This week, Sam talks with Clayton Notestine about hexagons and hex maps. Some topics discussed include:
The birth of RPGs out of wargaming
Avalon Hill’s hex map
The vibes of different numbers
Why hexes and not squares?
The hex’s modularity
How RPGs create stories in the fiction and at the table
Leaving hexes empty
Travel in RPGs
Hex flowers
Clayton can be found @ClayNotestine on Twitter, @ExplorersDesign on Bluesky and dice.camp, at explorers.itch.io, and of course at explorersdesign.com. That’s also where you can get his sick layout templates and join the explorers design discord. I’ll see you in there.
You can find Sam on Bluesky, Twitter, dice.camp, and itch @sdunnewold.
Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey.
Join the Dice Exploder Discord to talk about the show!
Transcript
Sam: Hello and welcome to the season two premiere of Dice Exploder. Each week we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and throw graph paper at it to see if that helps. My name is Sam Dunnewold and welcome back! This is actually the first of a two-part season premiere. I'm releasing a second episode tomorrow that kind of pairs with this one. You'll see.
My host today though is Clayton Notestine. Clayton is the RPG graphic design guy. He's known for his Twitter threads breaking down the visuals of games. But the thing he's best known for is Explorers Design, a Blog and community built around RPG visual design. He's got posts that teach the basics, a friendly discord for talking about and experimenting with all things layout, and even the Explorer's Template for Affinity and Adobe InDesign, which is not just a template built for quickly laying out classic fantasy games and modules, but its example text is itself instructions on how to do it and pick it apart. It's so slick.
Something I'm excited to explore more of on this season is visual design and vibes as mechanics. So I knew right away I wanted Clayton on the show. But when I invited him, he wanted to bring something even more basic than any of that: the hexagon.
I promised in the season one trailer that Dice Exploder was going to be a nuts and bolts show, and let me tells you, there's not much more nuts and bolts than grade school geometry. This is a technical episode if ever there was one. Clayton tells some fun stories, but the early days of RPGs, we get lost in some wonderful number theory minutia, and then we get to mechanics for logistics based travel in RPGs and hex based maps at large.
And I wanted to say one last thing before we get started. There's a completely different side to RPG travel, the story game side, that skips the logistics to try and capture the emotional truth of travel. Clayton, and I don't really talk about that in this episode, but there's two other episodes coming up this season that get into all of those feelings.
So if you are pumped about hexes, I hope you stick around for those. And if you're more of like a For The Queen junkie, I hope you give this episode a shot. You know, see how the other half lives.
But let's set all that aside for now because this episode is brought to you by the number six. Here is Clayton Notestine with the hex.
Clayton, thanks so much for being here.
Clayton: Sorry, I have my brain already uh, froze up. I have this problem every time with a podcast where I, uh, I wanna start and then I just get stagefright, even though it's just one person in the, the chat.
Sam: You're not the only person like that.
Clayton: A skill that needs to be practiced and learned.
Sam: Well, we'll leave all that in. And,
Clayton: excellent. Love that. Yeah. Probably makes me relatable.
Sam: Exactly. So what are we talking about today?
Clayton: We are going to talk about the hex grid, more specifically the hex. A regular hexagon when arranged together creates a matrices and that makes a map.
Sam: I love hexagons. I love shapes. Big math guy. Love the geometry. Let's, do it.
So this isn't from like a specific game, like in my mind, like I, I feel like when I think about hexagons, I think about like Settlers of Catan, right? Which is in some ways we're gonna kind of get into related ideas here. But the, the concept of what game is the hex from is more sort of the oral tradition of playing role-playing games I feel like.
You wanna get into that a little bit, like, tell me about where did this thing come from?
Clayton: Oh, for sure. So, I think the important thing to know is that like hexagons and the hex maps existed before RPGs ever did. So
Sam: Hexagons go back pretty far, I hear.
Clayton: Yeah, I, I think the earth and something about basalt or rocks invented the hexagon. But when we think about like RPGs and how they started using hexagons, I think a lot of people talk about Advanced Dungeons and Dragons or just D&D in general.
And to be fair, that has always been the case even in war gaming. So it's like one of the things that they got, you know, they took like many different parts of the lineage of the hobby comes from war gaming and the hex grid is one of them. But uh, one of the things I always thought was really funny about D and d is that we, we kind of think of the overland map, the traveling, as being like this thing that was baked into Dungeons and Dragons as a system. And that just simply isn't the case. Dungeons and Dragons is not really designed at least not the original.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: it was a cobbled together mass made by an actuary in Wisconsin and people would ask him questions and I think he would get frustrated and be like, well, this is how it's gonna work, and would have to, you know, essentially make an idea up on the fly.
And so Dungeons and Dragons, I, I think the first sort of recorded use of the, the Hex map was actually using a, a, a completely different game. And this is like a huge thing that happened in Dungeons and Dragons in the past. They used to take other things and then sort of retrofit them for gameplay.
