Which is your favorite, Veeky Forums?

Hexes if we're seriously doing grid-based combat. Otherwise a linear plot if the characters' relative positioning is necessary (Bill and the zombie are ten feet apart, where they're standing in the room doesn't matter)

Hex

Even for indoor environments you can just bisect the hexes if need be.

What said pretty much as most games I play aren't too tactical and we can get along with just clubbing a kobold to death without having to break out a board.

>what is Chebyshev distance?

Personally I didn't care for the 1.5 movement cost rule myself. Yes it gives closer an approximation of real world. But if that really matters to you, just use hex or use tape measurement.

It only really helps you when crossing large open ground.... No jimmy you can't cut four days off a 10 day journey

Vectors. MAXIMUM ACCURACY

But hex has 6 directions, whereas the squares have 8. It's awkward to move left/right or up/dow (depending on how the hexes are lined up) and that gets pretty frustrating to me, personally.

There are no wrong answers except 4 way grid.

So just models and measuring tape?

>Which is your favorite, Veeky Forums?
Non-Euclidean hypergrid.

4-way for heavy units, 8-way for light units.

The way the simple action of "walking straight forward in a fucking line" gets so confused in a hex grid makes it almost undeniably worse for a combat encounter than an 8-way square

Hexes.

I've been thinking about building a special glass table with a rotating square grid underneath, so that no matter what direction you are facing, you can make use of the easiest method.
But I'm lazy.

None.
Abstract combat that needs no grid, because it also doesn't need knowledge of specific spatial placement of characters.
Even IF I'd ever want game that needs placement (but that's more likely for some purely tactical wargame and nit a RPG) I'd like plain surface and a ruler/tape than a stiff grid.
For maps, whatever. Though hexes look cooler. Yet square grid gives you ability to use coordinatess - though I don't see use for coords in fantasy gamem really.

>Abstract combat that needs no grid, because it also doesn't need knowledge of specific spatial placement of characters

That's just wrong. I have played a LOT of games with abstract combat over my many years of gaming, and the one question that always comes up is some variation of "So where is everyone now in relation to each other?". Because once you have your 5 players, 5 enemies and various terrain features, it becomes really difficult to track mentally.

Having a map, even a rudimentary one is an essential tool for every system featuring combat and movement. The ability to grasp at a glance the entire scene of a battle is so incredibly important and time saving that you're just hobbling yourself by not using it.

Depends on the system, m8.
If you need something for tactical combat with detailed combat, those are important but I don't play such games. Instead i prefer ones that treat combat not as a tactical minigame within an story game, but as a dramatic device. That's why I mentioned "abstract".
There are games that handle combat as a "scene" with players only declaring basic tactics beforehand and solving everything by single roll - or batch of rolls representing changing tides for dramatic effect (HeroQuest)
There are games that just divide battlefield into abstract "zones" that player can only switch to adjacent once per round. Where it is only important if character is in kitchen or living room, not wheter he is in the corner or at the center of said room (FATE)
There are games that break down the combat into series of stances, pairings and engagements (The One Ring)
Finally, unless the game combat isn't super complicated like D&D you actually can evenm play more "conventional" rpg combat in your head. It works pefectly for WFRP at least. With some amount of DM fiat, yes, but at least in my group everyone was in favour in allowing this fiat and sacrificing some specific tactical options for quicker combat.

There is no right answer. Grids spare you the trouble of having to keep an up-to-date mental picture of the encounter in mind for the duration, which is incredibly relieving and allows players to focus on the game and not on uncertain details. But the game is so much more vivid when you play without a grid, and it is that way because the lack of a grid forces you to fully dream up the scene, carefully follow along with the DM's narration, and accurately describe your own actions and intentions. It can be clunky because even a perfect DM couldn't make five people see the exact same thing, but it's only an issue if the DM hasn't set the scene properly or if the players aren't putting in the effort.

just use a goddamn ruler and have an inch be a unit/square/5ft or whatever. place it at the base of the mini and move them x amount of units where x is their speed

Hexes for larger scales (armies, mechs), but for "adventurer scale" squares work better, since that's the usual building/dungeon layout.

Eh, I tend to play things with guns and guns tend to make it easy to keep track of people.

People tend to die really fast so the number of important elements decreases quickly and people don't worry too much about how far they are from each other since guns have enough range for being inside of a house.

Plus fights in stairwells are a bitch on grids of any kind.

filthy millennials. can't ever do things right. use a ruler or a piece of string ffs.

gridless on all counts, with round bases, tapemeasures, (tailors tapemeasure usable for curved movement paths) and a good variety of gridless area templates of different sizes.

but if theres no way to avoid them ?

boottom left for combat bottom right for everyting else.

Has anyone ever used octagons for movement?

No grid.

The only shape which Tesseract are hexes triangles and squares.

But I suppose you could have and some sort of octagon and square grid?

Tessellate, not tesseract. The tesseract is the 4D analogue of the cube, like the cube is the 3D analogue of the square.

How about a criss-cross hexagon to pentagon grid ?

Fuck you're right

What the fuck do those numbers mean? Shouldn´t they be
>6,3
>4,3
>4,6

instead?

I don't know the second number, but the first number seems to be the number of sides in any given unit.
>Hexagon 6
>Square 4
>Triangle 3

8 way square grid for ground combat, hex for space combat.

Number of sides of the polygon, number of polygons around a single vertex.

Space Combat

Unless you're just ignoring the fact spaces is 3D, wouldn't cubes/squares make more sense? I think that's the only shape you can really use

Scale map and measuring tape for open spaces. 8 way grid if the encounter takes place in small rooms.

The easiest way to do 3d combat that I've found is to use stacked hex grids, as if the hexes were columns. Basically, make it 8 way by adding "up" and "down" that both lead to the next grid in that direction. Obviously, up and down are entirely arbitrary in deep space, but most settings would have you fighting over something important (A jump point, or planet, or space station, or massive capital ship or whatever) that you can use as a reference point to orient your grids

Triangle grid looks pretty comfy. I might try one out.

Bottom left for small-scale combat maps, bottom right for long-distance travel maps.

HEX
GURPS REPRESENT

TRIANGULAR TILING

Every side is on equal distance from other

Octagons is equivalent to squares with 8 way movement. The squares you have to insert on the four sides represent the extra distance. There is no difference.

>Hexagons make moving in a straight line complicated
>Zig zagging slightly is complicated

Why are you people even allowed to exist.

There actually is a 3D equivalent of the hex grid - a honeycomb of rhombic dodecahedrons.

Yes, but now you at least have the extra distance explicitly represented as a grid space.

The rhombic dodecahedral honeycomb can be easily represented by stacked, offset hex grids BTW. It's the unit cell of the face-centered-cubic sphere packing. (Which, ironically, is much more hexagonal than the equally efficient hexagonal close pack)

Hexes for days.
All hexes all the time, baby.

Hex

I like hex, but most people play 8-way, so I usually do that.
If I had my choice, I'd use rulers for scale maps, but it's a pain to prepare painstaking maps for groups that do things you don't expect and I usually have to rent or borrow terrain from my LGS when I do that.