Hello! Welcome to the Cauldron’s blog club. This week we are looking at our last entry from the year 2009, “In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex” by Steamtunnel on the Blog The Hydra’s Grotto.
You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
In this classic post, Steamtunnel argues for the dominance of the 6 mile hex based on ease of measuring distances, potential visibility into neighboring hexes, and its ability to be broken into 1/2 mile sub hexes (and smaller). This topic and opposing hex sizes were revisited several times both by its author in “The Ergonomic 3 Mile Hex” and much later Joel Hines in “Down with the 6 Mile Hex! A modest proposal.”
I use 3-mile hexes as the base size. I can break those into 1-mile hex clusters for more detail when I have need. One can stand in the center of a 3-mile hex and see into the surrounding hexes, should terrain and foliage allow. On flat ground, the horizon is roughly three miles distant, so standing on one edge of a hex means everything from you to the horizon is in that hex (if facing directly across it).
While I too am a proponent of the 6-mile hex, I use hexes to abstract away the levels of granularity described in that article, so those points are lost on me. Interesting stuff, though!
(For me, it’s all about a hex size that is reasonable to easily spot prominent landmarks and get a general idea of the hex’s contents while passing through, and be able to get the vibes of neighboring hexes from a good vantage point.)
I think this post by Dwiz is very important context for discussing these different hex sizes properly. Here’s how it starts:
I have noticed an unspoken disparity in the way people seem to use hexes in the context of a hexcrawl, and I think it deserves some attention. That is: do you bother with precision in the movement that takes place within a hex OR do you treat the space within them as fairly nebulous and concern yourself only with the movement between hexes?
This is a surprisingly complex topic.
Edit: I see Joel Hines makes similar points in his post linked by @Barnum above. Still, they’re both good reads.
Surely someone else (who’s used to Abstract Hexes) read that classic Hydra’s Grotto blog post about 6 mile hexes and thought, “wait, how is this even remotely applicable to the way I’ve been hexcrawling?”
It’s me. I’m that someone. I didn’t really realize there was another way besides abstract hexes.
Also, that Joel post almost had me converted to a 3-mile hexer. Almost.
I find all the conversations about hexes and point-crawls a bit dizzying. I love the idea of nerding out on the details, I just can’t always tell what the conversation is about.
Here’s my mega-reductionist take on what the conversation seems to be about. I’d love to know if folks think that I have missed anything big. Not in terms of how to run a hex-crawl/point-crawl, but in terms of the distinctions people are advocating for and why.
abstract tile vs interesting interior
do you like a more board game style, where you are dealing with an abstracted position, or
do you like something that facilitates the math of movement on a 2d map.
zoom level
1 mile hex, nice tactical size, perhaps a field of vision. used as an abstract hex
3 mile hex, something akin to thinking in terms of hours. you can start to care about the interior
5/6 mile hex, something akin to thinking in terms of days. sweet spot between abstract tile and interesting interior. 5-mile provides easy math, but 6-mile has less of a rounding error problem.
the 6 mile in particular is convenient for having hexes with hexes. zooming out to 24, or zooming in to 3 or 1.
24 mile hex, grand scale, thinking of kingdoms and strategy.
hex vs point
since hexagons tile the 2d plane so well, it provides the sense that you can go anywhere. at the potential cost of having dead space. dead space may or may not be interesting, depending on how you play.
the point-crawl makes the interesting areas front and center, perhaps downplaying the “you can go anywhere” feeling.
I very much fall in the camp of using hexes for abstraction. It’s maybe why as of late I kind of ditched hex-crawling altogether, opting instead for point crawls or just altogether handwaiving travel. As I understand it, traditional hex-maps are really more GM facing, whereas players engage with travel more in fictional terms (3 days journey through the eastern canyon).
Mythic Bastionland has so far been my favorite system for hex-crawling since it abstracts distances into hex-leagues, since a measure of miles really does not matter in this game. It also serves as the primary engine for triggering the game’s events, rather than using encounters as a form of punishment or distraction from the players’ goals.