Why not [strike]Zoidberg[/strike] good old graph paper grid maps?

What is it about wilderness maps that makes hexes a better choice than squares?

At very least numbering should be easier. You set up a grid, you can place any given feature on a (x,y) Cartesian coordinate system, instead of 0711 or whatever.

Just an old custom, really. I do my wilderness maps on standard graph paper, myself.

The ideal would be no lines at all, and just use a short ruler. That allows ease of measurement in any direction. The hex map is sort of a compromise, making it easy to measure in six different directions. Polygons with more sides don't really fit together as well as hexagons, squares, and triangles, so hexmaps are the best there is for movement in any possible direction.

Quote from: The Butcher;546366Why not [strike]Zoidberg[/strike] good old graph paper grid maps?

The main reason for hex maps is that you can move in any direction and get a pretty good approximation of the real distance from the number of hexes moved while square grids suffer from diagonal movement issues (even alternating 1 and 2 moves is only a rough approximation).  I think there are two main reasons why they weren't used more.  First, in the days before laser printers, it was hard to find hex paper and it was often expensive.  Second, it can be difficult to represent square or rectangular rooms, buildings, and hallways on top of hexes.  One direction is always going to cut against the grain of the hexes.  In wilderness settings, there are fewer right-angles to worry about.

John covered it. It's easier to measure distance. It's also possible a holdover from boardgames, which use them extensively (at least military ones do).

Quote from: danbuter;546383John covered it. It's easier to measure distance. It's also possible a holdover from boardgames, which use them extensively (at least military ones do).

Yeah, that's why they are also known as "hex and chit" games.  Dwarfstar has a few simple games for download.

What may not be immediately obvious is that hex maps aren't just used to measure distance. Traditionally (that is, in wargames, and in procedures articulated in a number of RPGs) they also regulate movement. That is, while you can certainly use a ruler on a map to measure distance, it's rather difficult to see how terrain will affect movement.

Overland travel is rarely a beeline; it will be a compromise between going as directly as possible (a straight line) even if it means traversing difficult terrain, and skirting difficult terrain. With a hex map, you typically define a predominant terrain in each hex which affects how quickly you can traverse that hex. Both factors (hard terrain and circuitous travel) are abstracted for movement through the hex, while if the terrain is hard enough, you might also take a circuitous route around the hex. To make things super-easy, you can use the wargame convention of "movement factors" and "terrain costs". E.g. a party on foot moving at normal pace might have a MF of 3 per day, with road hexes costing 1 MF, clear 2, and forest/rough 3. A party on horseback might have  a MF of 5 per day, but the costs could be different--depending on how complicated you want to make things.

By defining hexes by predominant terrain (and possibly other intra-hex features), you can also determine easily which chart to roll on for random encounters.

You can do all this with a square grid if you treat each square as a "space" and not just as a measurement unit, but then you don't have as many directions you can move unless you resort to multiplication by the square root of 2.

From the Mapping and Movement chapter of Game Design Vol. 1: Theory and Practice (adapted from a series of articles in The Space Gamer):

QuoteEvery three or four months, some writer laments the fact that wargaming is build around the hex grid.  Hexes in wargames go back to 1952, when they were used in some government-sponsored "think tanks."  In commercial wargames, hexes were first used in 1961.  Wargamers have been looking at that beehive pattern for a long time.

Actually the hex grid has so far been the most successful design feature in wargaming.  It's obvious that we need some kind of grid, so the question is not "Why use hexes?" but "What would you use instead of hexes?"  There is, of course, the possibility of a "no grid" game, but you have the same problems that the miniatures folks have had for many years: what exactly is 28 inches after you've turned left and right twice?  

Unlike other grids, hexes give the same distance moved regardless of direction.  With square grid, for example, you get a significant advantage in boardspace by moving diagonally, as any Tactics II player will testify.  Some games use "area" movement, but in many ways, this "innovation" is simply a plot for using big, odd-shaped hexagons.  

Hexes do involve a certain distortion when the unit is moving in a straight line "against the grain."  Since there is no straight path of hexes, the unit is forced into a series of tacks or zig-zags, and requires more hexes to cover the same map distance (the distortion is relatively slight (about 20%), and it can either be "factored" in by adjusting the hex scale in the raw movement forumula, or (more simply) ignored.

For some purposes, squares will work!  Kung Fu 2100 uses squares to good effect in a small-scale game, but diagonal movement is prohibited.  Squares also represent a right-angled floor plan must better than hexagons.  Look at the hex-shaped buildings in Sniper.  And in some games (i.e., The Creature that Ate Sheboygan, Raid on Iran) use "area movement" -- a system in which the map is divided into areas of varying shapes and sizes.  Play results can be interesting.

D&D 3.x mitigated the diagonal move on a square grid problem by making diagonals effectively a 1.5 square move, which is closer to the 1.414 squares (the square root of 2 that Elliot mentioned) it really is than making diagonal movement cost 1 or 2 squares would be.

While I think the Role-Playing Game chapter of the book is of questionable value, Game Design Vol. 1: Theory and Practice is worth reading for anyone designing a tactical RPG combat system, as are Greg Costikyan's First Course on Game Design? and I Have No Words & I Must Design: Toward a Critical Vocabulary for Games, "How to Play Wargames: The Technical Terms Used in Wargaming", and this Zone of Control discussion.  Understand the roots.

Also, from the Designer's Notes thread also going on in this forum, I recommended the Designer's Notes for GURPS Man-to-Man, which contains this comment:

QuoteAnother false start involved the map grid, I really wanted to use a square grid for mapping, for several reasons, It makes buildings work out better, for one thing. Well, I worked it it for months. The good news is — it can be lone. The bad news is — hexes are still better, The very best square-grid movement rules that I could write were still clunky, compared to using hexagons, So , . , back to the old faith- ful hexes I went,

I'm guessing he came up with something similar to the D&D 3.x solution, which is a bit clunky but works.

