How Do You Handle the "Inside" of a Hex? (George Lucas Special Edition)

[Context for this post: this is a re-write of an old post of mine I wrote back in 2021. I wasn't happy with my explanation, and it's filled with errors, but people link to it frequently anyway. Please update your links to this version, instead.]

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.

Two types of map, two types of game

We're going to call these opposing styles "Representational Hexes" vs "Abstract Hexes."

On a map using Representational Hexes, we typically see a fully-rendered, detailed interior for each hex, forming a continuous illustration across the hex boundaries. For example:

Credit: illustrated by Fernando Salvaterra, for the Vynestra setting by Giles Penfold

On a map using Abstracted Hexes, each hex instead indicates only the general character of the contents within (most often, the terrain type). This is typically done using singular, standardized icons. For example:

Credit: Collabris, a setting created by Matt Colville, used as an example on the Worldographer website

For a long time, I had assumed this was a mere aesthetic difference. But now, I realize that these two methods define entirely different playstyles, and accommodate very different design possibilities from one another. Despite RPG nerds talking about hexcrawls online every day for literally decades now, they've somehow seemingly all managed to overlook this fundamental distinction.

What does this actually change?

Oh jeez, so much.

The more you dig into it, the more you realize that these two types of map aren't even really doing the same thing. The very meaning of "hexagon" is different in each context. Let's go through a bunch of examples and compare the two versions.

1. What does crawling look like?

I think I first noticed this difference to begin with when I read that classic Hydra's Grotto blog post, "In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex." The author argues in favor of 6 mile hexes rather than 5 mile hexes based primarily on the mathematical properties on display in this diagram:

See how cleanly it breaks down into convenient units? As it says in the original post: "From a navigation standpoint pretty much any route through the hex in general is covered."

When I first saw this, I was confused. Not because the math is hard, but because I didn't understand the use case for it. I didn't realize that folks using Representational Hexes are actually pulling out the yard stick and measuring the party's precise location within each hex, or they're measuring the exact route they move through each hex to keep a running total of the distance traveled, down to the mile (or half-mile, even).

Here's a demonstration of how you'd use this in actual gameplay. Let's start by drawing a travel route onto a map drawn with Representational Hexes.

The route was clearly drawn freeform, by hand. For whatever reason, this party clearly wanted to visit both of those lakes before heading up into the woods. So how do we calculate the distance traveled / the length of the line? Well, we can break it down into chunks based off that tool, using each hex as a reference point.

We approximate the route into this basic shape, a line connecting centers, vertices, and edges of each hexagon the line passes through. Add those up and the route should be roughly 41.5 miles. If you know your rate of travel, you can then calculate how much time such a trip should take.

To many of you, all of that is obvious. To others, that was utterly bewildering!

To folks used to Abstract Hexes, none of those steps would ever arise in play. If you were calculating the distance of a route, you'd instead simply count the number of hexes traversed.

Each hex is a discrete unit, so it plays a little more like a board game with hexagonal tiles. Like Monopoly or Candy Land, you "travel" by counting the number of spaces you move along the playing board. One...two...three...four...

Your presence within a hex is also a strict binary. Either you're occupying a hex, or you're not. We're not tracking your precise location within a hex, like we would with the Representational Hexes. Consequently, you always travel a whole number of hexes. Which means that, if hexes are 6 miles, then you only travel in multiples of 6 miles. You never have to calculate how long it would take to go 41.5 miles. Either you go 6 hexes (36 miles) or 7 hexes (42 miles).

In a sense, the Abstract Hexes are really just nodes in a uniform network. The map is technically a (very dense) pointcrawl.

This is similarly bewildering to people used to the other playstyle. I once tried explaining this idea on Reddit and the response was, "do you think it would be feasable [sic] to handle traveling in less than ideal sitiations [sic] as fractioning the total number of hexes you go or penalizing it?" and I'm like, "dude. You go one hex. There aren't fractions." No shade to that guy, it's just a difference of understanding and experience.

