The Gaming Den

Regarding the 'big square' issue: I don't like it. I think Murtak raised valid issue behind the design philosophy involved in something like that.

Also, currently the problem has been tackled by giving charactesr 12 "Action Points" per round. Depending on how realisitically the players and GM want the combat, characters either spend 12, 6, 3, or 1 AP at time. That allows you to divide the round into 12 "subrounds" if you prefer, or just do it D&D "rough and fast" style. Presumably, in a fight against mooks, you'd opt for the low resolution approach, resolving combat quickly. In an important fight against the BBEG, you might need to slow it down to 3 or 1 AP expentitures at once.

Murtak: I would appreciate a breakdown of why hexes are preferable to squares.

Hexes can model movement much better than squares do. Consider moving diagonally accross squares. If you can do so you can move like this:

for the same cost as moving like this:

This of course makes no sense, not to mention it looks utterly ridiculous, so most systems do not allow it. That in turn however means that you have neighbouring squares that are further from you than other neighbouring squares. Since hexes do not have diagonal neighbours to begin with you avoid all of that.

Of course you can fit most human-built structures into squares more easily but on the other hand you can fit fireballs into hexes quite easily.

There is one very big drawback to hexes though. You can move diagonally, true, but you can only move horizontally or vertically depending on the orientation of the mat, not both.

How is that a drawback? Surely being able to move in 6 directions is better than being able to move in only 4 directions?

There is another big drawback with hexes.

They don't actually do diddly to interact with simultaneous charges, simultaneous movement or simultaneous turn resultion in any way. As far as dealing with the initiative and resolution problems outlined on this thread more uniform diagonal movement is about as relevant as what kind of hats the simultaneous chargers are wearing.

Now if they were really BIG hexes...

Edit: of course someone asked why hexes are so nice, but still, they're irrelevant to initiative so my point stands damnit.

The biggest problem with hexes IMO is that you constantly have to deal with half-hexes. Walls tend to go at right angles. and this means that you are going to have a wall which acts as a border to one hex and splits the next hex down the middle. This constantly requires you to have to worry about how to deal with partial hexes. Something you rarely have to worry about with squares.

What hexes handle very well is area effects. Cones, radius attacks, and so on are much easier to handle in a hex system than they are in a square system. Hexes don't have the annoying side effect of having diagonal squares worth more than side squares and this ends up being very helpful for a lot of things from movement to area effects.