Hello /tg/
I'm trying to build up a way to sandbox in the wilderness, and since it necessarily involves mapping, i was wondering which way is better for long-range (ie: not combat) distance: hex or squares?
TL;DR: better hexes or squares for exploration purposes?
OP - What do you think?
For my next atlas map, I'm inclined to do it with no grid at all, to a scale (like a real map), and then lay grid over it.
I think hexes are easuer to count distance than squares, corrdinates are easier to specify locations. A ruler/string is the only accurate method.
>>44110168
Hexes are usually favored in larger-scale RPG maps.
>>44110168
Hexes are always better, since you can move more freely. Especially if armies are involved, the diagonal square movement is a bit icky. I don't know any advantages of squares over hexes.
Hexes offer more "natural" land distinctions. You can dedicate entire hexes to either land, river, forest, and hill/mountain, and still wind up with a semi-natural looking map. Working with a grid, however, would result in weird rivers with right angle curves and square forests.
On the smaller scale, I prefer squares, because drawing rooms is a little easier.
>>44110331
I'm inclined to think that hexes may be better, due to the actual distance covered: diagonal move in squares should be ~141% of your actual speed (compared to 100% in horizontal/vertical speed), while this problem is eliminated in hexes since distance is always the same for all the neighboring directions.
I'm not even sure this actually matters though, that is, if there is any actual difference in the number of "steps" needed to cover the same distance, in a square grid or in a hex grid.
So I'm here to seek for /tg/'s wisdom and experience.
>>44110463
This. Grids work best in artificial environment where there are a lot of right angles. Hexes work better for more natural shapes.
Though I just drop a river down as a line running through the hex, because a river wide enough to fill a six-mile hex is going to be something pretty unique.
>>44110463
This seems to be a good way of thinking it, thanks for your contribution.
>>44110441
This >>44110463
Squares make man-made objects much easier because they're all rectangular. On a hex grid, you'll always need to make special rules and arrangements for getting around tight buildings.
>>44110510
Hang on, I have a book with the numbers in it.
>>44110168
sandbox is a terrible kind of campaign, stop being lazy and make up a real plot
>>44110515
> six-mile hex
Is the six-mile scale some sort of a broad agreement?
Funny thing, I was calculating the average walking speed of a man (starting from wikipedia source) and it's about 36km every eight hours/day of walk. From there, I supposed that three hexes with a side-side distance of 12km was an optimal choice for translating the day of walk, since it's divisible by 2,3,4 and 6, and since it can be also partitioned as "dawn, day and dusk" while walking.
Do you think this is a sound idea?
>>44110168
Hex is better because diagonal movement in square grid is not equal to movementin x or y
>>44110639
>make up a plot
Stay pleb, anon.
>>44110639
You are aware sandbox tools and settings are useful within a plot, are you?
I don't suppose if the party needs to, i don't know, dig out an ancient relic within a whole wood they have gps tracing for quest items like in wow.
>>44110639
>stop having fun the wrong way
>>44110655
Well, it's a popular size. From the center of a roughly flat six-mile hex you can see out to the edges and just into the neighboring hex.
You can cover a max of about four of them in a day's walk, which corresponds to a two-hour "watch" of marching, (A "march" is eight hours long, and then you have to rest)
There are some other ways that it divides up neatly, and six mile holds a TON of stuff if you want, but at the same time if you just want one or two things per hex, it's still fairly reasonable.
But even so, it's really up to the DM. Some folks like 5 mile hexes, or 25 miles, or 12.
>>44110700
they just need to roll to find the way, there's no need to waste their time with dumb hex hunting or some old school shit, it's 2015 for fuck's sake
>>44110552
>>44110510
It is a simple consequence of the theorem of Pythagoras that a unit that is allowed to move diagonally on a square grid in fact moves more than 41% farther in spatial distance than a unit that moves horizontally or that moves vertically. Claims that hexagons do not distort distance are incorrect. Hexagons do to some extent distort distances, but the distortion is considerably less. There are several ways to reckon and describe the distortion, but a standard number is that the distortion of spatial distance to a hexagonal grid is about 14%.
It is possible to reduce the movement point distortions still farther, relative to replacing a square with a hexagonal grid. For squares, the solution was introduced by the old MIT SGS game Strategy I. By saying that the horizontal vertical moves cost two movement points, but the diagonal move costs three movement points, the diagonal move becomes 50% more expensive than the horizontal move, which is an error of less than 9%. Squares are thus made less distortive than hexagons.
