The Pathfinder Kingmaker video game uses a point crawl format for overland travel.

Two excellent pointcrawls are "Gardens of Ynn" and "Stygian Library" by Emmy Allen.

@craigbryant3191

2 жыл бұрын

I had a good time with Ynn! Dropped it into Storm King’s Thunder for a change of pace.

@richmcgee434

2 жыл бұрын

@@craigbryant3191 Stygian Library works well for dropping in to other adventures as well - at least assuming the players wind up in a library at some point. Doesn't need to be much of a library either, just standing too close to the wrong bookshelf will do. :)

@kylehettinger1201

2 жыл бұрын

Ynn is fantastic, and really creative. I don't think of it as a point crawl though because the progression deeper into Ynn is essentially linear.

@williamdavis7274

2 жыл бұрын

I feel like Emmy Allen is like and indie rockstar... Patrick stewart, Scrap Princess.... theyre pushing the medium in such a cool way. Preach!

@sloth7ds

Жыл бұрын

My understanding of those was that they're depth crawls, not exactly point crawl. Similar, but not quite the same

Something else to take from some of the point-to-point wargames which inspired this: Use extra non-defined points along difficult paths to represent slower movement and longer travel times. Much like the hand drawn map in this vid, just use a small circle to show an extra day's travel between two locations. It can indicate areas where the players need to stop for a rest in the wild, else suffer fatigue penalties on the next stretch, and places where random travel encounters can happen. It's another way to give more choices to players, but also provide a trade-off of more dangerous wilderness encounters for taking a 'shortcut' and differentiate the travel times for each path. Multiple points on each path dictates how long it normally takes. You could also have two different types of circles to differentiate between risk levels. An open circle for lower risk, and a darkened circle for higher risk. Gives the option of faster shortcuts that are higher risk or longer travel at lower risk.

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

Good idea!

I prefer this method to hexes or grid or whatever, measuring things "time" instead of "distance" fits D&D better. Players want to know time between Long Rests, not the minutiae in between. Players also _hate_ Exhaustion, they will risk multiple battles at each point along the way rather than risk a single level of Exhaustion. Point crawl gives a fantastic visual "you can get to point A with time to spare or you can force march and make it to point B but Exhaustion level 1". I like this because I'm lazy, I don't want to have to map every fiddly bit along the way.

I remember playing an old AD&D module that used a form of Pointcrawl. Each location was either a "black dot" for encounters that were very likely to begin and end in combat, or "white dots" that were encounters that generally allowed more freedom of choice, such as through roleplaying and/or exploration (though combat was still possible). It actually led to in-jokes whenever we had random encounters, calling them "white dot" or "black dot" encounters. The adventure was UK5: Eye of the Serpent (had to look it up). That's the earliest Pointcrawl I can remember having experience, though it wouldn't surprise me if there were other, older adventures with similar aesthetics. EDIT: Minor fix, and also discovered that UK5 was technically a 1st Edition adventure. My group played it as a one-shot using AD&D 2E (which was our gateway game into TTRPGs) one night just because we were together and had time.

Might be interesting to combine this with a Skill Challenge mechanism for each route -- set a target DC based on the topography or difficulty of the route they choose - certain routes may have a higher DC than others but require less successes while other routes have lower DC but require more successes base on length of travel --- then let the players articulate what skill they want to use to make a given check and why it would apply to this challenge. --- may have to give this a go for my overland travel! Thanks for sharing this!

@payton.a.elliott

2 жыл бұрын

I like that idea but maybe not for every pathway, since I can see that bogging down the game if it's overdone. Sometimes a road is just a road.

@groovegnome

7 ай бұрын

Sometimes you gotta just let your pcs do stuff, if you want them making choices everything can’t rely on a dice roll.

It's a nice idea, which I've used up to now without even knowing its name ^^". Some tips I can share: 1) View the overland travel/city trek as part of the adventure and prepare it in advance, paying attention to how it blends with the rest of the adventure. 2) Instead of point 1, you could also prepare simple diagrams depending on the setting (city trek, forest, desert, mountain, etc) and then adapt them to your specific overland travel. 3) For D&D 5e, Xanathar's Guide to Everything has excellent casual encounters tables based on terrains, they are a good resource when planning or improvising. 4) If, like me, you want a travel grounded in reality (aka "distances and time are important"), keep close a detailed map or use an online map tool.

