Are they shit or good? I know people complain about how it looks less clean, Personally I like the idea of square hexes to retain a mostly clean appearance though. As for Flight, if you stagger the hexes appropriately, each hex is overlapping or is overlapped by 3 tiles. if you count above and below, that means you have 6 around the main, then 3 above and 3 below. Compared to traditional squares that net a whopping 26 threatening tiles to 12? It just seems more fair. And in the first place I'm not overly concerned about movement speed in squares at all either. A lot of people complain about the math of fractions when moving diagonal but the big draw of hexes for me is threat, facing, and the number of directions you can attack from. that said I've never fricking actually used hexes, and I've never met any player who tolerates them? should I bother releasing any content with hexes in mind? is it a waste of everyones fricking time? I just really don't like how when you are using squares you get to threaten so many spaces. That kind of power is not only too annoying for rogues to even stand a chance, but also deprives me the opportunity to design interesting and unconventional threatened areas for creatures and weapons. Flight is a factor in my game and a fairly common one all things considered.
rather than just advice, any stories related to hex negative or positive is welcome
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I prefer bounding boxes & arcs in when it comes to gaming.
I don't care for hexes because they're far more of a faff to draw. I don't think it makes that big a difference either way.
aren't they really easy though?
Hexes are good for travel and land maps, whereas is good for human-scale skirmishes.
those are both hexes
That's far more faff than a square grid. You don't even have to draw a square grid, just mark out the corners. And not even all the corners really.
It's not like hexes are really better anyway, just a different compromise.
you can use dots for the edges of a square hex too.
>it's just a different compromise
but is that compromise worth it for anyone? will people rebell if they have to use a hex? like I said I dont really give a shit about movement. I guess in the end I wont get a perfect answer but it seems like no one wants to talk about any actual experiances
>you can use dots for the edges of a square hex too
You clearly haven't tried or thought about that, because it'd be easier to mark the centre of hexes than the corners.
>but is that compromise worth it for anyone?
What the frick are you on about?
Both squares and hexes are compromises. Neither is better than the other. I prefer squares because they're simpler to draw and to eyeball, and I prefer the compromises they offer.
>I dont really give a shit about movement
Movement and positioning are the only things they affect, so why bother using either if you don't give a frick about that?
>it's easier to mark the center than the corners
probably so i guess
>movement and position is the only thing they effect
yes I stated I care about how they affect position ?????
Your OP is a hard to read ramble and I can't tell what the frick it's complaining about. Some numbers of adjacencies are "unfair" somehow because reasons.
It also seems bizarre to care about positioning but not movement, which is what you use to determine your position.
>hurr its vague that if you get surrounded by more people you're more fricked
????
>its bizarre to care about positioning but not movement
my concern is how many opponents can stand next to someone and how many players you need to protect someone. Just to put someone behind a line of meat so the enemies cant do shit against a middle target takes 5 units next to them in every direction. while you can accomplish the same with just 3 most of the time in a hex map. even if you are out in the open its only 6 instead of 8 people.
Hexes are great for everything except continuous straight walls which frustratingly is 90% of all structures
is it really a problem if one row is smaller than the other?
Just draw walls through the middle of hexes; I don't understand why this rustles so many jimmies.
Oh, noes. Not the straight walls. The horror.
Now let's talk about something you might actually see at a table rather than abstract notions. I know you don't have a game so I'll need you to use some imagination. Call it a role playing game, your class is 'Dude who has at least enough people in his life that will tolerate him to play an RPG'!
Now see this map? This is what a typical map might actually look like. Don't be scared, it can't hurt you. You see how some hallways on the map are going north to south, assuming the top of the map is north? Well with hexes those are a fricking b***h to deal with. This is why people dislike hex maps for a dungeon crawling game.
Hallways that tight aren't going to work well with squares either.
Either make "squares" that fit the local geometry, or free-form it in there.
Equally tight hallways, works fine.