That was the same thing with the dice. And in the case of the hex map, they would encourage players to go to the hobby store and buy a game from a completely different company called Avalon Hills Outdoor Survival Game.
Sam: Oh yeah, I've heard of Avalon Hills.
Clayton: Yeah. So this is how you know that it's also war gaming related because Avalon Hill is like the kind of company where you would go and it would be really ugly box art, and it would just have like a bunch of like cardboard chits inside of it and it would usually be about like panzers or like Napoleonic Wars or something like that.
And they had this game called you know, Outdoor Survival and that was the original hex map that they would use for exploration and Dungeons and Dragons. Yeah. So really weird.
Sam: So honestly, like, feels very modern too. Like we're still doing that all the time.
Like That's, that's just how I'm playing any dungeon crawler. I'm just going and ripping someone else's dungeon and putting whatever rules I want to it.
Clayton: It's one of my favorite things to like tell new players who are like, they show that interest where they're like, ooh, I kind of wonder how this hobby came about. And I'm like, oh, you're not ready for this.
Because the same things with the dice, like the 20 side die, in the past you used, you couldn't buy one, you had to go to a like an educational store and they would have mathematical, like polyhedrons and you would buy one, and then you would take a crayon and you would draw the numbers onto the die. And this is the seventies, so it's like made out of cheap plastic, so it would turn into a ball after like three sessions. You need to go back and buy another one.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. God really a boost for the educational supply stores economy, for sure.
Clayton: I know, and we really need to go back to that. We need to go back to that.
Sam: So before the hex grid, because there obviously was a time before the hex grid, like what were people using for their depiction of overland travel in RPGs. Or war games.
Clayton: Yeah. I mean, uh, I'm glad you said war games, because fundamentally, even to this day, a lot of war games are played with a little piece of string or like a ruler, right? Like you build up a, a space in a sandbox or whatever construction you have. And then you would use straight lines and uh, measurements.
And this goes back to like Napoleon, right? This is one of my things that I think is funny about war games is that like they've been played for centuries, and it's only recently that it's become like purely recreational. And I, and I love, like how, if we go even further back, we'll find that like board games and even RPGs have been just like a thing in like human history.
I'm going on a tangent here, but but like, I, I love that, like for instance, when they opened King Tut's tomb, they found like board games like among his things. And, you know, they're packing the, this tomb with lots of stuff, but there's still limited space. So he picked and chose what he wanted to have in the afterlife with him. And he decided that he needed like a dozen different board games in the afterlife. So
Sam: You're gonna be bored. What else are you gonna spend your time on?
Clayton: O of course, I, I mean he's got, you know, the figurines and everything else that would create an entire help staff for him. But yeah, I suppose board games would be important. And this is like
Sam: You gotta, listen, you need the staff to be there so you can play board games with someone.
Clayton: Oh yeah. Oh
Sam: are you gonna sit around playing solitaire? Fuck that. Like,
Clayton: Yeah. That's boring. Yeah, I didn't even think about that part. And then uh, you know, there's this historical thing of like, oh yeah, Napoleon was like a great tactician, and it's like he's just playing the game diplomacy, like on his time off. Of course, he's good at like tactical stuff. He's never in front of the cannons. He's always behind in a tent playing board games.
So, yeah, before there were like traditional RPGs, a lot of war games, or just games in general, were using just the spatial space. They weren't changing the medium that they were playing on, to depict distances and then slowly over time, these games that would eventually inform the design of role playing games started having these demarcations and maps because it was a crucial part of how the game was played.
So one of the things I, I think that's really interesting is like maps haven't always had distances attached to them. And, nowadays when we think of like a map, it has to have a ruler or some sort of distance marker on it. And we expect as modern people that the distances are gonna be exact. But back then, you know, way, way back in the day, it's like maps were relative. The distance that they were drawing on the map were oftentimes just how long or wide or far or away does it feel like it is.
Sam: Yeah.
They're making point crawl maps.
Clayton: Yeah, exactly. They're making essentially point crawl maps. And then, I'm not saying that this is like all of them, cuz they were doing star charts and stuff since, you know, ancient times.
But if you look at some really weird maps that came out of like the Renaissance or even pre Renaissance they would just have like locations on a map. and it would just be sort of in a collage of like pictures and images and cartoons. It was essentially like a bunch of gag comics and like illustrations just wedged up together into this weird mass.
And they'd be like, this is a map.
This is Sussex, you know, this is Cambridge. This is what you need to know about these places. And only when technology really caught up to it , suddenly now it's like we have this expectation that maps are going to be literal translations of the thing that they're depicting.
Sam: yeah.
