Quote:
Originally Posted by Fister
What makes the 6 mile hex the preferred scale?
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Well, it lets folks treat hexes as dungeon rooms, with empty/less populated rooms. Personally, I use a 5-mile hex; either way, a 5/6-mile hex is about the range of a man-sized animal. (The difference mainly is source.
OD&D,
AD&D, and the
Judges Guild used 5-mile hexes;
Basic/Expert D&D used 6-mile hexes. I learnt from
Judges Guild products.)
But that's not my objection. Folks run campaigns quite well in 10/12-mile hexes; you use Justin Alexander heavily, and he runs many, many local games (well, local to him and me) with a 10/12-mile hex. Jürgen Hubert has run
GURPS hex crawls at that scale. My issue is mixing apples and oranges. You're including Sorolla's work, which depends on 5/6-mile hexes wherein there are supposed to be empty room hexes, so to speak, and Alexander's, wherein there is supposed to be a major encounter in every hex. You can do an adaption (I had to accommodate both hex sizes for my
Pyramid article), but you're forcing someone to keep track of both the 5-mile hex and the 12-mile hex.
Basically, I'm saying, "Pick one."
EDIT: I see now that you don't actually mix hex sizes, but the issue does apply, as you are allowing encounters from two hexes (or, 24 miles) away to show up, which is quite a ways away. Also, you're combining Alexander's (purely unplaced encounters) encounter system with Sorolla's (purely placed encounters). My way of doing this is to use Sorolla's, with the modification that a roll of 12 on a d20 (which is no encounter in his system) is replaced by a pure random encounter, which is then placed on the map. I did something like this in the article when I changed the system to 3d6 (or 2d6 for 10/12-mile hexes, which only goes one hex away rather than two); the mountain lion encounter he gives in the example is a perfect example of a minor encounter that I don't think should be placed beforehand. Admittedly, I use the
d30 Sandbox Companion to handle road encounters, since in the inhabited areas characters aren't by any keyed encounters and simple things like markers or dead bodies or random bandits makes sense in those areas.