The Robgoblin proposes going to a three mile hex size (and also links to a couple of other posters who have proposed similar).
Funny. I’ve been going in the opposite direction. Huge hexes. One hex = one day of travel.
Lately, we’ve been playing a lot of Arden Vul, which does use three mile hexes on its valley map. One hex is one hour of travel, at my party’s current pace.
But I’ve also made versions of the map with one hex per day of travel. And for our ocean map I made even larger hexes since a sailing ship sails a lot longer in 24 hours than the party can walk in ten hours.
It’s great. For this specific region, a day is the salient number. Three encounter checks per day (two in the day time, one at night), scratch food and water.
So many mechanics key off of “one day”. Just as how in the dungeon, one exploration turn is the relevant number.
Anything that’s within a day, enh, we can eyeball it (“this looks to be about a third of a day”) or have maps with subhexes.
Yeah, yeah, the smaller hexes were also good so that we now know that it’s four hours between Arden Vul and Gosterwick. But I’m so happy that I made the huge-hex version because things like “we’ve got to go down to Bilsham to get some stuff from our ship that’s anchored there” which used to be a two-session ordeal is now like thirty minutes. And we’re not losing out on any salient stuff! Talking to people on the way down, running into monsters, handling the resource game; that’s all there! Handling things at this course granularity only loses the tedious stuff and not any of the good stuff.
Robgoblin’s point is that a six mile hex isn’t great because it contains too much stuff. You tend to oversimplify, thinking that a six mile hex only has one thing that’s cool while in real life it might’ve had three entire cities in there. Ironically the huge-hex version makes sense even for this problem because you know there is a lot of stuff in each hex. There’s a whole day of travel in there! Each hex is its own li’l kingdom almost.
I have a nitpick quibble around this one part:
And that idea has merit, it’s certainly mathematically convenient. But we don’t make maps for the convenience of mapmakers: we make them to describe territory.
The six mile side-to-side, seven mile point-to-point convenient property isn’t for the benefit of map makers, it’s for the benefit of map users. “How can this gameplay tool best help us run the game?” How can we best support salience time zoom? Making gameplay be about new and interesting decisions. Yesterday we had a six hour session and most of that was spent on one in-character conversation: how to deal with an incoming army. Six days happened diegetically but we could handle the travel bookkeeping quickly. There were plenty of fights also.
The characters are restoring one of the palaces in the ruined city and they had to deal with venom-lobbing spiders. They’re also at war with a baboon tribe and there’s an incoming threat of Burdock himself (or Sultan al-Dabab, as he’s been renamed in our campaign) sending a couple of hundred mamluk soldiers after them.
Going to huge hexes has been such a good change because we’re spending our sessions less on the tedious and fiddly counting and more on the actual real gameplay decisions that matter, and on the ham acting and, uh, let’s call it “character studies” that we love.
Robgoblin wrote in, saying:
And I don’t disagree - the right sized hex for the right purpose, and rules to suit!
Of course, you can easily subdivide a 24-mile hex into 3-mile (or 6-mile) hexes if that suits you. Elide the tedious days of travel, then zoom in when you need to.
👍🏻
(To nitpick, the 30_10 map we’re usually using to represent one day of travel has 30 miles. But just like Robgoblin is saying, that’s also dividable into 3 or 6 mile hexes.)