they emerged in front of the bridge that led to the western side of the forest they were delighted in a way that they weren't when they were led to the Hidden cottage POI. I think it felt more like actual exploration to them.
Off the Beaten Path
The first Hidden POI that the players uncovered on their own was the Giant's House, and honestly I think they felt the most clever about it out of all the locations they explored because they deduced the possibility of a hidden threat and interrogated George the Hunter about a potential location. When they came upon the water's edge and saw the large footprints in the muddy bank, they knew instantly that if they could just find a set of tracks to follow back they would find Brother Dirk. This would have been time-consuming normally, the same way looking for a hidden door along an entire wall is time-consuming, but their Prowler made it hard to justify any such cost.
Brandon's Barrow was much easier because they had Brother Dirk to lead them, and the Faun's Grove was always meant to have a Landmark path to it because I thought it might be one of the first decision points they encountered and I wanted to reward them for going off the "critical path", so to speak. GMs plan and players laugh, you know?
Secrets Yet Revealed
Like any good Dungeon, your Player-Facing Pointcrawl is bound to have unexplored POI, whether due to them being in the Secret layer, lack of player interest, time constraints, or simple oversight. I had a few paths that were Wilderness and would have incurred a serious cost to traverse: a northern passage out of the Faun's Grove and the path from the Withered Copse to the Dragon's Cave. My players never considered taking the former because they had already found the "correct" way into the Grove, and as for the latter they wisely realized that it was more prudent to set a trap for the Black Wyrm in a place that it clearly frequented rather than face it on its home turf.
More tragically, they never encountered the Dwarven Mine or found the treasure in the Dragon's Cave, and they never met the king of the Pooka or had to endure his outrageous demands. It is a great irony that the one Landmark POI that they were aware of from the very start is the one that they never visited. I even placed a nice loop there in the form of a pathway to the stream and a half-loaded raft full of iron ore that I hoped would tempt the party into floating back to town. Alas.
There was only truly one thing that was classified as Secret on the whole Region Map and it was something I added myself: A entrance to a Fairy Road, marked by white quartz, that laid on the far side of the pond behind Vivian's Cottage. The path was only visible to those attuned to such things (The Foundling or Half-Witch Backgrounds), if they had a Hag Stone (there was one in the bottom of the pond that Vivian had misplaced), or if they were visiting around Midnight (the Witching Hour, heh). I threw together an encounter table just for it, and without an actual way to navigate the path (either the first or second prerequisite) a Die of Fate would have determined they either arrived at a Faerie Mound behind Brandon's Barrow (good!) or the Pooka's Castle (probably bad!).
While there's part of me that wishes they had found everything, I think the best games end with unanswered questions and players wanting more. There should be no 100%ing a good module.
Lessons Learned
What would I do differently? Honestly, not much. The players were able to explore the wilderness surrounding Brandonsford and discover various Hidden POI, make plans based on knowledge of their surroundings, infer the locations of things based on clues, etc.
If there's one thing I wish I had done more of, it would be introduce more Dynamism that would tempt or force players to change their intended route. The players found unexpected things during their journey, but they almost never deviated from their intended course. They knew what they were looking for and sought it out. To an extent, this is a "problem" of the module. Chance put so many information hooks into the town of Brandonsford that my players were very well-informed before ever having to step into the wilderness outside of its walls.
At the risk of committing the cardinal sin of TTRPG game design by desiring to emulate a video game, I would ideally like to have had more Breath of the Wild diversions where players were distracted by things they caught sight of as they were traveling to their intended destination. We can't exactly take advantage of the Triangle Rule in the same way as the map of Hyrule, but perhaps more sensory information in POIs that telegraphed the presence of other locations would do the trick. Acrid smoke could have drifted in from the northwest when players were on the eastern side of the bridge, tempting them over the bridge and towards the Destroyed Caravan. The Destroyed Caravan POI itself had the potential to distract players by leading them to the Pooka (Goblin) Castle, but sadly that came to nothing because of everyone's rush to reach the Black Wyrm.
All in all, I think the experiment was a pretty rousing success. Still, despite my changes, the core of this region map is based on a map that was never meant to be a pointcrawl. Like much of my work on and off this blog, it is a conversion, and I think that a map purpose-built with these principles from the start would provide a superior experience.
Tune in for part 3 and we'll find out if I'm right.