Clayton: And the hex map is probably one of the great examples of that. There's all kinds of different maps now. We got, you know, astral maps maps, topographic maps, and navigational maps, and then we have these sort of more like mathematical architectural maps, and the hex grid is one of those.
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Clayton: Now what the central tension is in RPGs is figuring out is distance important?
So like, if you're going to use a hex grid, the answer should be probably yes. Distance needs to matter for you to use a hex grid. Cause if you, if distance doesn't matter, then you're not using,
half of what the hex is offering.
Sam: Yeah. You don't need the tool. Like the tool is for measuring distance basically.
Clayton: Yeah. And if you don't, if you don't need that, then use a point crawl. You know, point crawls are really cool anyway, so like, I, I prefer in many games having a point crawl over like a hex.
But if distance is something you care about, then the next thing you have to do is you have to reconcile or find a balance between having some of those components of the other style of map.
Because, in real life distances are inherently useful and you don't need there to be a cool thing on mile three of a map of, say, Ohio. You know, like it can just, it can just have empty space. But when you're making an RPG map, you should have some things in spots periodically in order to keep the exploration interesting. Cuz the players need that thrust that sends them over multiple different hexes on the other side of the map.
Sam: Yeah.
So I actually, I'm curious, do you know why the hex grid really became the thing as opposed to like the square grid?
Clayton: Yeah, the problem with the square grid is that the shape is just, it's built, it's a weird shape actually, when you think about a map. It does give you the like classic cardinal directions of north, south, east, west, but diagonal movement is so much further. There's not an equadistant distance from the center of the square. So you get these really weird movement patterns on a square grid.
It became this thing that, like D&D third edition would constantly hem and haw and like walk and winge overs. Like how do we make this work when the players realize that they can just diagonally move like a bishop
Sam: Yeah,
Clayton: everywhere, and they'll go farther and faster
Sam: yeah,
Clayton: did the other way.
Sam: Yeah. And anyone who's tried to like put a breath weapon onto a square battle map,
Clayton: Oh.
Sam: understands the problem here. Like forget about it.
Clayton: Absolutely. It's, it's a complete mess. So now I think the hex grid is kind of the one that most people prefer for that reason.
And I, I do see every now and then, like game systems will return to the square. I will admit the square is fantastic for drawing maps because I love a good straight line.
But when it comes to like exploration, which I think is the, the big deal with the hex map, the hex feels good when it comes to like overland travel through like nation states and countries and terrain. The hexagon is the way to go.
Sam: Well it just feels, when you look at a hexagon, just visually it feels like you are surrounded as opposed to when you're on a square, it feels like "obvious exits are north, south, east, and west." It doesn't feel like you're sort of there.
Like something about the difference between just the way they look visually and the numbers four and six feels really different. It, it doesn't feel like you can get lost on a grid because it feels so orderly.
Clayton: Yeah. And that sort of equal distant thing that's happening where you can picture yourself in the center of the hex. That plus like the number of sides creates a sort of like psychology built into the hex itself which then leads into expectations or modes of play that don't necessarily exist in the square.
Sam: Yeah. So say more about that.
Clayton: Yeah. Yeah So there's a psychology with numbers that I think... this is a bonus conversation, but numbers have a psychology sort built into them that come with presupposed uh, logic behind how you should perceive them and how you should use them.
For example, let's just picture ourselves in a room in a dungeon. And there's just one door in front of us. The number one tells you that it matters. It's the monumental thing.
You put two doors in front of someone and they suddenly start to think to themselves whatever's behind these doors is gonna be opposites of each other. It's a choice, and the choice creates in itself an inherent assumption that the two things are gonna be opposed.
Then you put three. And three things are somehow equal to each other, and important in a way where they're interrelated.
Sam: It feels balanced. It feels complete. It feels like a whole.
Clayton: Yeah. Three still feels like you're making a choice, but there's a sort of inherent importance to these three choices.
As soon as you get into four and five and six, now it's like, oh, this is a menu I'm, I'm pulling from.
And what's cool about the hex is it's a six-sided object. So it gives you six different options, which tells the person who is looking at the map that these six directions are both equal and could have anything behind them.
And I think that is part of the magic of like picking six too, because there's this whole like rule in like design and UX specifically called Miller's Law. And the whole idea, Miller's Law says that like the average human being can only hold and process about seven plus or minus two things in their working memory.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: If you're gonna design like a room or an RPG, so like rules or something, try to keep the number below six. And I think the hex is one of those where it's like six is probably just enough of directions that you can go in before it becomes unwieldy or starts to feel a little arbitrary.
Sam: Yeah, six is also I think a good number because when you think about actually practical use at the table, it's very rare that you're sort of like dumped into a hex without any context around it. Like you're coming in from the south say.
And when, when you do that, you know, you already know about the hex to the south cuz you were there. And you know probably a little bit about the two hexes that are neighbors of both the hex that you came from and the hex that you've just come to. You were considering those last time you decided what direction to move. But then you come up and there's three more hexes that are entirely new.