John and Elliot have said it better than I could (although I still expect Settembrini to chime in).

Quote from: talysman;546371Just an old custom, really. I do my wilderness maps on standard graph paper, myself.

The ideal would be no lines at all, and just use a short ruler. That allows ease of measurement in any direction. The hex map is sort of a compromise, making it easy to measure in six different directions. Polygons with more sides don't really fit together as well as hexagons, squares, and triangles, so hexmaps are the best there is for movement in any possible direction.

Elliot already touched on the issue, but I will add that hex maps are not simply a way to figure out movement, even if that is their primary function. Hex maps are the game board for wilderness travel, abstracting a continuous stretch of terrain into discrete, identically shaped and sized units.

This is something which makes it convenient to manage inside the game - the GM can prepare a clear key and gauge the density of fixed vs. random encounters, while the players have an easy way to interact with the terrain. In wilderness-based games, it can actually be pretty hard to "anchor" movement - which direction are we really moving? How far do we go? And where are we? A hex maps answers these questions with fairly easily understandable information: we can usually move in the six basic directions; we travelled one hex (and we can still go another today); we are in hex 2212.

In a recently published post on hexcrawls, Justin Alexander makes a case for treating the hex grid as a player-unknown structure, and followed up with a movement system. This approach, from the player's POV, is essentially vector-based and close to what you are describing. I prefer the abstraction of the game board.

Is it limiting? Yes, in a sense, it is. But I am finding it nicely sidesteps decision paralysis, making for fast-paced play. Ultimately, other styles of wilderness travel also hinge on these simple decisions - except for highly linear treks (which are unfortunately common in adventure writing), your decisions also tend to come in the shape of discrete options:

Quote"You are at a fork in the road. The main trade route turns right and winds around the tall cliffs, above the rushing river, ultimately disappearing in the darkness of the wooded canyon. A narrow path in front of you climbs up the slope towards increasingly rocky terrain; it is less travelled, but you can still make out the fresh tracks of a small group of men and horses. On the river bank, you also spot something else - a collection of tumbled buildings with a lone tower balanced precariously over the lot."

That's three major and two minor decision options openly in front of the characters:

• canyon
• mountain trail
• investigate ruins
• turn back along the road
• go downstream along the river

Of course, you can strike out at random, but most players will choose one of the options they are presented. If they go off the road, the description of the game world itself still orients decisions: even if we remove these obvious markers, you are left with something like:

Quote"You are at the foot of the mountains. To the right, the river rushes out from the darkness of the wooded canyon. In front of you are mountain slopes, rising towards increasingly rocky terrain. Behind you are the woodlands you came from."

That's still

• canyon
• mountains
• turn back to the woodlands
• go downstream along the river

The wilderness, in this case, is a grid of linked decision points, whether it is explicitly laid out on the GM's map or entirely abstracted. The decision points are found at the points of discontinuity, that is, where the players have a reason to re-assess their navigation decisions:

• at the fork in the trail
• at the edge of the woods
• at the foot of the mountains
• after we lost Fredo and Moriarty in an ambush
• as we are running low on rations
• at nightfall
• etc.

What the game board understanding of the hex approach does is to combine this sort of decision-making with the ease and simplicity of a navigable grid. It is a method to give the players an immediate (although artificial) context to their decisions, and also to let the GM design and manage wilderness adventures.

Well nothing to add, really. I see the answers have all been provided.

What everyone else said.

This is why I keep coming back to theRPGsite even when the front page of the RPG forum is swarming with edition war threads, and life is crazy and hectic and I should be doing something else. Thank you, gentlemen.

Very well put.

I'd like to add something that I found recently that set off all sorts of creative ideas about hexmaps in gaming.


The human mind actually uses tessellated grids (triangles) to map spaces abstractly:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100120131201.htm

Now... if you put a point in the center of every Hex, and connect them with "routes" what do you have?


I love the Strange Times.

Quote from: trollock;546911Whut? It's the same amount of squares going in straight line across the chessboard as when you pass it diagonally from corner to corner. All real maps and most fantasy maps are "carricatures" (the correct word would be projections) of curved space into a plane anyway so there's no point in trying to project real distances into it as it will allwas be deformed. Both hex grid and square grid are graphs and the only difference is to how many other nodes is each node connected.

No one is talking about exact real distances down to the quarter angstrom.  The hex is more accurate than a square as a means of measuring.  Not everyone likes taxicab geometry, or dealing with players that exploit it; additionally, circles in hex are much more like actual circles than with squares.  Moving from the center of the 'node' to the centre of adjoining nodes means you only have four directions of easily measurable movement with squares and six with hexes, which also provides a more natural movement pattern.

Interesting link Stormbringer.

Quote from: the Wikipedia articleTaxicab geometry satisfies all of Hilbert's axioms (a formalization of Euclidean geometry) except for the side-angle-side axiom, as one can generate two triangles each with two sides and the angle between them the same, and have them not be congruent.

Wow, Manhattan is non-Euclidean?! Who would have thought

The 1.5 distance created by making every other diagonal move the equivalent of 2 squares a pretty close approximation of the actual distance (1.4), which isn't bad and largely fixes the "taxicab geometry" problem, though it's not as easy to count as simple squares or hexes.

Quote from: Bloody Stupid Johnson;546959Interesting link Stormbringer.

Wow, Manhattan is non-Euclidean?! Who would have thought

The Ghostbusters.