But what about when you visit different locations that are all within a hex? Well in this version of crawling, we define movement between hexes differently than movement within hexes. The language I often use is "traversing a hex" versus "exploring a hex."

To quote Anne Hunter:

I think the two purposes of hexes are to regularize travel times, so that each hex represents 1 unit of travel time, and to demarcate locations that take no travel time to move between. If two locations are in the same hex, it means that you can pass freely between them without "traveling" the way you do to get between two locations in different hexes.

You can simulate all the movement within a hex through a mechanical abstraction. "Roll a die to determine which site you discover." At no point does the player have to actually look at a map, see the sites of interest, and chart their route to get there. At least, not at the sub-hex level.

2. How you make the map

To start, on a Representational Hexmap, you may notice that the landscape doesn't even really conform to the contours of the hex grid. Here's the example map I've been using, before the hexes were added to it:

You can see how the artist simply drew this map first, and then the hexes were added on top (more or less arbitrarily).

So then what's the point of the hexes? Well, they're essentially just a fancy ruler. You know how on most maps, somewhere near the key, there'll be a ruler showing you the scale? One of these things:

The problem with those is that they're always tucked away into the corner, far from the parts of the map you're interested in. They're useless without a handheld ruler to compare them against. Well, a hex grid serves as its own ruler, right where you need it.

One of the benefits of this is that all maps can be used for hexcrawling. For example, u/BadRussell edited the map from Chance Dudinack's The Black Wyrm of Brandonsford so they could run it as a hexcrawl.

They pushed a few major sites around here or there to center them within hexes, but technically they didn't need to do that.

You could do that with any map. Check this out:

And voilà! Instant hexcrawl.

(I seem to recall once upon a time the original Forgotten Realms boxed set included a transparent hex grid sheet that you could overlay on the map, for exactly this purpose.)

The title of this post refers to the "inside" of hexes. So in this style, when you populate each hex with gameable content (NPCs, adventure sites, safe havens, etc.), you literally just draw them somewhere in its interior.

Pretty much all the fancy professional cartographers in the industry seem to use Representational Hexes in their maps. It certainly looks more deluxe.

Credit: Mike Schley, the main cartographer for D&D 5E. Taken from his map of the Sword Coast

Credit: Christina Trani of Lorelei Cartography. The hexes are very subtle on this one.

By contrast, I believe the vast majority of hex-mapping software is designed with Abstract Hexes in mind. You'd often do this from scratch, with a palette of terrain types and other icons you can assign to each hex.

Credit: HexKit, stolen from a stream by Chris McDowall

With Abstract Hexes, if you had a pre-existing map you want to hexcrawl, you'd need to recreate it one hex at a time. For example, to make a map of Middle Earth ready for hexcrawling, you wouldn't simply overlay a hex grid on top. You'd lay down hex tiles one by one, subtly re-shaping the landscape to conform to the hexagonal contours of the grid, like this one made by Idraluna Archives.

So when you populate an Abstract Hex's interior with various contents, you make a list of hex sites off to the side, in your map key. Their exact location is left undefined. They're just "somewhere inside that node." Like in this map here, the hex only shows jungle terrain. But according to the map key, somewhere in there is an iron mine, a creature's nest, a whirlpool, a hollow tree, and more.

Credit: Andrew Kolb's Neverland

3. Movement mechanics and math

From what I can tell, hexcrawling systems designed for Representational Hexes are also typically built with highly granular calculations in mind. Like we saw before, even though the hex might be 6 miles across, you're expected to measure your journey down to the individual mile. For example, here's the movement rate chart from the 1E AD&D Greyhawk Gazetteer:

As you can see, you're expected to factor in the terrain type, your mode of travel, and your encumbrance level to determine how many miles you can travel in a single day. This is meant for a map using 30 mile hexes. Thus, if you travel by foot, unencumbered, on a road, track, or grassland, then you can travel exactly 1 hex's distance per day. But if any factor changes for any stretch of your trip, suddenly your distance traveled is now a fraction of a hex. Walking unencumbered through the hills? You traverse 2/3 of a hex. Bringing your horse into a swamp? You traverse 1/6 of a hex.

