BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK BARK he looks SO GOOD. putting him in my mouth and shaking him like a squeaky toy

yesss do it!!

...things that are on my Manshoon playlist...

oh they do, I'm not arguing that (my players have been lucky so far).

as to the 'crawl, speaking from experience, albeit player-side, repeatedly covering the same stretch of terrain in an exploratory manner requires different support to help the dm keep the experience fresh with lower prep effort

I'm also not really looking for an outside solution, I'm mostly venting because it feels like the obvious answer is "run this side project in a system that's better suited to it rather than brute-force 5e" and rather than be open to it I'm getting pushback because "but what if my character dies"

you'd think, but there's also the setting up of random encounter tables (by terrain), other wilderness travel procedures like foraging, weather, downtime activities, etc, that 5e has left vestigial and undersupported, and it's a lot more work than you initially think in bringing them up to par

however, none of my players have ever played anything BUT 5e, and OSE is a much lower-powered game, with more fragile PCs, and my players are of a mind that dnd is "OC simulator where nothing bad happens to them permanently", which doesn't gel well with a more potentially lethal game. you see?

I've been attempting to set this thing up for a hot minute now, and what I'm finding is that 5e needs enough work, on the dm's side, that I would be better served switching systems than trying to hammer 5e into shapes that it isn't

yeah, the problem I'm having isn't "I don't know what to do when not everyone can make it", it's "5e doesn't well suit the needs of a hexcrawl, but my 5e-only player group is resistant to changing systems (to Old School Essentials) for a side game, though it would be easier for me to run"

is it too much to ask to want to run a game in a system that properly supports a hexcrawl without players bitching a fit about characters possibly dying, I ask you

a thousand curses upon 5e for not having proper random encounter tables in the DMG or MM where they belong, and on ttrpg spaces that elide the labor a dungeon master puts in, and a thousand curses upon whoever popularized the idea of "dnd as Low-Stakes OC Play Pretend Where Nothing Bad Happens"

but to get back to the original point, if I'm going to set up an off-game hexcrawl that's supposed to be just low-prep low-effort for days not everyone can make game......then 5e may not be the best system to do it in for low stress on the dm's end

and those kinds of campaigns are a LOT of work. especially if you're homebrewing

don't get me wrong, 5e is kind of a player's paradise (it's got a lot of options for customization and the rules are a lot more streamlined than, say, 3e/3.5/pathfinder), but out of the box it has very poor support for running anything other than a Storyline Campaign

like I'm not saying this to be mean to my party (and I am not crowdsourcing advice, just bitching) but I truly do not think that most players realize how much effort goes into game prep, and that 5e especially is high effort with low support from the dm side of it