And so I think you end up in this really nice place of having some information about part of the surrounding hexes and also no information about some of them, and that that balance of like we've got something to work with, but we also have something new, like, you get the fun of novelty while also retaining enough context that you're not completely at sea.
Clayton: Yeah, exactly.
One of the things that, that I think about a lot - maybe too much. This is a designer who loves shape's problem - but I really like thinking about the orientation of the hex on a hex map. And I haven't seen a, I haven't seen a lot of exploration from designers in the RPG space. So this is an invitation to anyone who's listening.
But how you orient the hex is going to change the psychology of kind of what your game is about. Or at the very least, it can reinforce what the game is about.
So what I mean by that is like, so if you imagine a six sided hex, you have to make a choice. And there's generally two like presume choices. Either you make the flat edge go north south, or you make the flat edge go east, west. And then when you do that orientation, it creates this thing where like your players will never be able to go pure north or they'll never be able to go pure south.
And what I like about this is if you create a setting, let's go ahead and just use one that already exists. Let's talk about Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is all about armies marching north and south. There's attention to the north and south. And if we are going to put that entire Westeros onto a hex map, we get to choose what the orientation's going to be.
If we were to orient it so that you could go purely north and purely south, then armies could just march directly north or directly south. And then that would say something about how movement works in it. And it would almost feel too easy to move north and south because you could go directly north or directly south on the map.
If you watch Game of Thrones or you read the books, it's not about going directly north or south. It's about zigzagging your way up the continent. And all these characters who are in armies or they're, you know, in caravans or they're sneaking or what have you, they are bouncing like pinballs off different settlements across the continent.
So if you wanna reinforce that in the exploration of your characters, orient that hex so that they can't go directly north or directly south. And now suddenly they're exploring more of the nodes of interest on your map.
Sam: Yeah.
So something we've kind of alluded to already, but that I think of as really the biggest strength of the hex as a mechanic in hex crawls is the modular nature of it and how that modular nature of it makes it easy to use as a gm.
Like when you turn a map into a bunch of hexes, when you break it up into chunks like that, suddenly you do not need to look at an entire continent and figure out how to fill it with interesting stuff. You just take a hex and you deal with that hex, and then you move on to the next hex. And that's really nice and useful as a planner, as a GMer as someone who's prepping.
But it's also really useful to make interesting gameplay where as players, you're moving not all the way from here to the castle over there unless we're, you know, doing a point crawl. Sure. Maybe we don't care about the travel. Maybe we're not interested in that game. But if we are interested in that travel and the difficulty of that travel, suddenly the hex means there's a unit of distance and/or time that we can use to break down Hey, does something interesting happen? Do we encounter a random encounter? How many resources do we need to use to get from where we are to over there?
And the concept of breaking down a map into modular units is the thing that allows all of that to exist.
Clayton: Yeah. No, exactly. And I wanna go back to the outdoor survival game because not only did you use the map when you played like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, using that game, you would also oftentimes use the rules from that game. And in that game, the requirement, I believe, for you to move from like one hex into another hex is that every movement had a cost attached to it.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: I believe it was, you essentially had like a quota, like how much movement you could do in a turn or in a day. And then that number would go down based off of like what your health was and how many resources you had, and like food and water. So one of the things I, I, you know, it's thinking about what kind of games lean in that direction because the modular quality is useful to like all games.
I think being able to like break something off into pieces and then tackle it one piece at a time is invaluable. Just as a creative, process.
Sam: Whether it's hexes or like Firebrand scenes, right?
Clayton: but that element of as you said earlier of like, oh, well if it's not important, then you just, you know, snap the fingers. You're now there. And that's like well, why would we bother ourselves or busy ourselves with the space between that we don't know what's in it. That is an ideology that belongs to a lot of fiction for story games, right? Like we got a genre to emulate. The miles that the monster hunters are driving in their sedan does not matter. We are gonna cut to the, we're gonna cut to the important part.
But then if you look at the other games that are like, say like more old school and they're about travel, they're about terrain, they're Lord of the Rings, or what have you, then suddenly it's you know, part of the ideology of those games is you're playing to find out what is in the empty space. Like that's
kind of the whole point of it.
Sam: well, dealing with a logistical problem is interesting. Right? Like I, I often describe, and I don't, I don't play a lot of OSR games, so this is probably completely a blasphemy to some people who do. But I often describe the difference between OSR gaming and story gaming as like story gaming is kind of genre emulation, like more leaning into the storytelling. And OSR gaming is closer to like doing an escape room where there's a lot of fun to be had in solving puzzles, in like dealing with logistical problems.
