A couple quick questions about a topic that, as someone who enjoys designing encounter spaces, has always interested me.
1. What measure of space to you prefer on your battlemats/graph paper, hexagons or squares?
2. How do you approach things when you get to 3D space. Do your hexagons become hexahedrons or hexagonal prisms?
3. What types of environments or strutures do you find most difficult to design with your preferred shape?
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1) Hexes! Specifically, 1" hexes.
2) Hexagonal prisms, I suppose. A fully 3d fight might run without a map at all. Otherwise, just on the hex with d20s for elevation.
3) You notice not being on a square grid when you're making a rectangular room, but it's not too bad. I wouldn't say it's a big deal.
Cheers!
Landon
We use a dry-erase board and a ruler.
No hexes or squares.
It makes movement more natural.
:D
1) Hexes! Specifically, 1" hexes
Can you elaborate on this? Sounds interesting?
Though I prefer squares to hexes, I prefer no grid (and a ruler) to a grid. Since I design maps and print them in large format, I have been known to create graphics that emulates changes in height, then I sometimes label the higher elevation in how many feet off the ground it is, even for multiple elevations in the same map.
In game, we usually use a white board (2 sheets of plexiglass) with a 1" grid printed paper in between the plexiglass.
I get the value of hex regarding movement, but PF is square grid, though not evenly distance in movement, the grid is arbitrary and whether as accurate as hex is all pretty meaningless. I see no particular value with a hex for wilderness maps, a square is perfectly fine, or even a scale bar and no grid at all. All works fine.
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I like hexes but my players unanimously voted to rise up against their right and proper lord if he were to continue playing with hexes, so we're back to a 1" grid.
This makes anything round kind of annoying, especially something like a round tower with stairs along the internal wall. There's always a "can I stand in this square even though the wall cuts into it a little bit". I try to draw well enough and provide a good rule, like "it counts as squeezing if more than 20% of the square is cut off by a wall". But when you do a circular staircase, it gets down right painful.
Hexes, definitely.
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1) Hexes! Specifically, 1" hexesCan you elaborate on this? Sounds interesting?
Not too exciting. I just mean 1" rather than 1.5" hexes. The scale is still 1" to 5 feet like most people do with squares.
My group feels pretty strongly about hexes, though. We don't like having to think about corners, mostly.
It does mean we can't get flip-maps or use Large+ minis, which is a little sad, but I appreciate what it does to my budget.
Cheers!
Landon
HEXES! HEXES! HEXES!
If I am going bother using a map with a grid, I want a hex map. Not as clunky as squares and yet still able to facilitate miniatures and movement rules. There is a reason that most war games use hexes if they use a grid map.
That said, there are a lot of times I just use a map and a ruler instead.
If I'm designing a game from scratch, generally speaking I'm going to go with hexes, and minimize concerns about the Z-axis as much as I can.
If I'm playing Pathfinder, I'll stick with squares, because a number of rules just plain rely too heavily on them. Size categories for instance. If you're medium, you take up one hex, and that's just fine. If you're huge, you take up 7, and that's just fine. If you're large though, you take up 3, and to move you we've got to do this awkward little shuffle... or we can skip the half-steps, make large 3 hexes wide, huge 5 hexes wide, but that gets awkward for other reasons.
And of course if I need to really really heavily incorporate 3D logic, cubes are really the only sane way to grid it up. I guess if you really wanted to, you could work off tetrahedrons, but... no.
As a gm, im gonna say squares because its easier for me to draw on squares than hexes. So dungeons and towns and inside buildings i go with squares. Outside areas, forests, or overview world map i go with hexes.
Tbh i need each
Yeah, it's the 3D space part that has always made me a bit reluctant to go to hexes.
I've been wanting to try hexes but our gm uses modules with maps printed for grid.
I prefer hexes for tactical fights, but I have to admit that it's often a struggle representing buildings (which tend to be predominantly rectilinear) in a geometry where those right angles aren't a good fit.
Yeah, it's the 3D space part that has always made me a bit reluctant to go to hexes.
Even in 3D, if you're talking about aerial combat with gravity, the Z axis is still going to be a special case. The asymmetry of a hex prism is no big deal at all when gravity makes that direction inherently a special case.
If you're talking about pure open space with no gravity, then yes, it's a bit awkward. But honestly, table top gaming is always going to be awkward in that case. The table top is a 2D surface, and it's going to be a chore to represent open 3D space.
Trying to adapt hexes to true 3D by using dodecahedrons is unworkable. Way too much bookkeeping to try to represent. As long as you're on a tabletop system, you have to keep it simple and stack the hexes right on top of one another in a simple prism shape.
If you aren't constrained to playing a tabletop game, and you're trying to do it in 3D space, that means you're probably in a computer game, in which case there is no reason to try to simplify the rules down into grids at all. You can just use free movement and trigonometry instead.
Squares. purely because of the greater range of support. Until I can find Hexagonal graph paper for a decent price (for planning and ect) I'm much more likely to use squares over hexes.
If I DID find said graph paper then it's hexes all the way.
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Squares. purely because of the greater range of support. Until I can find Hexagonal graph paper for a decent price (for planning and ect) I'm much more likely to use squares over hexes.
If I DID find said graph paper then it's hexes all the way.
I use Gaming Paper for hex graphing, both the pads and rolls. I've been really happy with it.
Sadly, I haven't found much pre-printed for hexes (like the flip-maps). It's basically all on the GM.
Cheers!
Landon
Hexes, even with the issues that have been pointed out here (which are relevant) I find them vastly superior for most everything else in the game.
I usually GM on map tools, so both are pretty viable for me.
Hexes or freeform (no grid).
I,m largely indifferent, but I take whatever is cheapest. So squares it is!
No to freeform though. It disturbs my cartesian mindset.
Hexes! :D
