Time

 "This thing all things devours;

Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats mountain down."

Time is a very important aspect of the #hexplore24 project. It starts with the concept of 1:1 time. One actual day = one game day. In other words, there are 365 days and you play one day per day.

But what does that mean? I get asked that a lot, and it is way simpler than you might think. Let's start with a comparison. In the Dungeon23 Challenge the goal was to produce a 365 room megadungeon. Sounds bonkers, doesn't it. The caveat was that all you needed to do was build one room per day. No more, no less. As of this writing, I've created 333 rooms (randomly determined) ...one room per day for the past 333 days. The same basic concept for Hexplore24, instead of one room per day...you play a single day in the game world per day.

Still sounds too daunting? In the Dungeon23 Challenge there were tons of "empty rooms" with nothing more involved than dressing.  The same will happen while your characters are exploring. Most times it'll be just terrain. Miles and miles of vast, unbroken wilderness...and that's okay. The days that include dungeon delves and dragon spotting will happen, should the dice gods determine that they should.

Did I mention that each day, each hex, each feature, and each encounter is supposed to be randomly determined? They are, and they should be for one single factor. Time.

You cannot predict the future. You can guess, you can speculate, and you can even plan for what you think will happen. However, you cannot know 100% what will happen 100% of the time. Neither can your characters while exploring somewhere they've never been. How do you accomplish this without Referee/ Player cross-contamination? 1:1 time and procedural hex generation. 

It takes time to cross the miles of unknown wilderness. We express this using "miles per hex per day", and that boils down to what size your hexes are. I strongly recommend 5-mile or 6-mile hexes, with variable travel times depending on the ruggedness of the terrain with each hex. Easy terrain may be crossed within a couple of hours per hex (well established roads), difficult areas may take up to four hours to cross the 5 ot 6 miles that hex represents (rugged mountains are a prime example).Travel is usually done during daylight hours, so the season (winter here in the northern hemisphere) will effect how many hours are available for "safe" travel. Which determines how many prospective hexes can be traversed that day. 

During that day, consumable items are consumed. Rations and water, arrows, torches...any finite resource runs the risk of running out. Pack a week's worth of supplies...and you'd best be back to civilization within a week or you could be screwed if you party sucks at survival skills/checks. Travel takes time, time eats up resources. Make that matter. Don't handwave it away. 

Do not play ahead. Let me repeat. DO NOT PLAY AHEAD. I know many of you will ignore this and pretend you know better than that simple concept. Trust me, you don't. I know it will be tempting to play a few days or weeks ahead of the calendar. Maybe it's because playing a single day sounds too easy or too hard (depends on perspective), and you don't want that to happen. Well, I'm here to tell you that that's a horrible idea and it'll fail.  How do I know this, because that is what has happened during the Dungeon23 Challenge. Most, if not all, participants who ignored the instructions to build "one room per day"...have since burnt out, dropped out, or simply fizzled out. Most, if not all, of us who adhered to the "one room a day" are still chugging along. 1 day = 1 room. 

For the #hexplore24 project: 1 actual day = 1 game day. Nothing more, nothing less. When you sit down on January 1st, you'll play out Day 1 in your game world. January 2nd is day two..January 3rd, day three...and so on and so forth for 366 days (2024 is a leap year).

In the next post I'll talk about "mindless plot following"...