Genuary 2021 Day 7: "Rules by hand"

 

Some sort of space filling road network, maybe?

For this, I decided that I would make a network of connected nodes. My rules, which I sometimes failed to follow exactly, sometimes adapted for conditions I hadn't anticipated:

1. Roll D6 for number of exits

2. Go clockwise, rolling d6 checking if that number is equal to or over the number of exits remaining

3. Roll D6 for distance from those exits

4. Go to 1

Not specified is how to start. So I just picked a center-ish hex on some hex graph paper I had lying around. (You don't have blank hex graph paper within arm's reach? I don't know how you even live.)

I rolled a 2, which led me to two exits from the starting hex. That made a cute little macaroni elbow to begin things. I rolled the distance that each exit would go from the starting hex, got a 2 and a 5 in order, which I drew as tubes or roads or pipes or ganglia.

For each node, I'd roll to see how many exits to open up out of the hex. If the roll was over the amount of available directions to go, or under the number of exits already opened to that hex, then I'd clamp to the facts on the page. To determine which exits to open, I'd roll a d6 for each direction, and open an exit if the roll was less or equal to the number of exits remaining. If the number of exits available on the page were equal to the number of exits that I was supposed to roll, I'd skip rolling, and just fill in the remainder. This isn't exactly balanced, as when there's two sides of the hex remaining, and 1 exit to allocate, the rule says to roll d6, and on a 1 open the first exit, and therefore on a 2-6, you don't open the first exit, but implicitly you must open the last exit. So, this could be reshaped some.

Sometimes, I'd roll that a node has one exit, and that node would already have a road leading up to it, so that's a dead end.

Sometimes, the road would be specified to meet up with (or go through) an open node. In this case, I'd allow the road to meet up with the open node (but not go through, unless the exit rolls said so later). If a road was supposed to go off the page, or meet an existing road, I'd go as far as I could and place a node at the last empty hex.

Several bits of judgement involved - I think I could come up with a v2 of the rules that explain my interpretations of the edge cases.

I'd kind of like to code this up as a street map and drive a car around on it in a computer game.

I'd also kind of like to code this up and generate city street maps - maybe allowing roads to meet each other. Generating buildings on nearby lots would be cool.

Tools Used: Pencil, hex grid graph paper, Chessex Purple with White Translucent D6

Languages Used: English?

Development Time: ~2 minutes

Drawing Time: ~30 minutes

What's Generative Here: At every step, the network expands in a way determined by a random process implemented by a die.