hex crawl

plural hex crawls · alternative hex-crawl · alternative hexcrawl

1. roleplaying gamesA style of role-playing game in which players navigate an outdoor setting detailed on a hexagonal grid map, encountering monsters and hazards and visiting settlements and locales. Usually populated using tables for randomizing encounters, events, and weather.

   The RPG Handbook ~ Getting Started, Thistle Games, 2013, page 151: “A Hex-crawl offers one of the simplest approaches to forming open-ended campaign worlds.”

   2 more examples

   Matthew Beilman (20 July 2020), “Dungeons & Dragons: A Guide to Hexcrawls”, in CBR.com: “Hexcrawls are also known as wilderness adventures, hearkening back to the days when the entire game could be boiled down to either murder-hobos in dungeons or murder-hobos in the bush, but really any expansive and unexplored landmass could qualify for a hexcrawl today.”

   Stars Without Number is an extremely detailed space opera sci-fi RPG heavily influenced by the "Old School Revival" game design movement, with extensive rules for creating characters with technical, social, combat, and psychic abilities, designing custom spaceships, and exploring new, unfamiliar star systems in a twist on "hex crawl" gameplay.

   Coleman Gailloreto (28 March 2021), “Star Trek-Style Tabletop RPGs For Fans Of Peaceful Space Exploration”, in Screen Rant