If we say that moving in a straight line along a row of hexes costs six movement points per hex, but if one turns alternately left or right one pays only five movement points per hex, the distortion in the hex grid is reduced to a few percent. Saying that the cost of moving one square is two movement points or three movement points should not be very distracting, because such rules are already common as a way to represent terrain effects. Writing an exact rule to deal with the alternating directions of motion along hexagonal grids may or may not be completely trivial; I have not seen it attempted.
>>44110739
>roll
>not using nature as an antagonist in itself
>the only enemies of the party are statblocks
You are the lazy old schooler here.
>>44110850
stop sputing memes, sanboxes are for lazy nostalgiafags and the hexcrawl is dead, just pick up some real campaign written by someone good
>>44110765
Wow, now that's very instructing, thank you very much. I'm still inclined to use hexes, but I think I'll be using these rules if I'll want to switch to squares.
Talking about squares still, do you think it might work even for smaller scale situations, like combat? Or will it be just burdening for the game flow?
>>44111003
Squares have been used for years for that.
If you don't want to use the 2/3 system, having cardinal movement cost 1 and diagonal movement cost 2 then 1 then 2 etc. works similarly. Several systems use that.
>>44110552
Almost every book has page numbers
>>44110935
>lazy
>go play pre written modules
You are still contradicting yourself.
Also, it's not like you disproved my previous point. If you have nothing to contribute apart from shouting "X is dead!!11", which is meaningless as long as all the people in a group agree and have fun on doing X, you can fuck off.
>>44110765
For more fun, a brickwork pattern of squares is the same as a hex grid.
There's also this thing, which is a pentagon grid.
>>44111137
>Squares have been used for years for that.
Yeah, poor phrasing from me. I meant the movement rules, not the combat itself. Thanks for clarifying it even more though.
>no ones talk about triangular tiling
>>44110737
Thank you. I'm not English, so I'm not familiar with this particular use of "watch" and "march", can you please be more specific?
Is does anyone have a printable scale 1 inch hex image or pdf?
I can make up a Square grid easily just in Microsoft Word but hexs are impossible to do.
>>44111168
This is kind nice for big maps. Give a nice natural feel.
>>44116709
OP here, i made this for myself.
Get photoshop and scale it to your liking
>>44117852
Don't have photo shop, Poor fag :(
>>44118056
Well, look for it in the gulf of buccaneers, yarr
>>44118056
im a poorfag and i have photoshop
what is stopping you?Green is my pepper can do it, too
![barbarianprince_map2[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/sXzkahu.jpg "barbarianprince_map2[1].jpg")
Getting it out of the way: I'm a Battletech player, so I'm biased.
Square grids are basically just there for convenience (You can find square graph paper at any office supply store), and because they're mostly used for creating very square rooms in dungeons. With everything at a right angle, things can begin to feel pretty rigid. More importantly is that it doesn't do distances very well if it's at any sort of an angle. Some folks use 1.5 movement costs for diagonal movement to compensate for movement gains and losses as seen in the pythagorean theorem, but it's not perfect.
Again. Easy to get your hands on, but as a tool to illustrate distances, not so handy.
Hexes (Or staggered squares) have a bit more of a natural and organic feel to them, which allows for more natural feeling environments than you'd get with squares. The other big benefit they have is that the distance is constant. If you're properly counting your hexes, you could pull out a tape measure and measure the distances between 8 hexes in a straight line or at an angle, and it should be the exact same. Especially if you're looking to do a hex-crawl (There's a reason they're called hex-crawls), Hexes are the best way to go for their organic feel and distance keeping. I'd also argue they're the best way to go in every circumstance, period, but like I said, biased.
Some folks have difficulty with wrapping their mind around hex movement because they can't get their heads out of the "Cardinal Points" mentalities, but that's the biggest problem you'd face. Even inside walls that don't line up with hexes, GM arbitration based on which direction the player is coming from, simply drawing the walls thick enough to not have that issue... You can easily run a standard "Everything is square" dungeon using hexes, so long as you're not counting movement costs for "Turning", which most RPGs do not, you shouldn't notice any difference.
>>44118056
Considering that Photoshop costs in the thousands of dollars for software people mostly just use to make image macros? You'll find almost nobody owns it... but it's installed on nearly everyone's rig, anyway.
