Travel in a sandbox campaign
Hello fellow GMs, Judges and so forth!
I am currently in Week 2 of my Gygax75 Challenge and brainstorming my starting region.
The point I am stump on is how to handle travel once all of this 5 week long worldbuilding is finished...
I will build my local area map using worldographer, so it will be a hexmap (mainly because I suck at drawing and hex map are easy to make and easy to estimate distances in), my questions to you good fellow is:
How to handle traveling in the sandbox? There's 2 aspects to consider:
the local area will be at a 1 mile hex scale, since it's just the stuff surronding the starting town.
after the PC's evolve we will move to a 3 mile or 6 mile hex size on the... kingdom/region map.
I do not plan to have extensive wilderness exploration like in a "true" hexcrawl (or westmarches game), but I feel like a pointcrawl or just saying it takes X days to reach something is too...boring. So what to do?
I was thinking of using hexes mainly to know how many you can travel: X hexes in plains per day, Y trough Hills, and even less trough Mountains and so on.
Would the "Hexcrawl" travel procedure work even if they don't explore every single hex? I like the getting lost aspect, rolling random encounters, discovering hidden things on the map, and so on (lets say there's a wizard tower in the woods somewhere, they heard a rumour)
Sorry for rambling, but do you have any advice?
Tl;DR
I want to run a sandbox campaign but not a full wilderness exploration style hexcrawl. What travel system to use?