Re: (TFT) Outdoor Scale - Request for Comments

[ErolB1@aol.com]

In a message dated 9/18/2006 7:39:56 AM Central Daylight Time, 
peterson@vigyan.com writes:


I am using 1970's Judges Guild campaign maps in my current TFT campaign (#10 
Lenap, to be precise).  Here is the solution I came up with:   use 16m per hex 

> for village-scale maps.  The JG campaign hexagon system maps have 25 little 
> hexes across each larger hex.  See 
> http://www.judgesguild.com/pdf/campaignhexes.pdf for an example.  If you use a 16m hex at village level, your next 
> level up is a 400m hex.  JG called this "Grand Tactical" level.  The next level 
> up is a 10 km hex on the campaign map.  This distorts the 5-mile-per-hex 
> scale that JG intended, but the change is acceptable.  
> 
> Meanwhile back in the TFT system, a 16m village hex is four megahexes 
> across.  This can be neatly drawn, but the 16m village hex to Melee hex drawing 
> doesn't come out so neatly.  Oh well.  
> 
> On to travel time and distance.  ITL suggests that a party on foot can 
> travel up to 50 km per day by road and about 25 km per day off-road through light 
> woods.  Does anyone have any experience that would suggest if this is 
> reasonable?  It seems a little high to me.  
> 

48 km is 30 miles. 50 km is 31 and a fraction miles. That's a reasonable 
figure for mounted characters, or characters with light loads (MA 10) traveling 
over a fairly good road. The Spanish missions in California were about 30 miles 
apart, for example, because that was about one day's travel. 

For a long time I used 25 km hexes, figuring that this would give 2 hexes a 
day under near-ideal circumstances or if the characters really pushed 
themselves, and 1 hex a day under more "normal" circumstances. In practice, however, 
there was a strong pressure to allow hex-and-a-fraction per day. 

Because of this, and because I wanted to make my world bigger without having 
to redraw all the maps, I decided to change to 32 km hexes. I still have to 
deal with fractional hexes, but at least I can make them nice power-of-two 
fractions (half-a-hex, quarter-hex, etc.)  

I've dropped the idea of megahexes, and have set Melee hexes to 1 meter from 
side to side. Not the by-the-book distance, but the books aren't always 
consistent, and 1 hex = 1 meter is convenient for me. 

I've also set that normal walking speed is 1 kph for every 2 MA, up to 6 kph 
(3-3/4 mph) maximum. This means that a group of MA 8 characters can travel 32 
km (1 overland hex) in 8 hours of walking. 

Maximum speed for overland travel is twice this: 1 kph per point of MA. This 
meshes nicely with my "sprinting" rules that allow 1.5x normal MA at a fatigue 
cost (and 2x or faster at a larger cost - but this higher speed cannot be 
kept up for more than a few km). 

Going off-road involves reductions to these rates of travel, of course. 

Erol K. Bayburt
Evil Genius for a Better Tomorrow
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