Have used this since 1980! ;)

The old Basic module Journey to the Rock (the first real wilderness module if I am not mistaken) operates as a point crawl with multiple routes

Dude you just saved my butt. Thank you so much!

Fantastic video as always bud. You have made my new dm journey 1000x easier with everything you've put out.

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

Thank you so much!

You can use a hexcrawl and have pointcrawlish features. For example allow the players to follow a road - they won't get lost and are guaranteed to meet any points of interest along the way. Likewise for following a river, the edge of a mountain range, a cliff (if they do not wish to climb down) and so on. You can use these to funnel players towards points of intertest while having others away that they need to discover.

This is excellent. For my next campaign I am leaning towards an urban campaign, and a point crawl diagram like the one you show in this video is a really smart way to go. Also, I am reading the original "Lazy Dungeon Master" book on my Kindle.

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

Thank you so much for your support!

I love everything about this concept. I'm gonna use it!

There's a mobile game called Survive-Wilderness Survival that uses point crawl and I always loved the concept. I will absolutely start incorporating this into my games...thanks Sly!

One of my first encounters with point crawls was the 2007 fantasy video game Odin Sphere and later its 1997 predecessor Princess Crown.

This was an extremely insightful video. I've struggled for years with trying to make the actual journeying side of the adventure enjoyable, constantly experimenting and dabbling with different methods before eventually just settling on having a fantasty/steampunk railway that can escort them everywhere, and I think this will really help. I like the idea of designing and thinking of the wilderness almost like a dungeon.

Graphiz is EXACTLY the tool I need for various purposes. Thanks for yet another useful tool.

As a software engineer... hyped. Crazy idea, why not using this to make the outline of a session? Not just land travel? You have encounters and events, in the end is not like writing an state automata?

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@Silkspar

3 жыл бұрын

yup, been thinking about this myself. I think you would need to be careful of your input/outputs as you can't reliably model player behaviour :)

@MrRourk

2 жыл бұрын

You should play Zen Fantasy by Better Games....It would be perfect for such a map

Good vid. Point crawls, AKA encounter trees/encounter networks. Fun stuff.

Reminds me of Zork maps.

I've been looking for some kind of flowchart program to do something like this, but nothing worked for my purposes. Excited to try this out. Thanks, Mike! Always love to see your stuff.

If you're using Obsidian-md or Joplin for Markdown notes, you can use Mermaid-JS to make mmd graphs similar to Graphviz and view them. Typora and MarkText should also be able to render those in real time. Otherwise you'll need to use some special HTML.

Just used this for my pathfinder 2e game, and it was awesome! Graphvis is an incredible tool

Point crawl, hex crawl, dungeon crawl, all great! So long as those pesky players arent sprinting!

Cool Idea, thanks for sharing!

Excellent tips! Thanks Sly

@knudsenmj

3 жыл бұрын

I used this today and it went great. Prerolled encounters chromed to fit the story, montaged through some atmosphere scenes. Best 27 day crawl I've run.

i like this sort of video from your perspective

Middle Earth 5e has some great overland travel rules as well.

@SlyFlourish

2 жыл бұрын

I’ll check them out.

Looks like a great mind map too. Cheers

Graphviz is an impressive tool!! Cool stuff :)

Thanks for the video. I was working on a point crawl for Rime of the Frostmaiden and I didn't even know it! If you ever decide to run Frostmaiden in that format, please share your ideas!

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

I will!

Great video and great tool. Thanks for sharing! Would you mind sharing your thoughts on how you would use this tool for Tomb of Annihilation if you'd run it again? I'm running currently DMing ToA and we just entered the jungle. I already can say that the hexcrawl as written will not work for my group, so I'd be excited to read your thoughts.

Seems like the crawl around the plane of Outland, were from were you are to any point next to you on the map you take 3d6 days of travel.

Really cool software.......

Any chance you are willing to publish the links to your Notion pages?

