Making A Thing By Playing It — a Report

Recently I put together a proper online reference document for a set of hexcrawling rules and procedures that I’ve been using in the main Big Long Term Game I run. My needs were pretty simple:
-Though I’m unlikely to play it again in the future, I want to see this full 5e campaign out to its end. It’s reached a point where large scales with scary things in them are crossed with regularity.

-Making hexmaps is genuinely very fun to me, a sort of play in its own right, so it’s the ideal way for me to prep this sort of thing. 5E doesn’t have rules for hexcrawling or indeed particularly interesting or easy-to-deal-with-on-the-fly long distance travel by default so I gotta provide my own.

-5e isn’t the only game where I find myself wanting this (I wanna be able to use my hexmaps in Whitehack and TNU and Kriegsmesser) so I wanted something that I could pretty freely move around.

So I grabbed a handful of hexcrawls and a few hexcrawl rules I kinda liked as an inspiration — some standouts being Vast in the Dark, Spy in the House of Eth, the first issue of Beyond the Borderlands — and proceeded to basically just reread those instead of writing anything coherent. They are all very cool so I don’t like, regret it or anything, but it didn’t help me put anything cool on the table in front of my friends.

What ended up actually working was just kinda iterating on things during the actual game. We had been doing what seems to be the standard 5e practice of Point of Interest based maps where the minutia of movement hinged on vibes about as much as the rules provided, so one day I just tossed one of my hexmaps on roll20 and treated it the exact same way. I immediately got a feel for how my players treated hexes differently from gridless pointcrawls, and suddenly the important things started to click. Within the first session of using it I realized that a system of halving/doubling speed was way more important than having a more granular time breakdown, and by the next I had the first iteration of the sliding scale that lets me track that doubled/halved speed through multiple speed-changing factors. A couple afternoons later and I had the whole thing minus an editing pass and some art I like.

Before this I would have already agreed with the claim that design is play and play is design (my personal guidelines of what I should/shouldn’t prep for a session are based on this idea) and I think this partially serves to confirm that, and partially to clarify for myself that I’m most interested in my own work when I plan to and am actively using it. Maybe this is a limiting thing in the long run and maybe I’ll run into the ways I’ll have to work around that eventually, but for now It’s a good way to focus some early projects.