This is one of those situations that I ran into a lot when I was first starting out. The deal is a games themselves will encourage you to use a hex map. Especially older games like FGU's Aftermath! or GDW Twilight:2000. Not so much with the newer EDEN Studios' AFMBE are like that but the older games (because the guys from 70's and 80's companies like FGU, TSR, SPI, were wargamers, or were influenced by Wargames. Many old-school gamers were into wargames, and they mostly approached it from the eye toward hoexes or grids and the tactical situation. Narrative stlye games (starting with stuff like Star Wars d6) were not invented yet. So in those games, encounters have hex maps, or gridded out to show for example a warehouse, all the blocks of crates and all that stuff in it for players to mess with. Nice job of showibng it as a map for a tactical exercise, but lots of work to draw out. Twilight:2000 even tried to make it easier by making zerox ready sheets inside the rulebook in the appendix of boxes and rubble and such that you could copy, cut out and display on your tactical encounter maps of your city streets and buildings in ruined post-atomic Poland. It's the differences between running it as a wargame and running it as a role-playing tactical game and running it as narrative only game. Back in the in the old days, I would take whole city blocks and work it out on graph paper and draw out the maps of the barbershop, next to that the bank, next a library, next the police station. Players you would break out the figures and then we woulb be fighting zombies or marauders or russians or whatwever the setting. And it would be hex by hex, inch by inch moving, checking line of sight, and taking two or three hours to play out to the last hit point, for a combat that in real world is maybe 1 minute tops. But those games never saw or at least never dealt with the problem of simulations to that level of detail taking forever to play out. You'd see rules that Claimed. "Fast, Simple, yet REALISTIC combat!" But it was all rehash of the same deal that took hours, and hours for a battle, the real apex of this being games like Battletech, that allocated each specific point of damage on a hit sheet foer the specific vehicle, with little boxes or fritical hits, complete with die rolls need to hit ammunition, or a part of the shielding of an engine. The real problem is all of that sim; it's very wargamish and that style is now rarer and not commonly dealt with. Now its more narrative. What I would do if I were you based on running these games for a while is have a sheet of paper that shows the overview of the situation, as a sketch with the key that the barbershop is number one and you show barbershop on the map and you show the relationship of the streets on the sketch map. A car here, a rubbled building over there. But just a quick sketch to show relationships. Something to shaw the players who say, we walk over there. You also do not fail to describe it, let the game fall into all you guys imagine is these lines on a map...add in to the descriptions of places. The descriptive details make it more of a story. The piles of hair blowing about on the floor. A bloody spot where the barber got eaten or was dragged off, or helped out by a rescue crew. The shattered front window. A mug with still soft shave cream and a leather strap for sharpening a straight razor. But these are details you come up with on the fly, tapping your own experience. Thus the players fill in the visits to the barbershop from their own past, it feels real and you've done your job as GM of suspension of disbelief. For a tactics encounter, as long as you know whaty is going on and describe it well you don't need a map. Know what your system does for the thickness of a car door, with regard to bullets passing through. then when a PC hides, and is shot at you can just subtract the damage or chances to hit or whatever and narrate, the enemy fire hits the gas tank, and now gasoline is pouring out, forming a pool at your feet, the smell is heady and sickening. Or how safety glass is shaterred and falls into little cubes all over them when a shotgun blast strikes a window. If it's a bank, you have a vault and countertops and bulletproof glass and where it is, what it is. The players won't care it's a sketch, as long as there is description, their minds will fill in the details.
