Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

Cultural exchange with the hymenopterans, maybe. They live in honeycomb-shaped dwellings, humans picked up the habit.

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

Definitely in favour of squares being an option.

The alternative is stl files to 3d print hexes with walls in both the standard 15mm figurine size of the original melee/wizard and the 28mm figurine expanded 1.5" hexes of the new mats.

Those of us who have Dwarven Forge or other sets are going to use squares anyway. May as well have an official published standard.

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

I'd go further: it's not just 3D, it's all the 2D terrain people will want to use.

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

Ironically, the first edition AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide explicitly endorsed using hexes for tactical combat (along with squares). See page 69, which has hex facings identical to TFT. And hex facings if the figure faces a hex point rather than side.

Unfortunately, it was MUCH easier to hand draw a square grid on posterboard than a hex grid in 1980.

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

WAY back when Greg Poehlein, Dave Tepool and I were repping for Metagaming at game conventions, our company was one of the first TFT licensees. We licensed the right to produce TFT character sheets and megahex layouts. For one of the GenCons, we had a pallet of large poster-board thickness megahex sheets in about 34 x 44 inches. (Our usual ones for sale were that size, but they were printed on paper and folded.)

We gave a big cardstock megahex sheet away with every Metagaming purchase that weekend (promoting our licensed stuff). By Sunday, we were giving mutiples away to everyone just so we didn't have to ship that cockamamie pallet home.

Man, I wish I had a stack of those now. Greg and I had a box each of the ziplocked 8.5 x 11 two-sided character sheets, too. But neither of us can find them. <sigh>

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

Why can't you use squares and offset each adjacent column of squares by half the length of a square? Wouldn't that give hex like movement yet the orthogonal lines of the grid to aid in mapping linear structures?

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

<Grumpy old man persona on>

Yeah, this generation of gamers have no idea how hard it was to get support materials that you can now download for free from dozens of sites. Even the best game stores were limited in the inventory they could carry. You could buy hex sheets in 1980, but our local hobby/toy stores rarely had them in stock. Mail order literally took 6-8 weeks, which was a lifetime for teenagers then. (Probably still is).

Anyhow, I played D&D for a year (at least) on a piece of posterboard with a hand drawn 1/2" grid, small 25mm minis and 1/8" square balsa wood strips of various sizes for walls. I *think* our scale was 2' per square (no suggestion for the size of squares or hexes was made in the DMG).

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

Bah, hand drawn grids. Luxury! We just used my Mum's cloth measuring tape marked off in inches. And we played on the carpet!

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

And what support materials we had too! Zocchi/Gamescience and The Armory made the best hex pads, hex sheets, and hex posters. Also were those wonderful rub-on terrain symbols for map-making.

I always wanted rub-on transfers for the "Level Screens" and "Stair Hexes" shown on the Labyrinth Map in ITL, so I could make mine look as "pro" as the Tollenkar map.

JK

Re: The Cartesian Heresy
 

When I have the option to create the grid myself, I’m fine with hexes. I’m fine with partial hexes along the wall of a rectangular room.

The reason I’m considering the heresy is for using the many play aids I have that already have a square grid on them. (Like the aforementioned Dwarven Forge tiles.)