It Takes A Village To Stock A Hex

It's fairly likely that your favourite fantasy roleplaying game has, buried in the rules somewhere, an assumption that you're using six-mile hexes at the basis for overland travel. This assumption is almost as old as the genre, and is present even if you're using a ruleset that doesn't explicitly use hex maps. Ever wonder why D&D 5th Edition has paces of 18, 24 or 30 miles a day? That's 3, 4 or 5 hexes!

The idea that they're the 'ideal' scale goes back to at least 2009, and Steamtunnel's oft-cited In Praise of the 6 Mile Hex. And that idea has merit, it's certainly mathematically convenient. But we don't make maps for the convenience of mapmakers: we make them to describe territory. The 6-mile hex does a poor job of that, because it is too big.

This has been remarked upon before, of course. Most recently by Eric Diaz at Methods & Madness, but also by Skerples at Coins and Scrolls. Both authors use European cities as their reference points, and quite reasonably so. Siena, used by Skerples as an example, is of course in densely-populated (even in the mediaeval era) Italy, where such a hex can contain - as he shows - a dozen or more towns and villages, as well as the city iself.

Even in rural Scotland, relatively sparsely populated even in the mediaeval era, such a hex containing my hometown contains:

• The town itself
• Two or three villages
• Two Iron Age hill forts
• At least three castles
• Part of a line of Roman fortifications and signal stations, though none of the major structures fall within the area
• Sundry standing stones, churches, chapels etc

Most of these would be considered 'points of interest' in most fantasy adventure campaigns. If one operates on the conceit that a hex ought to contain precisely one 'point of interest', as is usual, the six-mile hex only works for an exceptionally sparsely populated area. One that makes even mediaeval Scotland look cosmopolitan, and which - for that reason - cannot contain any major cities

What it does describe, and quite well, is the plains of the American West. Which makes sense, actually. Since the beginnings of the genre, Original Dungeons and Dragons was implicitly a Western draped in fantasy mediaeval trappings. 

Now, you're certainly free to imagine a setting where the combined effects of wizards and dragons do create a dynamic rather similar to that. And there's some charm in doing so. You're still constrained by the limitations of agriculture, which mean that if you've got cities (or dwarven mines - in any case, places with lots of people who import food) you need farms. And therefore somewhat-dense habitation at least near them.

Rather more plausible, at least for a quasi-European setting, is the three-mile (or one-league) hex. Steamtunnel came to a similar conclusion in The Ergonomic 3-Mile Hex. As did Silverarm Press in Down with the 6-Mile Hex! A Modest Proposal. A village, or equivalent unit - any self-respecting castle will function like a village! - to each 3-mile hex feels appropriate for a setting of European density, with a point of interest to each hex. That gives the players the opportunity to feel the scale of a setting, with interesting choices to make each hour or so of in-game time.

Interestingly, the Wilderness Exploration board game used 5 kilometre (that is, 3 mile) hexes. And Original Dungeons and Dragons used it, wholesale, as an overland travel system. So the 3-mile hex really isn't that weird.