Except that there, the walls were deliberately placed to respect the walls. In the previous one, walls were placed will-nilly, so that even the hexagonally-shaped chamber didn't line up well.
Incorrect, the walls were placed to be one hex wide.
>If I act moronic on purpose no one will notice
the minimum width of a non squeezing corridor is 1.5 tiles in every dimension with hexes.
Make a straight hallway with straight walls with hexagons without cutting through them lmao
>t-they work just fine
hey thats neat but you didn't post the right map there anon, you where supposed to post the one from before it makes me wonder why you didn't you know. could it be that its a bit more complicated than you wanted to admit?
What are you b***hing about? Hexes have been in use in dungeon crawlers since fricking forever. Grab yourself a copy of Gloomhaven, you colossal gigs-homosexual.
Name one.You say forever? Whats the oldest published hex dungeon you know?
>can't distinguish between dungeons and dungeon crawlers
>calls others are nogaems
You need to go back.
Name one, any one. Go on. You can't.
I already said Gloomhaven so everyone knows you have no point and are just sea-lioning.
No you said always. Is Gloomhaven he oldest thing you can name? Is that it? Fricking pathetic man.
Judges Guild had hex overlays on their maps back in the late 70s, wienersmoke
>still using tiling
>not using continuous maps and measuring stuff à la wargame
Ngmi
>wargames
>not using hexes
hmm
It's the fact they are 'More' inconsistent than squares.
Do not read that as squares being consistent- They are not! and also have issues. They are simply less often inconsistent.
On top of that squares are less of a pain to explain to newbies. and there are always more and more newbies... I don't need extra minor complications in my life.
i've found that Hexagons are best for Maps at a mid-size scale of towns, farms, and battlefields, where Hexagons have a sidelength of 0.2 miles. I outline the reasons in this graphic: with hexagons of sidelength 0.2 miles:
1 hexagon is 64 acres,
10 hexagons are 1 square mile,
19 hexagons are 2 square miles.
When measuring distances from centerpoint-to-centerpoint across adjacent hexagons (those that share a side), a good way to approximate is to consider 3 tiles = 1 mile, but for every 5 miles you tally, add 0.2.
Thus if you count across 15 adjacent hexagons, you’ll estimate 5 miles, plus 0.2; 5.2 miles.
If you count 60 adjacent, that’s 20 miles, plus (4*0.2); 20.8 miles.
This formula is y=(x/3)+x(0.2/15), and it closely approximates the “correct” formula of y={[sqrt(3)}/5)x to 1 decimal for x-values <150.
this makes it really easy to calculate the distance a party travels on winding roads through maps that are at this "0.2 mile hexagon sidelength" scale.
Assuming decent farmland by medievel standards, you can also use the hexes to calculate how much land can support how many people.
1 hex = ~64 acres = 20 people
10 hex = ~1 square mile = 200 people
24 hexes = ~2.5 square mile = 500 people
>10 hexagons are 1 square mile,
>19 hexagons are 2 square miles.
Please explain this math to me
Sidelength of the hexes are 0.2 miles.
Area of 1 hex = 0.10392 mi2 (66.51 acres)
≈ 0.1 mi2 (64 acres)
Area of Cluster of 10 hexes = 1.0392 mi2 (665.1 acres)
≈ 1 mi2 (640 acres)
Area of Cluster of 19 hexes = 1.97 mi2
≈ 2 mi2
Area of Cluster of 24 hexes = 2.49 mi2
≈ 2.5 mi2
1, 10, 19, and 24 are not random choices for cluster sizes; they are the size of easily-bound areas using a hex grid. You can count on a hex grid to see what I mean.
For large-scale maps, the 6-mile "tall" hexes used by the ACKS system (these have a sidelength of 3.46 miles) work well.
Those have a huge area of 31.2mi2 each and should be saved for depicting modern, massive cities, settings with long, straight highways, etc.