Some people aren't gonna enjoy that. Right? And those games aren't for them. But the idea that, okay, there's a castle over there and we need to go fight the dragon in the castle, or whatever, but. How do we get to the castle? Like that is an interesting question. And the way the community has found to make an interesting game out of answering that question has a lot to do with the modularity of the hex.
Clayton: Yeah, and again, it goes into that thing of like, you already, because of the shape of the hex, they have to make choices, but now you get to like really weigh those choices, make 'em heavier and harder to make. I, when I think of like a fantasy game, like your classic fantasy RPG where it's like, oh, we're knights and we're on horses or whatever. It's like, oh, well we could go through this mountain pass, which is the most direct route,
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Clayton: but it's dangerous.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: We could veer off 45 degree angle, go through the other hex, and suddenly we'll take this hidden path into Mordor essentially. And,
yeah, I, I, I love it. I think, I think problem solving... like I, I've heard a lot of people describe OSR as story emergent, but I'm with you in the sense that like, one, that is true. It is an emergent storytelling, but I, that's also kind of true for all role playing games. The thing that I've noticed more, or at least that I've glommed onto as an individual is the problem solving portion.
And this is how, like I, I was just talking to someone recently, we were playing Mothership. It's like, oh, that's how I know mothership is like an OSR esque game.
Sam: Yeah,
Clayton: Because
Sam: totally.
Clayton: we're only problem solving
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: We're always trying to Figure out how to do something logistically.
Sam: To tie together the two ideas, like the way a friend of mine John Breckenridge described OSR gaming to me and its story emergent sort of play, is that in story games, you are trying to work with your friends to like create a Star War, right? You're trying to make a Game of Throne. You are, you're doing, you're using a set of rules and procedures to emulate a story like that or tell a unique story like that.
And that that's really cool. That's great. We love that. But that OSR games are often instead of, ah, we're doing a Star War. It's like, Hey, so, you know, Clayton and I were like hanging out at the bar and like you wouldn't believe this like silly thing that he did. Like this guy said this thing. It's like you're telling a story about real life. Like the emergent story is almost describing what you were doing at the table rather than in the cannon of the world.
And I think that's a really interesting and useful distinction. And I think that a lot of those kinds of emergent stories to use that, I think bad vocabulary term, but from the OSR are are stories that come out of creative or failed ways of solving problems that, that, that experience of problem solving is how you get to the kind of storytelling that OSR does.
Clayton: Yeah. Every time I played an OSR game, there is at least one instance that I, I have deep in my memory, it is created a groove in my head, like my brain, of me just like looking at the other boys being like, I can't believe this is happening. That doesn't happen.
That doesn't happen in a lot of story games. Story games I'm, I'm kind of like in the fiction, you know. I, there's a whole conversation about whether or not immersion is possible. I, I, I do think it is possible. But when I'm in an OSR, I, very much feel much more like I'm, I'm a guy pushing a figurine around,
essentially. Like, but that doesn't mean make it bad.
I actually really like both, you know? Uh,
Sam: Totally. Totally. And like, like, because in the story game experience, I've, I've had the experience of ending a session and looking around at everyone and saying, I can't believe that just happened. But like in the moment I'm more reacting as my character, like, ah, fuck. Like, this person like is fucking me over right now. How am I gonna deal with it? Like, I gotta respond. Where, yeah, totally. It, it, it does feel a little bit more past tense when you are it as yourself.
Clayton: Yeah. I mean, when I, think of stories where I played like you know, Mothership or Into The Odd or something like that, a lot more of those stories are oriented around "I was a player doing a player like thing with my little little guy or tools." Which makes me think about a completely different thing of like, how physical does the game feel? And I, I, I think hexes do this thing where they suddenly make the game like super physical feeling like,
Yeah, it's tactile. That's it, that's the word to use. Tactile. And you know, you see this in other games and maybe we've we're, I'm actually we're stumbling onto something here. A lot of games that have hex maps often have another tactile component attached to the game in some way.
Like you think of Mausritter, it's like you got the hex map and then you have little tokens of your inventory that you have to move around like Tetris blocks.
Like it's, it's physical. And then when you think of like Dungeon Crawl Classics, well, they've just increased the number of dice by like three times. So like, there's, there's a, there's a tactile portion to it.
It feels, in some ways, you know... when I'm, when I'm playing like a story game, the table might as well not exist. We could be sitting in chairs or on a couch playing
Sam: couch.
Yeah.
Clayton: half the time. But when I'm playing a game that has like a hex map on it or something, we're working on a drafting table. You know, we, we, we practically have the exacto knives and like rulers and string and everything on standby because the game feels so much more physical.
And I, and now I'm starting to wonder like how much would you, might, might you bring in hex map just to bring some of that physicality, if that's something that you're going for?
Right?
I, I think about uh, Forbidden Lands. One of the big selling features of that is that it has a map and you literally lay out the map and put stickers on the hexes that have points of interest. Very physical, very tactile.
