So I would like to run a HexCrawl on the forum. Back in my Pen and Paper glory days, this is what we did. HexCrawl was the original sandbox and my nostalgia for it is HUGE. Heres a page with some description of HexCrawl and some links for more resources if you need more:
http://www.gnomestew.com/tools-for-gms/old-school-fantasy-hexcrawl-resources/I have a twist here. I have been hacking some random generation tables and coming up with some of my own stuff to sort of create what I am now calling "Procedural Campaign Generation". The current variant I am working on involves generating the game world on the fly, never generating more than is needed at any given point in the story. In this way, the world will unfold before the players.
What makes this procedural and not simply random is that I will (nearly) always stick to my rolls and the results. Where I get to stretch my creativity is how to weave the results together in the world. As the GM, my goal will be to create interesting storytelling opportunities. Because my choices on where to place encounters and what links to make between them will be influenced by the actions and characters of the players, the generation of the world will be both collaborative and procedural. Finally there is some logic and process to how the world unfolds, certain things arise only when the right conditions are met, and when certain encounters exist they spawn modifiers to the process
When it's "done" we will be able to look back at a map of a world, full of stories, that we created together.
I figure it might be something many of us would appreciate, the happy union of procedural generation, emergent story telling and some old school pen-and-paper RPG (bring your own soda and Doritos).
My question is this: what games system to use. I really dont want combat to bog things down, the HexCrawling being the primary feature. Roll to Dodge seesmt o be the simplest thing, but I am not sure if it provides enough depth for some of the simulation aspects we might want to achieve. Theres a couple of "rules light" systems that I am looking at, those are:
Old School Hack (looks super fun and...OLD SCHOOL)
http://www.oldschoolhack.net/osh-docs/OldSchoolHack_v1beta.pdfChimera
http://www.welshpiper.com/downloads/1000_ChimeraBasic_3.0.pdfBoth would need to be hacked a bit to make combat snappier, along the lines of what RTD can do. 1-3 rounds tops, battle done. 2 rounds would be ideal.
Thoughts?