(Side note: walking 30 miles per day is crazy fast)

This is also where you see people have so many debates about hex size. The dimensions of the hex will set your reference lengths when calculating the distance of a journey. There are tons of competing standards, including 3 miles, 5 miles, 6 miles, 20 miles, 24 miles, and 30 miles. But at the same time, the size is a bit arbitrary. The mechanics won't "break" if you change the scale of your ruler. It merely changes the precision of your calculations.

By contrast, in a system designed for Abstract Hexes, a "hex" is often defined as a mechanical unit within the travel procedure, rather than merely serving as a measurement tool. Instead of saying "you can travel 24 miles per day," it might say "you can travel 4 hexes per day." The term "watch" has been popularized in the OSR as a time unit employed with hexcrawls, often 4 hours or 6 hours in length, e.g. "you can move 1 hex per watch."

As a consequence, it's much more difficult to incorporate all these travel speed variables in a system made for Abstract Hexes. Let's look at the math for 5E's travel rules as an example.

DMG 14 suggests 6 mile hexes, among other options, so let's go with that. PHB 182 provides the rates for overland movement: normal travel pace is 3 mph, fast pace is 4 mph, slow pace is 2 mph. Therefore, a party moving at a normal pace would take 2 hours to traverse 1 hex. So we could set our travel turn length to 2 hours, right?

But wait, that doesn't work. Because if they move at a fast pace, then in 2 hours they'd cover 8 miles, which is equal to the length of 1.5 hexes. At a slow pace, they'd only cover 4 miles in 2 hours, which also isn't a full hex. Not to mention that difficult terrain doubles travel time. Traveling at a slow pace through difficult terrain would take you 6 hours to cross a single hex.

Another option to incorporate many speed variables is to allow players to traverse multiple hexes in a single turn. Kind of like in a board game, or in the combat procedure. "On your turn, you can move X number of spaces," that sort of thing.

This is actually how it works in OD&D, as shown above. 1 turn = 1 day, and your mode of travel tells you how many hexes you can traverse each day / turn. That then gets modified by terrain, though, which complicates things.

I think the smoothest way to handle this, which is what Outdoor Survival does, is to give you a budget of "movement points," and then have each terrain type cost a different number of points to enter. So in that game, you start with 6 movement points, and "clear" hexes cost only 1 point to enter. But a forest costs 2 points to enter, so if you pass through a forest hex, you can only traverse through 4 clear hexes in that same day.

This is the only way I can imagine accommodating the level of granularity that 5E's travel mechanics require. At the smallest possible scale, we could change the hexes to 1 mile across, so that a party moving at a normal pace traverses 3 hexes per 1 hour turn.

The problem with this option is that it's incompatible with the now (almost) universal design standard of 1 hex traveled = 1 turn. Neverland, Hot Springs Island, Fever Swamp, Mausritter, you name it. The basic exploration / travel procedure is a cycle of 1) move to an adjacent hex, 2) check for encounters, interact with the hex's content, etc., 3) update the time record, 4) repeat.

Thus, when dealing with Abstract Hexes, the reason for choosing one hex size or another is simply how long you want 1 turn to represent. If you want to divide a day up into 6 watches, then each would be about 4 hours. At 3 mph, you can cover about 12 miles in that time, so it sounds like a 12 mile hex should be your standard.

But there are also lots of hexcrawls where 1 turn = 1 whole day. This is what Necropraxis uses, Matt Colville uses, and I recall that being the rule in Luke Gearing's Fever Swamp. The "crawl" happens on the scale of days and weeks rather than hours, so 1 hex should be... 24 miles across? 20? 22? 18? Hard to say. Personally, I prefer to leave the size undefined! My favorite hex size is simply "the distance you can traverse in one day of travel" with no further elaboration.

4. Sub-hexes

You know, these things:

From what I've seen, sub-hexes seem kind of controversial. I think that has a lot to do with the very distinction this blog post identifies.