Sam: Yeah. I remember running a fourth edition d and d Dark Sun campaign with the official Dark Sun 4e books. And that book came with a map that you could lay out on the table. And it was not a hex map but it was, you know, to scale. There was a mile chart on it.
But really just, whenever they needed to travel from one place to another, just throwing that map on the table and everyone's sort of gathering around it like Napoleon in his tent and all of Napoleon's advisors, right. It, it brings a feeling of verisimilitude and tactileness and immersion maybe to the experience of just looking down and being like, where are we going? Where do we want to go? Why are we going there?
Clayton: Right. Yeah. I think my favorite application or deployment of a hex map is when it's both a player aid and an art effect at the same time.
Sam: Yeah. Totally.
Clayton: You know, obviously player aids are great, and I, frankly having played now lots of like mothership in the last couple weeks I realized that I want more player a than any GM will ever be willing to give me.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: That, that's partly because like, you know, when you're playing a sci-fi game that's all about problem solving, you want to ask a lot of science questions if you're a giant nerd like me, you know. But
But when I'm playing like a fantasy game, you know, it's like I want the play rate. But if it's gonna be on the table, it would be cool if it, it does have that component of like, oh, we're all standing around it just like our characters would be, and we're looking at a map.
I think this is a thing that I've seen done in a lot of video games. Not necessarily in board games or RPGs, but like, you give the player the map when their
character gets the map.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: That, that's like a classic, you know, zelda thing probably would probably be like the most immediate like touchstone.
But uh, I love having that element brought in. Cause then you can also do a lot of other stuff with that map then too. Or, or you can withhold information on the map and the players get to make changes as well.
And I think that goes back to the modularity thing, is like the modularity goes both ways for both sides of the table. The Gm, it's great for prep, but then also like it gives the players a means to interact with it in really easy bite size little ways. Like it's got every single hex is a little morsel that they can digest one at a time, which goes back to that whole like numbers thing of like you don't wanna give them too much cuz oh, here I go again.
UX design uh, Hicks Law basically says that like the time to make a decision increases the more options and complex options there are.
So, and you, you wanna keep that number pretty low. I think in an RPG you don't want the play, you want the players to be ponderous
about a decision because it's important, not because there's lots of them and they can't quite process what to do.
Sam: Yeah. I mean, as a, a podcast coming outta the Blades in the Dark world, like this is what flashbacks in that game were created for like okay, how are we gonna like elaborately plan our whole heist? No. Just like, you
Clayton: Right.
Sam: sit around making that kind of choice forever unless it's interesting.
Clayton: Yeah. I, I love that game. The funny thing about Blades in the Dark is I really like the flashback, but I don't hear as many people talking about the load rules which do the same
thing to me.
Sam: So smart. Yeah.
Clayton: Like we're not gonna waste any part of our playtime, on something that's not actually gonna come up.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: that's one of the things that's also kind of nice about I guess a hex map in a way is like some of the components. All the components are, are, are there and are and can be used right then and there.
Sam: Yep.
Clayton: There are other like maps where you might play with them and it's like you can't tell if it's important to be there or not.
Like if you look at an old or even a new Dungeons and Dragons map, it will have like no grid and it'll just be like really pretty trees and forests and unless the GM tells you "Hey, there, you can go there," then the, the players are like looking at the only things that matter, which has been proven by cannon is only Waterdeep, Baulder's Gate, Candlekeep, and Neverwinter. And you just is zigzag between those places.
And that's about it. But if, like, if that map were more of a hex map, then suddenly at the very least, you now know, oh wait, actually that forest, which is a nothing forest originally, I now know that it is at least six venturing locations cuz it's six different hexes. And then suddenly the GM again, going back to their prep, they can start inserting things into those hexes. And now the players have a vector for exploration.
Sam: The world feels more alive.
Clayton: Yeah. I, I have this problem in my games, or I did have this problem, getting better at it, but I would like make this world, you know, I had the little mind worm that said you had to like, make a whole world before
you could play.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: And I would make this world and then I would be confused as to why my players didn't immediately say where they wanted to go.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Clayton: And it turns out it's like they just, they need fewer options, and the options need to be concrete. And I think a hex map would've been part of that. You know, like you give 'em a couple like distant locations on the map where it's like that hex is really important, but right now you don't have to worry about that.
All you have to worry about is the three sides of your hex that'll get you towards that hex. And then suddenly there they go. They got the thrust, the momentum in one direction, and then making the decision is so much easier.
Sam: The other thing I really like about modularity is how it allows starting a campaign that's going to use a hex map to really start with just like three hexes. There's a famous OSR-y blog post about just three hexes, that's all you need to, to start your campaign. But really, you know, even a small amount of like seven hexes, one with, a ring around it or 21, which is one hex with sort of two layers around it, that's something that's gonna take you an afternoon, maybe two afternoons to like create as a Gm, but that's really not a huge amount of work and gives you just plenty to start with. And then such an easy way to expand from there too.
