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(TFT) Re: TFT Digest V3 #746
At 22:51 -0500 3/25/06, TFT Digest wrote:
After doing all this work, I can see certain
advantages to basing your mapping system on squares.
Perhaps, but you have almost single-handedly made the hexes as easy
to use for the rest of us! I missed this the first time around.
*Very* nice, thanks! Minor comments on some of your points below:
What are peoples feelings about adventuring in a
dwarven palace? How would you map it? This is a
subject of intense interest to me, as I've ALWAYS
wanted to do an adventure in Moria.
Seconded, but I have trouble imagining the volume of material it
would take to map all of Moria. Playing through the Playstation 2
"Third Age of Middle-Earth" right now, and there's a *major* sense of
unease at the small number of steps it takes to transport the party
from one part of Middle-Earth to another.
Moria is kind of the great-granddaddy of all dungeons that I've ever
heard about. Maybe it's sacrilege to map more than a part of it, or a
single path through it? Like trying to map all of Cidri, there should
always be unexplored turns and twists? In that sense, I guess my
ideal Moria map would have "here be demons" on all edges, or at least
two edges and below, and quite possibly above, where the party goes.
One other note. Most human expansion is to tame/cultivate an area,
populate it, then *keep* it populated forever. Tolkien's mines, both
Moria and the path taken through the Misty Mountains in "The Hobbit",
were tunneled out and then pretty much left fallow by the tunnelers,
whether dwarves or goblins. I guess the implication is that they can
and do tunnel a lot faster than they reproduce. That solves a lot of
the logistical problems I would otherwise associate with a habitable
volume that big, ie getting food and water in, waste out,
ventilation, etc. etc. It does not really solve the "tailings pile"
problem, though, and I'm still at something of a loss on that subject.
But I digress.
If we assume that the TFT hex is exactly 1.13
meters across (for the reasons given above) then
the LothU hexes are about 20.9 m across. Assuming
a scaling factor of 2.645, then:
Lv 1 hex: 1.13m ~1 meter or 13.0 % error
Lv 2 hex: 2.988m ~3 m or 4.0 % error
Lv 3 hex: 7.91 ~8 m or 1.13 % error
Lv 4 hex: 20.91m ~21 m or 0.37 % error
Lv 5 hex: 55.31m ~55 m or 0.67 % error
Lv 6 hex: 146.2m ~150 m or 2.36 % error
Lv 7 hex: 386m
Lv 8 hex: 1023m ~1 km or 2.3 % error
Lv 9 hex: 2.706 km
(The % error says how big an error there is
between the actual hex size & the approximation
given after it.)
These approximations work out quite nicely,
(much better than some I tried). In particular
the Lv 8 hexes are very close to 1 km across.
*SWEET*. OK, this is good enough to be effectively canon for me henceforth.
Note that a Company will fit with room to spare
in the Lv 4 hex, but things are too tight for a
Battalion. If we want the basic military unit for
the TFT wargame to be a Company of less than 100
men (thus a PC party will be a noticeable unit)
then this suggests Lv 4 hexes.
This seems like the overriding concern for me. If at Lv 5 individual
parties are down in the noise, it may share the name but it's
basically an unrelated game. However if *my* party could take part in
a battle at Lv4, it connects. If there's some connection to ITL
rules, too, that'd be even better. Like, maybe:
Move/move/act/act turn sequence.
Ranged attack values, with a table showing how to convert total
missile weapons carried by the company to the ranged attack for the
company counter.
Movement and defense values based on the heaviest armor in the company?
Magic values, maybe in several flavors, based on total wizard IQ?
Fatigue level?
Injury level, with ability to heal based on high enough fraction of
physickers in the party?
I am a bit torn. I have been working on a TFT
war game and am trying to decide if the game
should use 21 m hexes or 55 m hexes. (This is
assuming a LotU style, hex and counter game. If
I went with a block game like Wizard Kings, I
would want to use fewer larger hexes and then the
Lv 5 hexes become almost mandatory.) What are
people's thoughts?
Don't know either, but as above, Lv 4 so my characters can swing the
battle has enormous appeal to me.
Maybe I should post some thoughts on my TFT
wargame for you all...
Or just the pointer, if already done. This'd be great!
--
- Mark
Cell Phone: 210-379-4635
office: 210-522-6025
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