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

Yep! Check out the show notes for my lazy dm prep videos. They have links to my Notion notebooks for those campaigns.

You could use a free mindmapper to make a graph

This is how I prefer to run things, with the focus on points of interest, events, and narrative to bridge them. Never say never--mixing things up is fun, too--but I dislike how a hex map makes everyone think in terms of hexes. Designers, too--how many maps have we seen where the rivers and borders all politely follow the hex boundaries?

is it possible to run a west marches campaign with just pointcrawl?

@SlyFlourish

2 жыл бұрын

Probably!

@MrRourk

2 жыл бұрын

Yes very easily. You just have to have a lot interconnection and lots of options. Put in a lot of way points.

@firstlast5454

2 жыл бұрын

Original West marches was a pointcrawl

I don't know about this approach for overland travel. It works fine for cities and for going between cities where the route is clear because of a road and people knowing the way. For me, overland travel is interesting when there is the possibility of getting lost and off-track. A hex-crawl seems to work better for that unless you add a bunch of extra points to your point-crawl for your players to end up at. The wilderness is supposed to feel different in that there is no clear route from A to B and many ways one can end up off track.

@RSanfins

2 жыл бұрын

Well, if you define that going from point A to point B takes 1 day of travel you can simply have them get lost and take double the time. In the narrative, they lost the path they were following due to misdirection or some kind of temporary hazard, for example. If you're using random encounter tables, which you normally do in hexcrawls, you can also increase the chances of rolling such an encounter or simply choose that it's guaranteed. Alternatively, you can create a branching path that wasn't there before that takes them to a lesser point of interest but that point of interest is a dead end that requires them to turn back, retracing their steps in order to go on the correct path. At higher levels or if they have used that path very often you simply make it so they can't get lost, which is a good thing because at some point travel shouldn't be as dangerous as it is at lower levels. The same way you can add points of interest in a hexmap at any point, you can also modify the point crawl map as long as you stay consistent with the idea the players have of it. Hope this helps ^^

@philosopherhobbs

2 жыл бұрын

@@RSanfins I don't really like doubling the time to get there as that's boring and doesn't make getting lost much of an issue for travel. The branching path is better but kind of strange considering each way of getting lost is a dead end. It's fine if you're married to the point crawl idea. I just prefer a map. If people get lost, and don't detect that they're lost, then they might discover something out there they didn't intend or hit some terrain that they weren't expecting and have to think about how they got lost. If you want to have overland travel, it should feel dangerous in various ways, big and able to get lost in, and have unexpected surprises good and bad.

@RSanfins

2 жыл бұрын

@@philosopherhobbs The branching path doesn't necessarily need to be a dead end, just a path to somewhere else they didn't want to go. Those things can happen in a point crawl. Each point is something interesting to discover, be it a location or a particular terrain. And why would a point crawl not convey danger? They might find the lair of a creature above their power, for example. If they decide to escape they can pinpoint that location for later. And I'm not "married to the idea of a point crawl". I like both point crawls and hex crawls and maps in general. I was simply suggesting that everything you said could be applied to a point crawl. It just seems to me that you're choosing not to see it. But hey, what you prefer is up to you =)

@philosopherhobbs

2 жыл бұрын

@@RSanfins I didn't intend to criticize by using the term 'married' but just meant that if you're committed to it in general, or for a campaign, or even a part of one, then I liked branches more. You're the one that mentioned dead end branches so I offered a criticism of it. It doesn't work well for open worlds. Now of course you can add branches to branches and have multiple branches per node but at this point what are you gaining? Just make an open world map. There are contexts I think point crawls work well in. Caves, large buildings, and similar environments with very limited options seem like the right contexts for point crawls. But they suck for overland travel because overland travel is usually more open.

@RSanfins

2 жыл бұрын

@@philosopherhobbs I see what you mean now. And even though I still think it can work just as well as a map, it's not that I actually disagree entirely with the issues you raised, I suppose.

Do you think Point Crawls are useful also for dungeons (especially megadungeons)? I think it is a nice way to map them as a player, when I'm playing OSR games. But do you think it would work on the DM's side?