I think they make perfect sense when you're using Representational Hexes. They're just a finer ruler to use when measuring distances. Instead of choosing one hex size, you might choose two. A big number that's easily divided by a smaller number, like 30 and 6, or 25 and 5, or 12 and 4.

Credit: Dyson Logos

On this map, there's a huge disparity between the super-hex sizes and the sub-hex sizes. I bet that the map key refers only to the super-hexes, providing only 7 descriptions for the 7 major chunks of this map here. Yet the sub-hexes would still be useful for up-close measuring.

But with Abstract Hexes, sub-hexes usually wouldn't make sense. Remember, by definition they "abstract" the inside of each hex. You would need to provide some mechanical definition for each layer of hex, such that both units have a meaning within the procedure.

Alternatively, perhaps only the sub-hex is mechanically "real," whereas the super-hexes merely carve up the map into conveniently-sized chunks to make your prep work and keying more manageable.

Credit: template from the Welsh Piper

Which is best?

My impression is that Representational Hexes used to be the norm in olden times, whereas Abstract Hexes are now more popular. TSR-era hexcrawls came from a culture of wargamers, who were quite used to measuring movement distances on their tabletop with rulers. OSR-era hexcrawls are influenced by decades of board games and video games, as well as a general culture of wanting to streamline crunch. But there are definitely some notable exceptions, too!

For example, we already saw that 1974's OD&D, the first commercially-published RPG, used Abstract Hexes. But it used those because that's what Outdoor Survival used, and Outdoor Survival used them because it was a board game, not a war game.

Something charming about this map is how rigidly it conforms to the hex grid. Mountain ranges somehow always go perfectly vertically or perfectly diagonally, but never horizontally.

Another old game that used Abstract Hexes was 1977's Traveller. Each hex spans 1 parsec, and may contain a single star system. In fact, lots of hexes may be empty, meaning that there's no reason to ever travel into them.

Because almost all the mechanics in Traveller are also diegetic, your ship actually uses two different means of travel for movement "between hexes" (interstellar) and "within hexes" (interplanetary). Your ship's main thrusters can only take you places within a system, propelling you from planet to planet or from asteroid to moon or whatever. But a parsec is such a vast distance that you can only traverse it by using your jump drive, slipping into "jump space" to move faster than the speed of light. And that's what the hexcrawl models.

Of course, you're free to zoom in and map out the contents of any single star system if you want to. Here's a diagram of the Bowman system, detailed in the supplement BeltStrike: Riches and Danger in the Bowman Belt.

When I played in my first campaign, our group got somewhat "stranded" here for a few sessions, so we had a lot of fun hopping around from asteroid to asteroid on this map. But this sort of thing is not the norm in Traveller. It's never necessary or expected to zoom in to this level of detail. The primary mode of play is the hexcrawl, and the hexcrawl only cares about interstellar jumping, abstracting anything at a smaller scale than that.

Meanwhile, an example of a recent game that uses Representational Hexes is Jacob Fleming's In the Shadow of Tower Silveraxe from 2021.

Credit: I think also Jacob Fleming? He's really talented. The hexes are labeled with a letter for each column, but a number for each diagonal instead of each row.

I really love this adventure, but I also hated the hexcrawling part. I did my best to try the Representational method, using that 6-mile hex diagram to measure the length of each journey the party took so I could calculate the amount of time it would take. And it was a huge pain in the ass! It's even worse if you're one of those GMs who insists on making the hex map exclusively GM-facing, hiding it from the players for some reason. (But that's an argument for another day).

The map tries to save you some pain by listing travel times on each route. They're really granular, instructing you to add up distances of 2.2 miles, 4.3 miles, 8.7 miles, etc. Basically no segment of any journey you make in this adventure can be measured as a "whole number of hexes." But what happens when you go off-roading? Or, even worse, you only travel part of the route, but then depart from it halfway through? For example:

The red line shows where the party follows the roads, making calculations easy. But then they decide to split off halfway through a segment of the path to take a shortcut, as denoted by the blue paths. Well crap, now I gotta throw out the path numbers!