So if you are someone who is interested in trying out the hex crawl thing, like running a game like this or whatever, the hex itself makes it a lot easier to get your feet wet, to set things up and to start off trying to do that.
Clayton: Yeah. And first off, if, if you prep like just three hexes, that's an entire session, if not two sessions, right then and there.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Clayton: If you are doing the whole like, 20 hexes to make like a small map, kinda like what you have in Mausritter, that's a campaign. You know, it, it's a lot of room to explore in that.
And this is a completely different thing, but like, you know, I've been thinking about uh, have you read the Adventure by Luke Gearing "The Isle"?
Sam: I have read several pages of The Isle and I think it looks amazing. I've listened to the Between Two Cairns podcast episode about The Isle.
Clayton: Excellent.
Sam: have not read it all the way through myself.
Clayton: Well, I, I've been thinking about that and I think Chris Bisette has also said there's like this component of that game or that adventure where there are just empty rooms. And this is like a, a, thing that is kind of controversial, but comes from like two different philosophies. And I, and I'm wondering about like, if you make a hex map, you get to decide is every single one of these heins gonna have a thing inside of it?
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: Because if you're, if you're playing like Mausritter they only give you like a whole world map. It's only like nine hexes. And every single hex is like an adventuring location.
It's like big. But uh, if you play a more classic OSR or old school game of some sort, your, hexes, where literally like your GM will roll a die to see if something happens. And if nothing happens, nothing happens. You just keep moving. And so there's a lot of empty space.
But Chris Bisette and Luke Gearing, I believe they both said that like done correctly, that can create tension and a sense of verisimilitude in this space.
Space. So in like The Isle, you know, you may walk into empty rooms, but you're always going to hear something like, just, just deeper in.
And the more, you go in to other rooms, the louder the noise gets.
Sam: And it builds tension so well. Not just... I mean, you can hear it in the way you're describing that already, but even in overland travel, the idea that, yeah, okay it's gonna take six hexes to get from here to the castle. Okay, well let's roll for the first random encounter... let's roll for the second random encounter... like that sort of building of tension fun and exciting.
Clayton: Yeah, and there's an element of like every experience with RPGs is like partly felt in post. Like the, the story does not stick together until a week later when you're thinking back on the story and you've shaved off the edges of all the empty space. You've edited it, the memory in your mind.
And you'll remember maybe that you did six hexes. So, you know, it took a long time for your guys to get there. But if it, but if there was nothing in it, you as a person is not gonna remember what
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: in every single individual hex. But the power it imparts on your memory is that it forced your brain to like measure the time passing.
Sam: Yeah. You are gonna remember the building of tension as you made your way towards the castle and you're gonna remember a lot when you got ambushed by a basilisk on the way there.
Clayton: Yeah. If we were reading or if we watched like, Lord the Rings or whatever, and all we saw was just Sam and Frodo and no one else, and they just cut from like the three locations that we see that they're in, in the books. We'd think that middle earth was tiny. That the trip was not that hard or it wasn't that long.
But because. We see lots of footage of them just walking, and then we will spend 30 minutes to an hour with a completely different like group of characters who have entire sieges, wars, adventures without them, that creates the truth that they have been traveling for a really long time.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Clayton: And if we remove those brief moments where we just see them walking through the marshes for a long time, we lose a little bit of that. Which of course, maybe for some games doesn't matter. Again, going back to if you're playing Monster Hearts or whatever, being in a sedan and talking about the mile markers is not gonna be interesting and it's not gonna give you anything useful.
Sam: Unless you create some other kind of mechanic for it. You know, the Hex is not the only kind of mechanic that's gonna make that interesting. But the Hex is a mechanic that does make that interesting.
Clayton: Yeah, it does. And it's really easy to use, which is why it's still being used in games even now.
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: In fact, it's being used right now in wolves on the coast by Luke Gearing which is... one of the other things that's cool about the hex is that it's a really good way for writers to just be told that they have to write like three different passages or six different passages. And so if you're, if you're a really good writer, a hex map is a table of contents. You have to write something for every single chapter. Every hex can be a chapter. And you get to decide the pacing, the, the, the rise and fall, the climax.
And so if you wanted to, you could almost take a hex map, and obviously drawing a map is fun all in and of itself, but you could also create a almost like a heat map of excitement and like tension on the map itself just by mapping it. Like there's a lot of games like Symbarom is like this where getting deeper into the forbidden forest is bad. It's gonna be more dangerous.
And so if you were to completely remove all the qualities of the hex map, but you kept like the danger, like as a danger meter on the map, you would see that the hex map is this concentric circles
Sam: Mm-hmm.
Clayton: of bad stuff. Layers. It has layers.