>>44118056
Use Gimp...
>>44114379
The terms are a little archaic, but watches and marches were last used as military terms, and I think they come down to us from the wargaming crowd.
A nautical watch was four hours, and was how long a crewman was on duty, while the ancient Romans, in and out of their military, divided the night into three hour watches.
A march, on the other hand, was just the standard period of a full day's march, and you generally didn't have your army march more than eight hours at a time, normally with a short rest in the middle. Any more than eight hours was what you call a "forced march" and is normally seen in desperation, because even really fit, well-trained men won't be able to take that for long.
>>44110331
this.
the real world is neither hexes, nor grids. Design a map accordingly, and then overlay it. Even better, give the player the option of what sort of overlay, if any.
Personally, I've always wanted to give the players some really fucked-up proper medieval maps, with shit-tonnes of distortion, with markings for the mile-stones or days' travel on roads, but no accurate scale.
>>44118056
>Don't have photo shop, Poor fag :(
Aside from the obvious (Yarr, raise the jolly roger m'earties!)
GIMP.
Free, 100% legal to download, Open-Source, image processing software. Not quite photoshop, but almost as good for general artwork.
https://www.gimp.org/
>>44120759
Thanks.
>>44120631
Having everything in-game be classical medieval maps would certainly be more immersive, but wouldn't you agree it would be helpful for the DM to have a grid with actual distances so you can actually track where the party is?
>>44121361
of course - that's where photoshop/gimp can come in handy.
of course, you need to make two maps - the real, and the "inaccurate" version, so it takes a lot more work, but its entirely possible to use transparencies, layers and overlays to make an illustrated map become a technical one, for GM's use only.
here's an example I did a few years ago, where a parchment accurate version was made - the finished version was stacked with things like lines for roads and sailing routes, town names, all that shit.
>>44121534
good stuff man
>>44121534
and here's exactly the same photoshop file with the textures stripped, grids overlaid, no parchment, etc.
>I'm getting paranoid. Capcha images included a map...
>>44121581
the fun bit was that the terrain was created from a photo of a load of chipped and scratched paint on the back of a seat in a railway carriage, that some random anon saw, took a really shit photo of, and posted on here, saying "doesn't this look like a map?"
Which do you think is better?
On a large scale, I divide it up: For my players, they don't get hexes/squares, whatever. They get a map, and point to a location on it.
For me, I use a grid, but it doesn't really matter how that grid is shaped: hexes or squares or octogons or whatever. The purpose of a grid for me is to divide an area into roughly equal areas, and let me define the types of encounters a party is likely to deal with traveling through those areas. You can do that equally well with either squares, hexes, or pentagrams.
>>44116709
Shit, son.
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/
2 million seconds on a word processor
>>44116709
Have this, it's great. I recommend running it through an image editor and reducing the lines from inky black to a soft grey before printing, though. If it's too dark it can be hard to read your markings between the hex lines.
>>44122448
How do you manage the particular case in which the pcs are exploring an unmapped area, or where the area is more or less known but simply they don't have the map, or are supposed to not have it?
I don't know, large forests, deserts, wastelands and so on.
>>44126262
2 layers on my map project, one that simulates fog of war while still revealing general features known to everyone.
After the session, I remove the fog for that area and make any necessary changes.
In session, I try to be descriptive enough that they don't need the visual aid of the map.
>>44110168
Hexes probably, but the main question is how you want mobility to shape out. If you want a limited, staccato progress across the board then squares will serve you better. If you want a more fluid and dynamic movement, go for hexes.
>>44116709
This is a little bit smaller than 1" hexes, but there's enough hexes on a simple 8.5x11 to work decently with a single page. For larger maps, just print multiple pages and fold over the whitespace at the edge - the pages line up perfectly when you lie one on another, so it can be as large as you want.
Bonus pages include some tokens and rules for giant creatures, but those rules might not apply to your system.
>>44127038
Cool, I might do it too. Though you don't have a system in session to actually manage exploration, it's more improvising than actual mechanics, am I right?
Want hexes?
http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/hexagonal/
Thank me later.
>>44123071
>>44129471
Thirded
>>44120631
>Scocia Ultramarina
I propose creating a regular /sbg/ - sandbox general in which we could share material, advice and prepared settings for sandbox games.
>>44131019
Goddamn Albanians.
>>44132219
Sexy Link here is right, i approve of this.
