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A Question About Hex Crawls

Started by christopherkubasik, December 12, 2016, 05:03:49 PM

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Gronan of Simmerya

#60
December 31, 2016, 01:48:23 AM
Look at downtown St. Paul, MN or NYC south of 14th street for modern cities that don't have rectangular grids.
You should go to GaryCon.  Period.

The rules can\'t cure stupid, and the rules can\'t cure asshole.

nDervish

#61
December 31, 2016, 08:18:27 AM
Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;937982Look at downtown St. Paul, MN or NYC south of 14th street for modern cities that don't have rectangular grids.

Damn drunken Irishmen...

Xanther

#62
December 31, 2016, 11:59:06 AM
Quote from: rawma;937020They work better for terrain, but not as well for buildings constructed with right angles. An approximation of 1.5 squares for diagonals is less bad than the approximation of 2 for moving two hexes on a path with a 120 degree turn, and not very hard to manage. TFT maps forcing rectangular rooms onto hexes just felt wrong to me. (The very first dungeon, or maybe the second, my character explored when I started playing D&D was graphed on polar coordinate graph paper. That mostly did not work.)

You can use off-set squares instead of hexes.  They provide the same benefit as hexes, same distance no matter which way you go, and work great with square rooms.  For dungeons and such this is only important (IMHO) if there is a big tactical miniature/counter aspect to the game where details of facing etc. are handled through maneuver, such as TFT or D&D 3.x.   I prefer it to a regular grid and counting diagonal movement as 1.5 times regular movement.  Well really I gave up on detailed tactical miniature/counter, now it's a bit more abstracted with rolls used to determine if you can get into some contested but advantageous position.
 

Xanther

#63
December 31, 2016, 12:05:04 PM
Quote from: Old One Eye;934775It takes time at the table for players to fill in their own map which has an impact on pacing.  While I like the fog of war aspect, I don't think it is worth slowing the game over.  

I also have more luck getting the players into a pretty map I prepared beforehand than a whatever handscrawled thing is produced in play.

Even the last dungeon I ran, the PCs had reason to know the layout, so I gave them the dungeon map.  

Having the map simply does not harm gameplay much if any, in my experience.  They do not know the map key or secret places omitted from the map.

I'm with you on this, I try to find good in-game reasons to provide a map, not that it happens to much, for reasons of pacing.  A lot of players just don't map very fast.  I love mapping as a player.  TO balance it out, it I draw the map for them one of the characters must have quill and paper (and clip board ;) ) and this slows down there progress.  Unless the character has some skill/background or tool that would allow for accurate distance measurement, I freehand it on regular unlined paper to reflect imprecision in distances.  If a player ever had a character with more accuracy (or uses the Map spell) I'd use graph paper.
 
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