Sam: You wanna talk about Hex flowers
Clayton: so hex flowers are uh, it's this slightly newer thing. It, it came out of a blog, the blog's name I can't remember.
Sam: I looked this up later, and it appears to be the Goblin's Henchman blog. There's a link in the show notes.
Clayton: But we talked earlier about how like maps weren't always literal interpretations of the thing that they're depicting. A hex flower is the same way. It's not a literal, like this is the boundaries of a map. It's a random number generator. And so the way the hex flower works is that you start in the central hex of like a 20 hex grid that forms a bigger hex. And that poses the characters with six possible results. Right?
And then you roll dice and every hex flower is a little bit different. You can change the way it behaves based off of how, how you randomize the numbers. But you roll dice and then the dice will tell you where in the hex the players progress to. And so what you get is this this random table that has like an internal logic or memory built into it. Because the next number that you roll is dependent upon where you are now and where you've been in the past.
Sam: So the easiest example of this that I've seen is like a random weather chart where, you know, whether it's something where yesterday's weather probably is related or correlates to some extent with today's weather. So you ha have like, you know, really stormy weather at the top of the hex and really sunny weather at the bottom of the hex. And you'll start in the middle. And like, if you're headed towards sunny stuff, probably tomorrow will be sunny too. But eventually variance will bring you up towards the top again and then it'll start raining. And so on and so forth.
Clayton: Yeah. And the uh, numbers that you're rolling will have a bias. So like the designer who's making the hex flower can decide like, oh, you know, I'm gonna have them roll two D six s and with that number then I know that the facts flower is gonna force players. It's gonna sort of weigh them towards like the bottom of the, uh,
Sam: yeah,
yeah,
Clayton: flower.
And so when that happens, then you can be like, well, I want this kind of event to happen more often than this kind of event. So you put the really like, rare thing up at the top of the, the flower where only crazy, wild roles are gonna get there.
Sam: Yeah,
Clayton: And then the things that are more rote or expected will show up in the ones where the number, the bell curve sends them to more often than not.
Sam: Yeah, so the hex flower is like a cool way to do a random table, and it, it acts as sort of like a metaphorical map too,
Clayton: Mm-hmm.
Sam: and I think that's really cool. The idea that you can be moving around like a metaphorical space instead of a physical space.
don't know how like broadly applicable that is, but it is a really neat idea that I'm sure could be applied more often than I see it applied.
Clayton: Yeah. it does this thing where like normally random tables don't have a sense of progress
Sam: Yeah.
Clayton: Like different things will sort of proc, so to speak on the table. But rarely do you get this sensation of movement. So even if the hex flower is metaphorical, which it normally is, you still get the feeling that you've been moving, like that progress is being made.
Sam: Yes.
Clayton: And, uh, you're gonna know this cuz you're a writer. Uh, Theory of composition, I think is the word. It's the idea of like, if you're writing like a short story or something, every word sentence should work towards the goal or like the core theme of the story. I love this in design as well. it's the same way with like graphic design. If you're gonna make like a logo, the colors, the angles, everything should be going towards like the overall theme or
Sam: Yeah,
Clayton: And if you were making an RPG where everything about it is about travel or movement, then this would be like one way that you could do that, right? Like, cuz you could just do a random table, but a hex flower, if it does impart this sensation of movement or progress and that's what your game is about, then maybe you should use the hex flower, cuz
it could just be another component that is borrowing or reinforcing this core idea or concept of your game.
Sam: Yeah, totally. All right. We've been going for quite a while, so I think it's time to wrap this up. So I just wanna say one last thing though, which is that fundamentally I think drawing maps is fun and hexes make drawing maps easier, and therefore I'm pro hexagon.
Clayton: I was praying at the altar of hexagons well before I started making maps, but now I've just become this like foaming at the mouth zealot about them. I drawing maps-
Sam: I'm, I'm putting that in your intro. A foaming at the mouth hexagon zealot.
Clayton: Yeah. Oh, for sure. Absolutely.
Sam: Alright, well I really appreciate you being here. This was really fun. Thanks for, uh, thanks for coming out.
Clayton: Thanks for having me.
Sam: Thanks again to Clayton for being here and see you tomorrow for part two of this season premiere with Morgan Nuncio and I talking about travel from the story game side. Clayton can be found at Clayton Notestein on Twitter at Explorers Design on Blue Sky and dice.camp at explorers.itch.io. And of course@explorersdesign.com. That's also where you can get his sick layout templates and join the Explorers Design Discord. I'll see you in there.
You can also join the Dice Exploiter Discord. Why not come and talk about the show if you want to.
As always, you can find me on Blue Sky, Twitter, dice.camp, and Itch at sdunnewold.
Our logo is designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Gray.
And as always, thanks to you for listening. See you tomorrow.
The Hex with Clayton Notestine