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

Sure. I think pointcrawls actually model the way dungeons work on overland travel. Building a dungeon as a series of interconnected chambers with loops, secrets, and stuff is how dungeons work already.

@lucasmarquesdecamargos4298

2 жыл бұрын

@@dziooooo Thanks for the tips, and especially the resources =)

Interstellar travel in Traveller are point crawls.

Could you please share a link to your Notion page?

@stephensayers4998

3 жыл бұрын

Its in a previous video from a few weeks ago I believe

So, it's like the world map for Super Mario World.

I would use point crawls if in an overland area that is not dangerous, meaning the are "civilized," like the immediate area surrounding a large city which is likely to have forts and garrisons to maintain order....

Pointcrawls are not meant to replace hexcrawl, they serve different purposes. Pointcrawls are for established routes. Hexcrawls are for places where there isn’t an established route. Hexcrawls are for wilderness, trailblazing, searching for something rumored to be there or that used to be there. Also when there’s an established route, but the PCs want to take a shortcut, or find/investigate something they can see from the route but is some distance away.

Anyone have any idea how you get just the image of the graph from Graphiz?

@SlyFlourish

2 жыл бұрын

There’s an export for png and svg in the upper right.

How would you account for passage of time with a point crawl?

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

I’d just describe it

@MrRourk

2 жыл бұрын

Now one thing I do is - say from point A to point b is going to take x days of travel and you will have to camp 3 times. Here are 6 possible camping spots. I usually use little triangles with numbers along the route. Now which ones do you use? - The players will usually ask for descriptions of each camp site. I usually ask them are you just glancing at it or are you getting in there and really looking around? ***Occasionally Players will want to go off the path. Do not say NO! Instead what I say is it will be 3x or 4x the normal travel time and 3x or 4x the encounters. Not to mention the cost

So how do you communicate to players which "points" in your pointcrawl are actual points of interest? For example, in the map at 8:10 what if players want to leave the road and travel into the wilderness that (I assume) exists on either side of it? Do you make it explicit that there is no "content" there? Do you add content there if there is something the players want to do there?

@SlyFlourish

2 жыл бұрын

I’d let them know they’re breaking off the beaten path and may not find anything that way. Typically players are happy to follow the structure.

@user__214

2 жыл бұрын

@@SlyFlourish Yeah, I think my issue here is that, if players have reason to go "off map", there probably should be content there. For example, in the wilderness if players are searching for a particular plant, there should be some probability of finding it (assuming it exists there), and there should be some probability of a random encounter if it's a dangerous area. I just did some searching, and I think Justin Alexander addresses this in his article on the Elturel pointcrawl. He talks about "side routes", which are places not on the pointcrawl, but that have potential for random encounters, getting lost, and other things that make sense to have. This addresses the concern that the world outside the pointcrawl have the type of "stuff" you expect it to have, even if it's stochastic, low-density content.

Rad!

Just fyi, The Alexandrian is also on KZread at youtube.com/@TheAlexandrian

I don't get the idea of a point crawl thru a city. A city has streets all over it. You can get anywhere from anywhere. Just put numbered points wherever you want.

This sort of game wouldn't work for my group, they're way too hung up on knowing how long things take.

I'm afraid I'm too lazy to try this

@SlyFlourish

3 жыл бұрын

You'll be ok.

this just feels like drawing roads with extra steps

Point crawl seems like a BS video game. A Role-Playing game let the PLAYERS control the narrative, the GMs should be there to arbitrate and be the universe reacting to their actions. You throw stuff at them and they do WHAT THEY WANT... NOT what you prepared. That's like a movie... the actor have NO impact on the story... they follow a script. Well my games aren't like that. I make the script has we go, I build events in answers to my players goals and actions. Normally I don't even have a main plot from the start... it come to life on it's own depending on what happened. That's also why I hate systems with levels... You are limited in your progression choices by levels and so players tend to make a ''build'' from the start up to end game... instead of evolving dynamically in function of what happen in game. Hexcrawl for the win... where players make their map and are free to explore the world. Exp as a currency > Level, so you can improve what makes sense for your character instead of what the book told you would go up for you and when and by what amount...

Really nice concept, I love your stuff, very inspirational and great advice , thanks a lot 🫶💙