Hexes vs. Squares???

[Ranger REG]

Have you *played* warhammer? You fudge all the time! Ever tried measuring an arc with a measuring tape? It's not very accurate. That and it takes FOREVER.

D&D is slow enough as it is. Stick with squares, be a good little sheep.

Well, I didn't say it is best. I didn't say it is simple. Besides, we created our own turning templates, as well as templates for different areas-of-effect.

But the good this is you get unrestricted diagonal direction, from 1 degree to 89 degrees, and all the minutes and seconds in between.

EDIT (7/16): Corrected spelling above.

 

[Conaill]

I never understood why people prefered hexes to squares. With squares you can move in a straight line in 8 directions. With a hex you can only move in 6 directions. Why use the more restrictive of the two? Especially in dungeons and other generally rectangular areas... hexes become a real pain in the butt.

Yeah, so you have to count diagonals as 7.5' if you really want to be accurate, but hexes aren't much better... you're still rarely moving in a perfectly straight line - at least with squares the change in direction can be as small as 45 degrees, compared to the 60 for hexes. Which sounds more accurate now?

The whole 5'/10' rule for diagonal distance on a square grid gets really messy, especially once you start mixing reach weapons and 5' steps along the diagonal. You never even have to open that can of worms when playing on a hex grid.

Put another way, on squares, you can only move in 4 directions without resorting to special tricks. On a hex grid, you can move in 6 directions.

Besides, the whole "you can only move in 8/6 directions in a straight line" is a straw man argument anyway. You can move in *any* direction in a straight line, providing there's nothing in the way. It's just easier to count the distance on a hex grid.

As for drawing rectangualr features on a hex grid... the trick is to never draw the walls through the *center* of the hex. That way you never wind up with 1/2 hexes, and it is never ambiguous whether a hex should count as a "full" space or not. Takes a little bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, it's just as easy as drawing on a square grid.

 

[Saeviomagy]

As for drawing rectangualr features on a hex grid... the trick is to never draw the walls through the *center* of the hex. That way you never wind up with 1/2 hexes, and it is never ambiguous whether a hex should count as a "full" space or not. Takes a little bit of practice, but once you get the hang of it, it's just as easy as drawing on a square grid.

Alternately you could just realise that a 5 foot hex is quite a bit of space, and making do with half of it probably won't make much difference...

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

And of course, there's a reason real wargame simulations take place on a hex grid. I'm not talking about anything you can buy at your hobby or computer store; I'm talking about the ones that cost millions to put on and consume the efforts of thousands of people for a month.

 

[Conaill]

Alternately you could just realise that a 5 foot hex is quite a bit of space, and making do with half of it probably won't make much difference...

Sure, but you get some weird effects with corridors (in a 5' wide corridor, every other 5' space can fit two people side-by side), and you get into arguments whether a corner hex (which could potentially be as small as 1/4 of a hex) should count as a full hex or not. My way, even corner hexes still contain more than 3/4 of a full hex, so there's never any ambiguity and/or arguing.

 

[Shin Okada]

I definitely like to play games (both board games and RPGs) with minis. And actually playing games with squares, hexes, and no-grids (tape measure type of thing).

Squares .... It is easy to make a good dungeon to play. Some may say it is strange that all the dungeon floors are made of 5 foot by 5 foot tile. But does that really matter? Squares are not so accurate when involving some diagonal movement. But it is not so problematic as most of the DnD combats are fought in relatively small (say, less than 20 squares wide) rooms. More than half of the members in my current D&D playground also play hex-map style board games. But no one complain about it. At least not so often

Hexes .... Better than squares for wider open battle field as you don't need to use 5/10 rule. But it is not so easy to make a dungeon map which is good to play on a hex map. And, when involving vertical movement, it is equally clumsy as squares. I like to use hex maps for most ground-based war games. But not for D&D.

No grid ... Well, by logic, it is the best way to handle distance and angle. You can move toward any angle, and you can measure the distance by using measuring tapes. But when actually playing in this style, you must expect your players arguing you all the time if his fighter can reach the opponent or not. I play warhammer and other actual games. So I know.

In overall, I prefer Squares for D&D. Sometimes I thought to use Hex maps for wilderness encounters. But after some play tests, I found it does not improve this game nor solve much of the problems. And simplicity is always good.

 

[Ridley's Cohort]

I find hexes to work extremely well when we adventure in a Giant Bee hive.

 

[Pax]

I never understood why people prefered hexes to squares. With squares you can move in a straight line in 8 directions. With a hex you can only move in 6 directions. Why use the more restrictive of the two? Especially in dungeons and other generally rectangular areas... hexes become a real pain in the butt.

Yes, and in four of those 8 directions, each square you move, is 7.5' of movement; in the other four, each square is 5' of movement.

Whereas with a hex map, whichever of the 6 directions you wish to move, one hex is 5' of movement, period.

Furthermore, you can simply redefine a cone to be a 60-degree arc (instead of the 90-degree arc we currently get), and it gets a LOT easier to count out what is or isn't affected -- without truly appreciable loss of area, in the grand scheme of things.

Reach weapons are much easier to adjudicate; if you have a reach weapon, you threaten one "ring" further out than normal.

Spells measured as a blast/emanation/etc -- anything with a radius -- you divide by ten, and that many "rings" out is how far it reaches (obstacles not withstanding).

Simplicity sometimes has it's own rewards; I strongly prefer a hex map, and it's what I'll be using in the (offline) d20 Rokugan campaign I'm starting up tomorrow.

 

[Nifft]

Hex = Love

I love hexes!

They're easier for everything from movement to area effects, and they encourage more "organic" structures, since you know you're never going to fit the structure to the grid exactly.

-- Nifft

 

[Ranger REG]

The whole 5'/10' rule for diagonal distance on a square grid gets really messy, especially once you start mixing reach weapons and 5' steps along the diagonal.

Bah. Such details can be easily resolved. After all, I spent the last decade remembering the gawd-awful THAC0 formula. Now it won't leave my head.