People Walk Too Fast

Your Hexcrawl is Too RealisticAn average adult can see 3 miles away on an unobstructed horizon. That same adult takes about 1 hour to walk that same 3 mile distance. I learned these facts because they’re frequently invoked to justify the verisimilitude of hexcrawl procedures. Both the 6-mile hex and its critics rest their arguments, in part, on the 3 mile sightline. Most retroclones inherit the 24-mile per day travel pace from D&D, because (3 mph x 8hrs) = 24 miles. A plurality of NSR travel procedures have since settled on “three 8 hr watches”, moving one hex per watch, as the default.1 In any remotely realistic hexcrawl system, the party cannot see their destination when they start moving. Thus, for players to make informed long-term navigation decisions into unknown territory, they must have access to information beyond realistic human sight lines. We have many tools at our disposal to impart that information - rumors, tall landmarks, map fragments - but in my experience GMs…