Part one here.
I got to use my traces/tracks/spoor/monster/lair table for encounters this week and found out it doesnt work for hex crawling. If you recall, I was rolling every four hours and cleared the encounter track every night. That means I need six (remember there are 2 traces) out of six dice to come up as successes. Why didn't I figure this out? Why didn't you tell me! Well, that's what playtesting is for, my players got off easy!
Ok, we have two options here, decrease the DC or shorten the encounter track. Either should work, but which is better? I want an encounter once every few days, let's say twenty five percent chance per day. If I were rolling one d20 I would set a DC 15, as each increment of a d20 is one twentieth of one hundred, or five percent. Looking at anydice 6d20 output, 72+ is about 25% so I'm guessing a DC of 12 without any fancy probability math. Is there a website that will do that for me? To google!
Lowering the DC means I still need 6 successes. Or I could use a range. Probably based off of the encounter DC. DC 19 encounter, 17-18 is track, 15-16 is spoor, natural 20 is lair.
So looking over this today, I came up with a solution I like and will try. Nat 20 is a lair, encounter DC-1 is spoor, -2 is tracks, -3 and -4 are traces. Now to make encounter tables!
I removed the graph side and pelaced it with a
rocketbook page (not shown). Here is the revised tracker in
google drive.