But for games I run, where farmland, wooded paths, and medieval size towns (most medieval cities were crazy small) are the milieu, these "0.2" mile hexes work a lot better for me.
you can see
for the approximations of how much hex'd farmland you need to support x amount of people, assuming decent land and standard euro-medieval farming practices.
Gridless with tape measure or go home.
That's great until you're just a millimeter out of range
Referee can decide it's within tolerance, otherwise you get there next time. Don't really see a difference to when you want to go a square/hex further than you have movement for.
I like hexes, not gonna go into any sort of rules or math autism to justify it, I just like em, simple as. The homebrew system I'm working on for the sake of simplicity all rules (movement, effect ranges, etc) is all just listed in hexes instead of feet or meters or whatever with one note near the beginning that says a hex is 5 square feet when things need to be measured for contextual reasons.
Real men use staggered squares
Hexagons are the bestagons.
Hexes are a big meme.
Someone in marketing found out that saying hexes are awesome and make things better with zero facts helps sell games.
Same exact thing with the word roguelike.
>hexes are a meme
Doesn't explain why hexes are a meme
>someone in marketing
You can't even rely on your own words to explain your reasoning?
>saying hexes are awesome and make things better with zero facts helps sell games
Almost like saying hexes are a meme with zero facts to back you up?
>Same exact thing with the word roguelike
Completely unrelated
This might be the single worst post on /tg/ right now, congratulations.
Hexes are a useful tool for maps since they provide a lot of easy measurements. I think if you're using a virtual tabletop though you should just go gridless. I can't really justify using a grid for anything other than simplicity for battle maps, and you can easily convert grid-based systems to gridless. For overmaps they are definitely useful still IMO, and hex is just better than square if you get used to it. If you don't want to square is fine.
OP, you're way fricking overthinking it. Hexes and squares are both arbitrary ways to represent distance and orientation. Obviously there's geometric differences in how they tessellate and one way or another, there's going to be some level of awkwardness in marking a 'real' space on your hex or square grid. That's perfectly acceptable. A tabletop game (be it an RPG or wargame) *has* to involve some level of abstraction and use of player imagination. Any statement that is emphatically and uncompromisingly pro-or-anti hex-or-square is just pure fricking autism.
What system/game are you talking about?
Why use hexes or squares? You don't need a grid.
People play wargames without a grid and that requires moving and therefor measuring a lot more dudes than a ttrpg. Just pull out your measuring tape and move what ever direction you like.
People will b***h about it being slower, but 90% of the time the dude you want to hit is obviously in rage so you just pick up your model and move him next to the target without any counting grids, so its actually faster.
I genuenly dont understand "Its slower" thing, like, just move the model? or are they standing there calculating how many nanometers they can move? Its just much more intuitive and immersive than any grid
On a gridded map you can "pre-measure" while it's not your turn by counting cells.
In the I-go-you-go world of wargames this isn't an advantage, but for a table of five plus GM it's necessary. The speed-up comes from avoiding confusion between players by clearly having an "active" player.
Consider: Grid-less system that uses minis with hexagonal bases and a hexagonal ruler for unit movement.
Minis are allowed to rotate freely, but must lock into base contact to be in formation or melee combat.
This is effectively the same as round bases. but with less fudging. (Densely packed circles approximate hexagons)
>hexes
I have a real love affair with them when it comes to campaigns. If you've got or can find the 2006 release of mighty empires or planetary empires you can make some great hex based maps.
I prefer round bases and gridless for combat, but I like hexes on the GM side for overworld maps. It makes for more natural feeling region shapes for what the regions of random encounters are, and theyre a quick way to estimate travel distances without trying to measure across what may be a tiny 8.5x11 map stuck to the inside of my GM screen. Though, when I've had a bigass poster map, it's been fun to unfold it on the table and have the players measure actual distances.
I mostly use them for my zones of random encounters.
what about octagons?
You cant make them into a grid without connecting squares.
