TFT - Game Accessories

[tbeard1999]

Originally Posted by Steve Jackson

FWIW, I have just finished recovering a good Word version of MELEE from a scan of the second edition, and nowhere does it define hex size at all. That must be in the later releases. It does say that turns are about five seconds each. So for MELEE taken by itself the official answer at the moment is "Big enough for one person to stand in with room to fight."

1 1/3 meter was the size quoted in ITL. After an initial affair with using hexes for dungeon mapping, I went back to graph paper. In those days, I interpreted a standard 10' wide corridor as being 3 hexes wide (or about 1 1/3 yard). The thing to remember is that the smaller the area the hexes represent, the more hexes large creature will take up.

One thing I don't like about megahexes is that they are irregular in width. A corridor 1 MH wide, will be 3 hexes wide about 1/3 of the time and 2 hexes wide about 2/3 of the time. This is okay (I suppose) for natural tunnels. But even there, it causes some odd combat effects because 3 figures can be positioned to battle 2.

That said, I think that megahexes practically scream TFT. It's hard to see how you can relaunch TFT without them.

Something that I bitterly object to is the 1 square = 5' scale of D&D3E+. This scale makes rooms and corridors crowded and lessens the opportunity for tactics to matter. My 10' corridors have always been 3 man-sized figures wide and always SHALL BE! THIS IS SPARTA. Uh, sorry.

Another option would be to use the 1 hex = 1 yard scale of GURPS. That would allow TFT to use GURPS maps and the like. I would, however, leave larger TFT creatures the same size in hexes, though. The bigger the creature (in hexes), the weirder the movement becomes. All IMHO, of course.