![]() Who cares, right? Well, your players will care if they travel a week north, a week east, and then travel home southwest because they’re not actually going to get home. Instead it’s 30 degrees south of west, which is about 15 degrees off (or 60 degrees south, which is off 15 degrees the other way). ![]() So the next step is obvious: why not just make a hex map and not tell the players that they’re on a hex map? Well, turns out there’s a very good reason: On a hex map, southwest isn’t really southwest, or at least not without a lot of painful jiggering it isn’t. ![]() Yes, you can make house navigation rules to shift the effectiveness back towards landmarks (basically add a big penalty to your navigation roll if you’re not using landmarks), but that’s an extra layer of complexity. Hex maps (from the player’s perspective) badly undermine that dynamic because it’s far easier to just say “I travel a hex east, then a hex northeast, then a hex north” than to pretend you don’t have access to the convenience of hexes on your map. If I described a ridge they saw and they would point at their map and say “hey, we must be here” I would shrug and neither confirm nor deny. ![]() No hexes, no squares – just an open terrain map … they would say “march southwest into the woods for three miles, looking for a big tree” and then we’d check Wilderness Lore to see if they went anywhere close to where they intended. I want more of the feel of players navigating by landmark, finding points of interest and traveling from one to another because sight navigation is easier than heading directly to the end destination, similar to Ben Robbins’ West Marches game ( see comment #7 here). Easy to scale the map up or down and put things roughly where they need to beīUT, in my case I don’t actually want to RUN a game on a hex map from the player’s point of view.Easy to judge density of points of interest, also due to the built in scale.Easy to judge distance due to the built in scale.There are three main advantages to overland mapping with a hex map, as I see it: ![]() But at least this time I think I’ve actually gotten somewhere with it: namely I’ve decided on an alternative to overland mapping with a hex map. As usual, rather than actually prep, I find it much more useful and productive to agonize and fret over how exactly I should go about prepping until the desire to prep fades away. ![]()
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