1. Okay, I was thinking a normal octagon, not one with an inverted corner. I stand corrected.
2. I think you just like that the center looks like a swastika in this radial configuration. 4edgy6me. I dont see any practical benefit to this setup. If you make it just tile one-way instead of radially, like on either side, it just tiles like hexagons with a weird divet shaped cutout
The swastika thing didn't enter my mind, its just the image I got from googling 'octagon tile the plane'
Be a little less paranoid dude. It isn't even on a 45 degree tilt like the nazi one. If you're going to lose your shit every time you see two lines intersect with four arms coming off then your going to live a terrible life.
Stop seeing nazis everywhere.
On this website I typically start with the impression that people are being edgy trolls until I'm prodded to conclude otherwise.
So, fair enough, but I stand by my assessment that it wouldnt offer any benefits over hexes.
The benefit is that if you are mapping a globe and assume the center of tessellation to be a pole then you can approximate going around the globe by following reflex angles. It only works for one hemisphere but better than hexigons.
Oh. If you want a tiled globe, triangles would be your best bet. Something like this, or higher resolution.
No I don't want to tile a globe. I want a tile that when put onto a flat plane can approximate a globe, because at some point I want to put a piece of paper in front of my players with locations on it.
You see this shit? This is what triangles look like on a printed piece of paper. It isn't very intuitive how that translates into a globe. At least with the octagons when I tell them the center point is the north pole, it becomes super fricking obvious how it works.
Fricking play a game before you make suggestions. A triangle tiled globe is zero use at the table unless it happens to have 20 sides.
>I want a flat piece of paper to approximate a globe on.
Oh. Yes. I was thinking a literal globe unwrapped. A bit more accurately. But that said, a triangle-subdivided 20-sided globe unwrap (somewhat like the 2e worldbuilders guidebook, though I think it might have subdivided the triangles with hexes) is also very clear north is up south is down, and will hold the whole globe nicely at whatever scale you want the triangles, just a bit less of a spherical shape.
But sure, your octagon thing does give you poles that are surrounded in expanding rings of tiles, and so long as your globe is essentially a d8 shape, it'll get the job done.
I'd rather the triangle subdivided d20 over the octagon subdivided d8 personally, but sure.
Found it. World builders guidebook did indeed subdivide them with hexes. (Which you can certainly do, but it gives pentagonal tiles at all the corner intersections of the triangles.)
You did it. You found the solution that doesn't have intuitive distances, uses the most dead space, and looks like utter shit when you draw a world map on it. Its the worst possible thing you could have done.
Best of it it literally doesn't work if you need to move over the missing spaces near the poles because the hexagons don't align with each other. If you folded that into a 3d object then the hexes wouldn't even fricking tile.
God damn genius.
You can thank TSR for the hexes.
They do line up and make more hexes except at the corners though.
But yeah, I dont like that you get the handful of pentagons. Thats why I said subdivide the triangles with more triangles, to whatever resolution you want. With only triangles you can absolutely line up the edges differently and get clean triangle tiles everywhere.
Except then you are stuck with triangles which only easily resolve movement in three directions instead of six. Terrible solution.
I think it looks alright. Most of the time you don't need to look at the whole globe, and will just be looking at one triangle or two adjacent ones. The only weird case is if you're on one on the two poles, but you can line up some edges there for a quick variant map for that edge case. It's not like it'll take you that long to rotate a couple triangles in krita/photoshop.
Whats unintuitive about the distances exactly?
>Whats unintuitive about the distances exactly?
Measuring distance, especially if you need to go over one of the blank triangles of the map.
That map makes it impossible to eyeball the distance from Helsinki to Moscow.
That would be one of the situations where I suggested you make a more local map and connect the triangles.
Why do you need to only use a single projection of the whole world map rather than zooming in on more local regions?
>Only 3 directions easily counted out instead of 6.
Ah. Frankly my players generally just pull out a tape measure for distances. When I do a tiled map it's not usually player-facing, I turn off the grid but leave the scale visible.
So they would just chart their course from Helsinki to Moscow (again, I would connect the sides and have a couple smaller scale variants of the map) and they'd make a rough measurement with a measuring tape / ruler, and call it good.
