Hexcrawl - Unsorted Resources

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member





















note the melan comments - towards the tower. vision distance and the importance of abstraction to immersion













 
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The Heretic

Should be playing D&D instead
Silly question: I've always assumed that the distance covered by a hex as calculated from one flat side to the other. I have an adventure path that states that the distance was from one corner to the opposite corner. But but but...that just seems wrong to me. Am I alone in this?
 

bryce0lynch

i fucking hate writing ...
Staff member
You are not alone.

Mechanically, the purpose of the scale is to compute travel distances? So are characters entering from one corner or from one side? IE: this corner statement may be academically correct but irrelevant because its not how its used? Or is it? idk ...
 

The Heretic

Should be playing D&D instead
I thought about this some more when I was trying to sleep last night. Consider:
The usual scale used for graph paper is one square = 10 feet
A ten foot square room is usually drawn with all the borders shaded in as walls
Therefore the traditional use of the square is from one side to the other = 10 feet. If it was one corner to the opposite corner, ten foot square rooms would have to be drawn differently.
The hex is just like the square, except that it has six sides instead of four. Therefore it should be computed the same.

This was a Pathfinder adventure path where I saw this. So you can blame it on evil, bad Paizo ickiness.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
Hexes vs squares, corners vs. sides.... it's all just semantics. The DM decides how long something will take, and it takes that long... period. Even uniformity goes out the window, considering not all hexes are the same. Cross a hex, 1 day. Cross two hexes, 2 days. Cross a hex filled with jagged cliffs and thick brambles? Two days, or one and a half, or whatever you want. Ask a villager how far to the next town... "Oh about three days of walking". I'll never see a party complain saying "well technically we are crossing from the SE corner to the NE side, so it should only take 0.85 days"... no, the DM says something and it is what it is. Done. What they want to do will take 1 day. Ruling made, let's move on to the actual game please.

I will never understand why people let the game bog them down so much. You're the DM - the world is as you say it is.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
For me...get called out months or years later due to inconsistencies. (Predicated upon a long-running campaign.)
Just makes it easier, I believe, if you have a system that works for you and is well documented.
 

DangerousPuhson

Should be playing D&D instead
Here's how I see it:

Take an easy to remember rule, let's say 1 hex = 1 day travel.

Going from a corner to a side? Takes a day - the terrain isn't so easily navigable.
Going from a side to an adjacent side? Takes a day - there's some big-ass ravine to go all the way around.
Going from a corner to an opposite corner? Takes a day - it's a lot of unimpeded walking in a straight line.

The world is not conveniently broken up into hexes. To me in this scenario, the hex doesn't represent shape or distance, so much as it represents TIME. It's a day to do it, no matter how wide the hex or whether you start from a corner or whatever. A hex could be a five-mile stretch of thorn bushes and irregular terrain, and a hex could be a fifty mile stretch of open, well-maintained road - in both cases, they take a day to cross. In both cases, they are a single hex on a map.

The shape and distance of the hex is irrelevant - your party isn't going to whip out a measuring tape and check for hex consistency across the borders. They're not going to peek at the DM map. The borders of the hex are representative of a time measurement - 1 day's journey. If you were to directly translate this into distance hexes, sure you'd get some weirdly oblong hexes, but that's why you're using them to measure time and not distance.

But the hex only represents a unit of time, not distance, simply because I decided that it did. It could represent anything - units of supply, measurement in walking miles, days of water required, etc. point is, the lines of the hex are metrics we can set ourselves, and so long as we maintain the baseline metric of what a hex even "is", then consistency is easy to maintain.
 
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The Heretic

Should be playing D&D instead
(drat, where'd I put that glue trap...)

Hexes vs squares, corners vs. sides.... it's all just semantics...I will never understand why people let the game bog them down so much. You're the DM - the world is as you say it is.
Lol. I agree with you. I am more aghast that anyone would do the measure from corner to corner. That just seems barbaric.
 

squeen

8, 8, I forget what is for
@grodog : I was going to say how cool your blown-up Verbobonc-Dyvers regional maps are, but embellishing on topdichvu's elegant prose would just be gliding the Lilly. :p

Seriously, I think that is the most interesting region on the Greyhawk map because of the ToEE history. (I had integrated the B2 map a bit to the south, on a road through Gnarley for my home campaign.) Very cool. It will be fun to watch your work unfold. Someday, when we figure out how to get city-products right, Verbobonc and Dyvers need a fan treatment.

Sounds like a lost Crosby/Hope movie: "Road through Gnarley"

Happy New Year all.
 
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