(Looking back at this now years later, it occurs to me that maybe I "should" have also factored in vertical shifts in the movement calculations. It is an elevation map, after all. But man, fuck that.)

I suspect that bad experiences with Representational Hex-style gameplay are responsible for countless gamers writing off hexcrawls entirely. It's a slog that mostly involves doing boring calculations rather than making interesting choices.

Personally, I vastly prefer Abstracted Hexes. I find their style of crawling to be way easier to run, easier to play, and straight-up more fun. But in the interest of fairness, I'll note some criticisms.

One thing a lot of people dislike about Abstracted hexcrawling is that it makes the game feel too "board game-y." That is loses all the rich detail that makes you feel like you're really exploring a world. Representational hexes are easily the more simulationist option.

Likewise, I've also seen a lot of folks who started with Abstract Hexes eventually move on to using simpler pointcrawls instead. After all, if the way you've been hexcrawling was secretly just "really dense pointcrawling" all along, then at some point you might decide that giving every single point 6 exits is a bit much.

Can we find a compromise between the two styles? Maybe!

One thing that Representational hexcrawls get is a detailed zoomed-in experience within each hex. Well, Chris McDowall has recently been playing around with this idea of inserting mini-pointcrawls into each Abstract hex in Mythic Bastionland.

Interestingly enough, Dead Tree, No Shelter had a very similar idea a while back. Their hexes aren't, uh, quite exactly hexagonal. But it's the same basic concept.

Meanwhile, if you're interested in preserving all that juicy simulationist verisimilitude offered by the Representational hexcrawl gameplay, I think it's doable.

One of my biggest issues with that style of hexcrawl is that it's overly focused on movement speed as the primary question that all gameplay revolves around. Which really isn't that interesting to deal with. Random encounters? Awesome. Weird weather? Affects the game in a cool way. Foraging and hunting? Not always applicable, but it creates interesting choices when it is. Getting lost? Ehhh depends on how you do it, but sure. But measuring the exact route you need to travel so you can calculate the shortest time? Ugh. Is that fun? Really, is that anyone's idea of fun? It's usually a job for only one person anyway, and it rarely involves much of a choice. You just calculate the shortest route. You're solving for X. That's it.

I propose that you take each of those variables that would ordinarily factor into movement speed and find a different mechanical effect for them, instead.

Moving through forests, mountains, and swamps? Higher chance of random encounters.

Moving along a road? Removes the risk of getting lost.

Moving while encumbered? Inflicts an exhaustion effect.

Moving using a vehicle or mount? You can haul more stuff around.

To me, thinking about the nitty gritty logistics of a wilderness trek can be cool, but not if everything just boils down to speed. Trust me, this is a blessing in disguise.

Conclusion

Most products featuring hexcrawls seem to align pretty firmly with one style or the other, even if the author didn't make a conscious decision which one they were going for. But not always. For example, I've had some trouble determining which category Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa would fall into. Or take Mike Evans's setting for DCC, Hubris. It doesn't have a grid on its map, but the text recommends you play it as a hexcrawl. That implies to me that you can / should simply overlay a hex grid on top, creating Representational Hexes. But the individual sites of adventure have undefined locations, instead nebulously keyed to broad regions, like in Abstract Hexes.

In both products, you're just given content and told to deliver it by whatever means you want to. But people don't talk enough about the means! Two different groups could each play the exact same adventure or setting, yet one using Representational hexcrawling would have a wildly different experience from one using Abstract hexcrawling.

And that's why it kind of boggles my mind that I've never seen this distinction acknowledged elsewhere before. Surely at some point someone must have tried two different hexcrawl adventures and noticed, "hey, these don't support the same basic playstyle at all." 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?" Surely someone else (who's used to Representational Hexes) has watched the proliferation of hex mapping software and thought, "but how do you know the actual layout of the landscape if every hex is just an icon?"

But from now, as soon as someone pitches me the next big hexcrawl adventure they wanna sell me, this will be my first question for them.

-Dwiz