[RPG] How to handle the math of hex maps

Actually, combat in a modern city should be a lot more interesting than in most fantasy settings! That's because of the complexity of the terrain. The opponents the players are facing may have numerous types of advantages.

• Height - the enemies may have higher ground than the players. It may be small scale, they may attack surprisingly from the ceiling of a room, they may be higher on a staircase or just sit on top of a garbage container. It may give them the advantage of reach or surprise, it may make it easier for them to defend them selves. They may be a lot higher than the players, sitting on a roof of a building, a balcony a few stories above ground. It may let them attack the players from afar, provide them great cover from gunfire, let them observe the players from afar and not be seen.

• Cover - it's really easy to hide or set up a trap in a city. There's the severs, back alleys, rooftops, you can hide in buildings... It's not as simple as in fantasy, where the cave in the middle of the woods is obviously the Den Of Evil and where the monsters just jump out of the bushes. Same for indoor encounters - that damn monster may actually be hiding in the closet! When fighting in a city, you may never be sure where and how numerous the enemy is. Also, narrow corridors, small spaces and the like may be used as a tactical advantage.

• Mobility - fights can be set up very dynamically in an urban environment. The enemy may be moving swiftly and quickly. Airducts? Sure! Jumping around from window to window? Why not? Don't get me started on the usage of vehicles... This may need a little imagination and creating home rules, but still, the possibilities are there.

• Other circumstances - the players may need to do their work secretly, not letting the regular folks know about the monsters. Maybe they have to limit the casualties among civilians and destruction of property. Maybe they can't use open fire due to being too close to a gas station / whatever. Civilians might get in the way, so can the law enforcement or other authorities. All this can be used to pose an additional challenge to the players and help avoid boredom during fights.

Limiting the fights to simply choosing the target and rolling the old faithful combo can indeed be boring, but fights don't have to look that way! Try to have all of this in mind when designing maps, and I think you'll be able to come up with interesting ones!

A megadungeon is simply too large to feasibly represent during play at 1in=5ft scale, even if you were wanting to, without a lot of work. I find that drawing out every section either beforehand or during play in battle-map scale is a lot of work for very little value. It's more effective to save miniature-scale maps for where they are most effective.

So instead, represent only the sections where combat actually happens, and during the exploration segments of play rely on just description to convey the layout, keeping your large-scale DM's map only as a private reference. That description-only information preserves the sense of exploration and uncertainty, allowing the players to use/need their smarts to figure out layout secrets, and maintaining the possibility of the PCs getting legitimately lost (as opposed to the kind of "story says you get lost now" approach that doesn't suit a megadungeon).

You can do this two ways. You can have "combat arenas" prepared in miniature scale in as much detail as you want, and lay those down when combat is either already broken out, or when it's obviously imminent even if initiative isn't yet rolled. The upside is you can put a lot of detail into these set-piece maps, but with the downside that for your prepared areas to be predictable, you have to build your whole megadungeon to neatly divide up into predictable combat arenas.

The second way is to draw out the map on the fly when combat occurs, on a vinyl battle-mat or small sheets side-by-side, using your master map for basic layout and your notes for room features that are relevant to an exciting combat. The upside is lots of flexibility in handling combats wherever and whenever they break out and go to, but the downside is that the maps won't be nearly as pretty.

You can also mix and match these methods. Say you decide to draw everything out, but you find an excellent ruined cult sanctuary tileset and want to use them—nothing is stopping you from busting out detailed tiles for one or more special rooms in the dungeon. Similarly, you can prepare all your combat-area maps beforehand in gorgeous detail, but fall back on sketching rooms and halls on a vinyl mat when combats occur in unexpected places or if they overflow outside of the prepared areas.

The thing these share in common is that you don't show your players perfect, miniature-scale maps for every foot of the dungeon, only "zoom in" when combat happens. That keeps the rest of the exploration in the mind's eye, where inexact knowledge of the layout can keep the "megadungeon mystique" alive for your players so it can enrich their experience of the place.