Scaling a Hex Map

Рет қаралды 8,517

Жыл бұрын

Should you make a 6 miles per hex fantasy kingdom map?, What about 5 miles/hex? 8? 10? And how does that choice impact a "continent" map and the world map?
While we do mention how this relates to a few of Worldographer's features, the core concepts apply to any hex map using any tool or on paper.
You can also read this same material here: worldographer.com/2022/10/pic...

Пікірлер: 27

@petersmythe6462 3 ай бұрын

Keep in mind that while trails are not straight, diagonal movement isn't either. So in some ways you're already getting some inefficiency why time the party doesn't go in one of the six cardinal directions.

@petersmythe6462 3 ай бұрын

I don't think we should assume a brisk walking speed. First off, aren't you carrying a bunch of camping gear. Second, even an open prairie is nowhere near the same as a paved path.

@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin 2 ай бұрын

It just assumes they know where to go. Ie. There's signage, they've taken the route before, or they have a guide, they have a pack mule to carry most heavy gear, etc.

@tangerian319 Ай бұрын

As the lunatic re-writing FATAL to be a more socially acceptable and reasonably playable game, I've personally spent days trying to figure this out. I've discovered that even with an average load for camping an adventurer could manage a speed of about 4 km/hr, so about 2 mph. And this would be without any breaks. Or a bit of a faster pace, but stopping for breaks to eat or drink water.

@petersmythe6462 3 ай бұрын

Good to mention the length of a mile because some other places have customary miles that are not the same size. When I went to Norway all of my relatives there spoke in miles, but not the 1,609 meter US mile. Rather, they had adapted the word mile to mean a deka-kilometer. 10,000 meters. That is the sort of unit confusion that changes a 20 minute walk into a 3 hour one.

@Tyneras 3 ай бұрын

Sounds like a throwback to when everyone used the same unit names but none of the units matched. Half the units changed depending on what was being measured!

@Suzuki_Hiakura 2 ай бұрын

@@Tyneras Did you hear the story about the queen wanting a bed made to fit her and her crown? Was told it in Elementary, and basically the bedmaker was imprisoned for making a bed that is not 6 feet (king said it needs to be 6 feet front to back), and the maker (being a small kid) had counted 6 of his feet. Made a model of the kings foot to make the bed right, and a happy ending all around, with the invention of the foot unit of measurement lol.

@Tyneras Ай бұрын

@@Suzuki_Hiakura Another version was that the inch was set as being 3 wheat seeds long, which meant that areas with poor soil had shorter inches! And the French inch was longer than the English inch, thus the myth that Napoleon was short (he'd be considered average today, and tall back then).

@Suzuki_Hiakura Ай бұрын

@@Tyneras lol. Loved that. Wonder if there is a version about miscommunication, like someone mistook a melon or pumpkin as an inch xD As big as the world is, I feel there is a good chance.

@robbabcock_ Жыл бұрын

Great video! Thanks.

@inkwellideas6624 Жыл бұрын

Glad you liked it!

@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin 2 ай бұрын

Pictured: 10,000 square kilometers of swamp. :P Scale that's approx the size of earth though would be 500 miles per hex on 50x50 (reasonably sized hex map). That's 625 million square km, where earth ~500

@txbluesguy Жыл бұрын

At the world level, I have it at 500 miles per hex, Continent level, I set the hex size to 100 miles per hex; at the Kingdom level, I set the hex size to 20 miles per hex. I haven't used the province level very much. Regarding travel, I set a base number of miles for each mode of transportation (walk, horse, wagon, boat - rowed or sailing) and then use % factors for different terrain. If the terrain is like western Kansas, flat as a pancake, then a person gets the full movement. If that area also has a true road (i.e., cobblestone, not dirt), they can go faster (especially with a wagon). Hills and mountains slow down travel.

@Usammityduzntafraidofanythin 2 ай бұрын

Province level is kind of fun if you want to put heavy detail into specific areas (may as well draw it out by hand at that point though). Players can travel in or out of a province in a day, but it would be interesting if they only had a day to do a quest and they have to choose the best route, or they're tailing an NPC and the hours matter.

@brenmayhugh Жыл бұрын

I have bounced back and forth using a 5 mile or 6 mile hex. Would love to see a map option to deal with the issues of hex scale near the poles.

@kadmii Жыл бұрын

I had a generated world map that I used a tool to render into Sinusoidal Projection. After a bunch of work in GIMP, I created an interrupting sinusoidal map, and applied hex grids to each segment. At the edges, you jump directly to the next segment, though I did my best to place the segment boundaries on the sea. Suffice it to say, the geometry of a spherical world is too difficult to deal with otherwise and I doubt anyone will be able to make a singular program to handle all those steps.

@Droid6689 6 ай бұрын

Villages would typically be roughly 5 miles from other villages/towns and at least within 6 miles of a water source. So either hex size is appropriate. Walking speed is 100% irrelevant since realistic travel speeds have far more to do with terrain than how quick legs move

@Grimmlocked 4 ай бұрын

this only works if you are thinking of d&d like it's actually european medieval.... it's very much based on the old west and midwestern scale of towns. with the trappings of medieval fantasy

@Droid6689 4 ай бұрын

@@Grimmlocked Not really. Most DnD settings are based on pre-settled continents, not old westerns. Though that does beget a campaign idea of modeling a setting around Jamestown or other colonial settlements where the players are in a remote environment with no access to reliable support/supplies and surrounded on all sides by potential threats.

@Grimmlocked 4 ай бұрын

that's how i framed my lost mine of Phandelver back in the day. @@Droid6689

@petersmythe6462 3 ай бұрын

Memory is still an issue. 200 million faces is quite unwieldy if you want a mile scale map if a planet. Not impossible but unwieldy.

@Drew-yj3ns Жыл бұрын

So an earth sized map would have about 100 hexes at the equator roughly? trying to figure all this math out for my own world tbh

@inkwellideas6624 Жыл бұрын

Yeah, if you want to go with 250 mile hexes that could work. Again, because of the curvature of a planet it will get skewed as you get further from the equator--or maybe in this case it'll be a bit too small at the equator (every two hexes might be 575 or so miles because of the hex staggering if you have columns lining up) but then at the 10-20 degrees latitude it will be right, then the scale gets further and further off as you approach the poles.

@xeltanni8999 2 ай бұрын

Allow me to offer up an idea that may or may not be interesting or helpful: if this is a fantasy world, it doesn't HAVE to be a globe. Make a (for lack of a better term) Flat Earth that is floating on the back of four elephants standing on the back of a giant turtle or whatever you like. Then you don't have to account for curvature. The odds of any players even ever getting out to that scale are remote to begin with, but also imagine if they DO reach the literal edge of the world and just see a gargantuan waterfall draining off into a star-studded abyss.

@ViktorRotkiv98 Жыл бұрын

Which program is this?

@inkwellideas6624 Жыл бұрын

Worldographer: worldographer.com/

@petersmythe6462 3 ай бұрын

The horizon distance thing is basically irrelevant for most real terrain that isn't ocean. I can see Mount Hood from my street despite it being easily 50 miles away. Moreover, I can also see a lot of the terrain between here and there because it gain elevation faster than the horizon drop off. At the same time, if I go into the nearby trails, I can see just 100 meters at most because it's all blocked by trees, and I'm many directions that drops to about 10 meters.