Hexes make more sense for large scales like for the GM to plot out different zones of beast/monster/faction territory. I wouldn't want to use them on a combat map either.
>Frankly my players generally just pull out a tape measure for distances. When I do a tiled map it's not usually player-facing, I turn off the grid but leave the scale visible.
Then why do you need a grid at all? Players are already just tape measuring it, so for all intent and purpose that is how the game is.
I use the grid for roughly plotting out random encounter zones, simply because I find them convenient for that. Sometimes also for quickly estimating how much rough terrain theyre crossing and how much it'll slow them down. I use them for GM-side convenience.
TRIANGEL :°D
I normally use 6 mile hexes for encounter zones and don't map out a whole world, (something the size of REH's OG hyborian age map is more zoomed out than I would normally need). But if I wanted a world map I can zoom in on, a subdiv'd d20 projection works and is the option I would pick.
I feel like if you are going to that effort just to have players measure a straight line you are going to be much better off formatting your game as a point crawl instead.
The players are already effectively point crawling by moving along lines between significant locations, your just making more work for yourself by designing content for the gaps between.
>Point crawl not hex crawl.
>He's familiar with Alexandrian-discussed game procedures
Based.
I generally do run it as a point crawl, unless theyre looking for something in a vague area of the wilderness. Its a bit more work to map out encounter zones on a grid, but it gives me a map that also works for wilderness exploration if it comes up or they decide to cut across open terrain instead of following the common travel routes.
>Happens to have 20 sides.
20*(4x) where x is an integer greater than or equal to 0.
80 sides would tile great, so would 320, etc. And it subdivides down evenly, infinitely. Subdivide to roughly a 3.5 mile length per side triangle and theres your '6 mile hexes' scale people seem to like so much for wilderness gameplay.
You can use the deltoidal icositetrahedron to tile the globe with squares.
>"squares"
The absolute state of burger education.
You don't know shit about topology
>implying square has a topological definition
Kek
You *could* unwrap something like that to squares as a deformed subdivided cube true. But then the shape on the texture wouldnt match the shape on the globe very closely. Those are pretty distorted to call squares, but at least the distortions are consistent. Its an option. I think if i want to unwrap a whole planet I like the triangle subdivided icosahedron better because i can use equilateral triangles and itll be closer to a sphere in shape than a proper squared cube-globe would be. (It's not like I need nice quad topology for animation purposes here, it's just for a map, and as mentioned I'm just coloring in regions for GM-facing tools, the players get one without the grid).
you are talking to some gaslit israelite anon they are never going to stop obsessing over something that was real in their mind
>every shape (except for the la creaturas in the middle) has exactly six neighbors
That's one fugly hex grid.
Thanks, I made it by tracing a photo of your mother
>oh no I made a moronic post and someone called me out on it
>better insult his mother
>surely this will enrage him so much he forgets that I was moronic
This is Ganker. You can type anything you want here, newbie. Black person! gay! israelite! Except for onions.
What is all this hideous homosexualry? Just use common sense. Yes squares are the only correct option for man made terrain. Hexes work well for overland travel where greater distances are covered.
My go to rule is: hex for big maps like cities and continents, squares for anything where your character is involved.
Hexagonal graph paper tends to be harder to get ahold of, and more expensive. This doesn't matter as much these days when people can order stuff online or use virtual tabletop software, but still is a bit of a factor to consider.
Is there a way to do them by hand?
You can do it by hand, but that takes ages. Or you can print it out, but that limits you to relatively small paper sizes. Meanwhile if your game uses square grids most of your player base can just nick some from the supply closet at school or work.
Yeah, 1/4" square graph paper is fricking everywhere.
I just print out grids at whatever size I need on my laser printer, with light lines. Theres a bunch of websites that will generate them for you at whatever scale you want, for whatever size paper you want, as pdfs.
https://incompetech.com/graphpaper/hexagonal/