This week we once again discuss one of the aspects of Realm of Runes that underwent significant changes during the playtest. Today's topic is one of the most extensive changes, whose impact is felt by every character in the game. It has been one of the most positive changes, as well, greatly enabling ease of understanding and smoothness of play for characters and GMs alike. We're talking about the fundamental change from the use of a more traditional square grid, and instead replacing it with a hex grid.
The use of a square grid was a natural place to start. In my time playing tabletop RPGs, every one that I've played used it. I was aware that other systems handled things differently, but had never really looked into anything else. There was no reason to while the system I preferred exclusively used squares. Even the word "square" was fully ingrained into the terminology I had learned to describe situations and interpret scenarios.
But a square grid has always had some strange quirks, some of which are more obvious than others. Squares, by their nature, do not handle circles or diagonals well. The space-warping effects of diagonals, in particular, occupy a not insignificant chunk of other rules systems. There has been many a tension-breaking moment in campaigns where players and GM tried to figure out just how far away an enemy was, or if if certain movement actually provoked attacks of opportunity with a reach weapon. Many iconic spells use a spherical or conical shape, neither of which conform to a square grid nicely, and always are left with the judgement call as to how much of a square needs to be overlapped by an effect in order for a creature in that space to be affected.
These areas are where a hex grid really shines. One of the interesting quirks of a hex grid is that there is no direction where space is warped. The mostly circular packing of cells makes calculating distance super easy. No matter what direction a target is, you can simply count the number of spaces by the shortest path and the answer is always correct. You don't have to treat every other diagonal space as two, use the Pythagorean theorem, or any other clumsy approximation. It just works.
Aura, burst and spray spells also work really nicely with a hex grid. These circular areas map exceptionally well into the circular cell packing. It also makes using these spells more intuitive overall. Where once these spells targeted a grid intersection, they now simply target a space. It's what players always tried to do anyway. Figuring out the area affected by a conical spray is also much easier in hexes. The way hex cells fit together makes recognizing triangles a quick and intuitive process.
For example, the spell flamethrower lists hex 3 spray as its area. The caster chooses two of the hexes adjacent to it, and the effect extends outward from those hexes three times. Each time it does, it gets one hex wider. In this way it ends up affecting a triangular area (including the caster's space), as shown in the example below:
Burst and Aura spells work similarly to each other. The caster of a burst spell chooses one space to be the origin of the burst. The area then gets wider until it is the listed number of hexes thick. An aura instead extends outward from the caster's space. For example, the fireball spell lists a hex 3 burst as its area, while the Paladin's Aura of Courage lists a hex 3 aura as its area.
Line spells are a bit of an odd duck in this system. On the one hand, if you choose an edge face it's extremely intuitive. You just start counting hexes. But what if you want to hit things that aren't directly in the line? You can extend your line from a vertex instead. Let's look at these cases with the spell alkaline, which lists a hex 5 line as its area. The first example is what happens in the simplest case, and affects all of the highlighted spaces equally. The second example is what happens when you choose to extend the line from a vertex instead of an edge. The spell affects all of the highlighted spaces, but creatures in the double-spaces each have cover from the spell's effects due to the widening. The spell can affect more targets at once this way than simply casting it along an edge, but more than half of them have a bonus to the saving throw, making them more likely to only take reduced damage.
Reach and threatening ends up being extremely easy to figure out as well. You can think of your threatened area as an aura. For small and medium-sized creatures, this is naturally hex 1. Creatures that perform activities with the intricate, manipulate or move trait in this aura trigger an Attack of Opportunity. If you have extended reach from an increased size, or from a weapon with the reach trait, the size of the aura gets bigger, with no gaps. Consider the aura example above. If the Paladin were wielding a meteor hammer (which has the reach 2 trait), her total threatened area would be the same size as the hex 3 aura of her Aura of Courage.
One final benefit that came from changing everything in the rules to utilize hexes is not obvious at first, and that is scale. Distances in Realm of Runes are listed in pure hexes. A longbow has a hex 20 range increment. The fireball spell has a maximum range of hex 100. An Elf can move up to 6 hexes when it Strides. What this means to you and your group is up to you to determine. If you like using the imperial system, one hex could be the equivalent of 5 feet. If you prefer the metric system, it's as simple as defining the size of a hex in meters. Your units are free to be those to which you are most comfortable, and the game naturally and elegantly scales itself to whatever system you choose.
Hex-based combat has been a huge hit with the playtesters since it became the standard mode, and it's one of the ways that Realm of Runes sets itself apart from the other titans and staples of the genre. Next week we'll continue the character creation examples by introducing the Bard Exemplar!
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