Measuring Hexcrawl Movement

In wilderness adventures on a hex map, some DMs like to track the precise location of the party in each hex. Not only is that more trouble than it's worth, but it renders the hex grid itself a bit redundant. Why not get rid of it entirely and track movement with a ruler and a specified scale for the map? Tracking precise locations in a hex violates my cardinal rule of not mixing scales. If you need to know the location of the party more precisely than +/- 3 miles or so, you should be using hexes that are less than 6 miles across.

When all you care about is what hex the party is in, it is a simple matter to track their movement per day. You just need to know the party's base mileage per day, the size of each hex in miles, and what sort of terrain is in it.

To get the party's base mileage per day, divide the slowest member's exploration movement by 5. If the slowest person in the party moves 60' per turn, the party has 12 miles of movement per day.

To enter a hex, the party has to spend mileage. The cost of a hex depends on its terrain. For six-mile hexes, here are the costs:

• Clear, grassland, or along a trail: 6 miles
• Forest, hills, desert, broken: 9 miles
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: 12 miles
• Road: 4 miles

A party must have the mileage to spend in order to enter a hex, and their mileage resets each day. You might make an exception if a party moves only 6 miles per day, so that they can enter 9-mile or 12-mile terrain by dedicating 2 days of travel to the task.

For hexes of other sizes, the costs are:

• Clear, grassland, or along a trail: hex size
• Forest, hills, desert, broken: hex size x 3/2
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: hex size x 2
• Road: hex size x 2/3

An alternative method does without counting miles and just counts hexes. When you know how many miles the party can travel in a day, you can easily find out how many hexes they can travel per day. Every hex then costs 1 hex to enter, modified as follows:

• Clear, grassland, trail: every hex costs 1 hex
• Forest, hills, desert, or broken: every other hex costs 2 hexes
• Mountains, jungle, swamp: every hex costs 2 hexes
• Road: every third hex is free.

The nice thing about the alternative system is that you don't have to recalculate movement costs for different map scales. Instead, you recalculate the number of hexes per day based on the map scale and the party movement rate.