Converting Square Maps To Hex

[tjbuege]

Ok, I have a plethora of old school D&D and AD&D modules. Of course the maps are all drawn on square grids. I'm able to scan them into Adobe Illustrator and overlay them with a hex grid, but something about this just isn't sitting right with me.

Take "B1 In Search Of The Unknown", a great simple hack and slash dungeon for starting out. By my count, that map is 37 squares wide. That works out to be 370 feet, or just over 123 yards. Again, that's 123 HEXES WIDE! How to squeeze all that onto an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper? At the standard 6 hexes per inch for area maps, that's only 50 hexes (or so) wide. I would need a sheet of paper 21 inches wide, and about 26 inches tall. I could scale down the hex grid to about 15 hexes per inch, but that's getting pretty small.

For those of you that have "converted" D&D modules to GURPS, how to you handle the maps? Do you overlay them with a hex grid, and just take multiple pages to represent what was done on a single sheet in D&D?

The other thing I'm trying to wrap my brain around is the fact that 1 yard hexes don't fit nicely into 10' squares. Do I completely ignore the fact that the map will not line up at all with the hexes? Something Kromm said on a similar thread, was about "getting over the aesthetic twinge". Do I just estimate while general exploration is going on, and only draw detailed closeup maps for encounters? I do have a nice large Chessex battle mat with hexes (and squares), so I could draw things out, but that could take sometime, too.

I'm sure I haven't accurately expressed myself here, but I'll stop and await some feedback.

Thanks,
Tim

[Mark Caliber]

On the off chance that I do this, my basic formula is to convert 3 yards (hexes) for every ~10 feet.

I don't worry too much after that.

As for my basic game board, I'm using a chessex mat w/ wet erase markers and do each room on that as it becomes relevant.

I'm also wont to shout "JAGGED ALLIANCE COMBAT SEQUENCE!" during sessions.

Honestly having recently played GURPS and also HackMaster V 5 or is it (oh bother never mind . . ) both as dungeon crawls, I find that its best to play GURPS fast and loose as even pared down, GURPS combat takes quite a bit of time to resolve.

[Philomath]

Is absolutely accurate cartography really that important?

Even when I have extremely detailed maps, my players don't. That is, they never measure the rooms they are in. As a result, my descriptions of room sizes tend toward "about X" or "the size of a bedroom/living room/etc".

Next time your players are all together in a room, ask them how big the room they are in is. You'll likely get a different answer from each player. Characters aren't going to be any better at it without something on the character sheet indicating otherwise.

If the detail isn't noticeable, it isn't important. What is important is that they are in a room with such-and-such a description. Or in a passageway that's too narrow for them pass except in single file.

The important bits for me have always been the general sizes of the spaces and their general layout relative to each other.

On the other hand, to translate the map directly, figure the minimum space a character can take up in each system and use that as the base. I haven't played D&D in a long, long time but assuming only a single character can fit in a square that makes a square and a hex equivalent regardless of what the map says the measures are.

[Collective_Restraint]

Originally Posted by Mark Caliber

As for my basic game board, I'm using a chessex mat w/ wet erase markers and do each room on that as it becomes relevant.

Same here, I find it's one of the simplest solutions. I take the room's measurement in feet and divide by 3 and do quick rounding. As easy as that.

[Kuroshima]

Curiously, I'm running Quest for the Unknown (The Hackmaster 4 version of In search of the Unknown), right now. I haven't overlaid it with an hex grid. I give the players approximate sizes (calculated on the fly), and only cnvert to hexes when I draw the room on my chessex vinyl hex map, as the above poster.

[The Benj]

Originally Posted by Mark Caliber

I'm also wont to shout "JAGGED ALLIANCE COMBAT SEQUENCE!" during sessions.

Because your combats take a long time to resolve but are tactically rich, or because occassionally one of the PCs will take an utterly stupid way around an obstacle?

[Maz]

There is also the posibility of simply using the squares instead of hexes.

It takes a little getting used to and the movement is slightly different, but we've been using a lot of D&D square-maps for our DF game without any problems. Saves a lot of needless work.

Just search the forum for "squares". There should be several threads about how to use them with GURPS.

The main diffeference is that you got 2 side squares to each side, and you have to decide if it cost a move point per 1/8 turn or only one per 2/8.
Ie. to turn to your side, should it cost 2 or 1 move point. And then turning al the way aroune, should it cost 2 or 4. We prefer to give a little more mobility so it costs only 1 for side and 2 for 180º. In GURPS that would cost 2 and 3 move points.

[Dinadon]

Originally Posted by Maz

There is also the posibility of simply using the squares instead of hexes.

It takes a little getting used to and the movement is slightly different, but we've been using a lot of D&D square-maps for our DF game without any problems. Saves a lot of needless work.

Just search the forum for "squares". There should be several threads about how to use them with GURPS.

The main diffeference is that you got 2 side squares to each side, and you have to decide if it cost a move point per 1/8 turn or only one per 2/8.
Ie. to turn to your side, should it cost 2 or 1 move point. And then turning al the way aroune, should it cost 2 or 4. We prefer to give a little more mobility so it costs only 1 for side and 2 for 180º. In GURPS that would cost 2 and 3 move points.

And I find it much easier to just declare one diagonal blocked. Leaves you with 6 surrounding squares so its almost like a hex grid.

[Bruno]

I've gone with "10 feet = 3 hexes" before. It tightens up the scale of rooms a little bit (the GURPS rooms will be 90% the height/width of the D&D ones), but I don't mind.

As for tabletop scale - big rooms are in fact big. Play at half or quarter scale (one hex is 1/2" across, or 1/4" across) or to get roughly the same size map, use "Metric hexes" (1 cm across, roughly 1/3 scale). For all of these, you'll need the really small scale wargaming minis, or beads or other smaller markers. I've seen pins used on a corkboard table once.

I really don't think that gamers in the AD&D days were meant to use the map as a battlemap, however, unlike modern products (Which btw use 5 feet = 1 inch square, and thus has similar scale problems to GURPS).

In "The Old Days" the DM would redraw a room as needed (or set up a wargaming sand table), or people played free-form and mapless.

It's a relatively recent phenomenon to have maps provided with the dungeon at play scale, and even then it's usually only for big climactic encounters... AND it's printed on a big poster paper anyways cuz it's huge.

I will print out up to eight pieces of paper and tape them together for a play-on battlemap - orient the pages Portrait and you can set them up 4 wide by 2 high (or landscape 2 wide by 4 high - same difference) which seems to neatly fit on kitchen tables.

The other solution is to go to a virtual tabletop, where there are no table size restrictions and the battlefield can go on for MILES if needed (on the computer, the GM can just fill a whole area with a solid color or a tiling texture, too)

[Diogenes]

Well, I'm preparing a dungeon that is on the map, with 1-inch-hexes, about 1.6 m by 0.6 m. That's the size of my table, which in fact determined the size of the dungeon 123 inches are alomst exaclty 2.5 m. I recommend (pick one)

1) a large table
2) small hexes
3) a map cut into pieces used in conjunction with a small copy of the whole level.