Say I wanted to run a play by post hexcrawl/exploration game.  In person I could simply hand the party a blank sheet of hex paper and tell them mapping is up to them.  But for a play by post game, how would I do that?  Is there a website or an app that would manage that?  I guess worst case everybody gets hexmapper or hexographer and a dropbox account, but it seems like there should be a better way.

You can find numbered hex maps, Welsh Piper has some it looks like.  That way you can tell the players the features of hex 2.8 as they move there from hex 2.7 .

So, simultaneous maps?  Might have to go that way.  Though I suspect that'll turn into one or two party mappers plus dropbox, but maybe that's okay.

Quote from: Dave R;978321Say I wanted to run a play by post hexcrawl/exploration game.  In person I could simply hand the party a blank sheet of hex paper and tell them mapping is up to them.  But for a play by post game, how would I do that?  Is there a website or an app that would manage that?  I guess worst case everybody gets hexmapper or hexographer and a dropbox account, but it seems like there should be a better way.

Just use Roll20 and keep it focused on the page with the map. Or use the handout section. In addition you can use the handout section to store any other images you want to reference to keep handy for the players. Normally Roll20 is meant to be used with everybody on-line at once but it can work as a reference site for a PBP as well.

And it free the various subscription levels have more storage but for this the free account level will probably work.

The nature of the maps depends on whether the expectation is for players to relate to hexes or not.

In the PBEM games I have run and played in over the decades, it has always seemed to work to use images and/or text to represent what players know about the world layout (usually a rough incomplete sketch world concept map, and a more detailed chart of the area(s) they know well, and additional charts/maps for situations they can see at the moment), and also maps representing actual maps in-game.

Unless the campaign is hex-oriented and/or has ability and need to map many accurate wilderness locations, there's been almost no call for hex coordinates. The maps I give PCs rarely have hexes these days, and the movement and observations are handled in text descriptions, with the GM using whatever map & rule systems he uses to figure out where they actually go etc.

But if the GM and/or players don't want that type of interaction, hex maps with coordinates is a very functional abstraction. I would tend to let players figure out how to try to make their own maps, unless they are a map-dyslexic player who wants to play a map-capable character (in which case I might try to foist the mapping duty onto another player, if I didn't want to do it myself).

Is there a reason they can't just map on paper from what you describe? Just make sure the description is clear. Player maps are seldom all that accurate anyway, at least in my experience, and it's quite fun when they make an error and rely on false information.