>>44129282
Pretty much. It's less improv though, and more just figuring out where my players are trying to go, and then what's in between them based on the map I've made for my use.
>>44110168
Actually, circles are best.
Just use a compass and straightedge on a piece of paper or a whiteboard.
>>44132219
That'd be pretty baller actually.
We could share maps, random encounters, towns and setting info.
>>44123300
so triangles.
>>44132553
why are they superior and not interchangeable with squares and/or hexes?
>>44132510
I see. I'm actually trying to devise a method of managing exploration through orientations checks, movement values and weather effects, all without necessarily providing players with a map. Should be the ultimate wilderness sandbox tool.
>>44121361
From Ed Greenwood's site:
>Do you want to hear behind-the-scenes stories, some of those that can now be told, about why things are the way they are? Why, for instance, that from the beginning the Forgotten Realms® maps didn’t have hexes all over them, so the rivers didn’t run in little diagonal lines along the edges of hexes, but rather the maps looked like maps of real places, rather than game maps?
I'm not sure if this was ever explored much, but the Forgotten Realms products specifically mention that they're presented as in-universe maps, usually drawn by someone from a specific place, so they get a little more hazy and less-detailed as they get further away from their place of origin.
There were hex overlays but I don't think the maps were supposed to be 100% accurate. They could be, but I guess the idea was that it's up to the DM's interpretation.
>>44132965
It was a dartboard terrain setting back then, and isn't any better now.
>>44134308
I think it's still good for that. Then again I've never read the novels or played the computer games, even though I hear the Crystal Shard trilogy and Baldur's Gate are good.
You just have to bluff and put on your best poker face when you mention Ten Towns and some player can name them all because of a Drizzt novel. Great job, player. Those sure are the ten towns!
I made a reference image for relative travel distance (straight/diagonal) and segment area (half/corner) on a hexagonal grid.
>>44110765
Diagonal movements is easily corrected this way.
>>44122031
The hex grid looks better than the square grid. Moreover, with fill/cutoff areas it works fine with rectangular structures too.
>>44135030
OP here, while I'm flattered you built on my template, I'm not sure i got the reference you made.
Geometrically, the 6 line and the 1 line are the same length, why are they having different scores?
>>44135396
6 refers to the straight distance (compared to 10 for diagonal).
1 refers to the corner area (compared to 3 for half).
Wouldn't some kind of octagonal grid be better? That way you can say, "I go east," or, "I go north west."
They don't tessellate but I'm sure someone has come up with something. After all, there are games where diagonals on a square grid still counts as 1 space.
Maybe even expand it to sixteen-sided polygons (whatever those are called). Depending on how the grid then looks, maybe 100% accuracy with distances becomes even less of a concern?
>>44135450
So is 1 moving to bottom right corner to upper right corner? That's still the same distance as from hex center to near hex center.
Or maybe I'm still not getting what you mean.
>>44135557
The problem from octagons onward is that your grid stops being uniform: you get visible gaps in between tiles.
>>44135585
I fixed the segment borders to make it clearer.
The 1 and 3 refer to the relative area of the shaded segment they are in, not to any sort of length.
>>44135557
But it's just a square grid with little holes in it at a 45 degree angle
>>44135557
>>44135604
>>44135835
To be more precise, having no tesselation could go two ways.
The first is you stop immediately at what is effectively a square or hex grid, just more complicated and ugly.
The second is you keep adding sides and making the tiles smaller, the limit of which is circles so tiny you're working in a free 2D coordinate system.
No gain over using either a square/hex grid or coordinates in the end.
>>44135953
What if they overlapped and you just ignored the overlap? Or is it that the same thing?
>>44136432
Then, if you would keep only the non-overlapping areas, you would find you're left with a normal tiling pattern, though probably no longer regular.
It's not exactly the same thing, but sacrificing regularity is actually a step back even.
>>44135781
Ah now I got it better. So, say 10 and 6 are miles/kilometers - ie: distance - what are 3 and 1?
Thanks for the explanation.
>>44132553
Is there any difference between this and having no unified system?
Is it that you define a location by a radius, and there's no standard radius so some places are large circles and others small with no regular pattern?
>>44136826
Now with approximately geometrically correct areas, and more cleaning.
If you have a straight distance 6 and a diagonal distance 10, then the area of a hexagon is 30.
This means a half-segment has area 15, and a corner-segment has area 5.
