How Much Do You Like Scissors & Tape?

[FireHorse]

I'm having some fun designing custom mappish stuff for TFT, but it occurs to me that maybe other people don't really enjoy printing things, cutting them out, and taping them together.

For example, that ship I'm designing (an 84-foot Carrack) is going to take three sheets of US Letter just for the main deck.

Or for another example, I thought it might be cool to have a perfectly circular Gladiator Pit, complete with textures and blood stains and other atmospheric flavor.

However, if I make that thing 50 feet in diameter as I intended, it'll take 7 sheets of paper to build. (The rectangles are the print areas for each page.) So I'm not so sure whether anybody actually wants to invest that kind of time and energy into it — which means I'm not sure whether I should invest the time and energy, either…

[malchidael]

That was a concern of mine when I was designing the three scenarios that I posted on the forums earlier. How to make it as easy as possible on me, and provide a high quality map.

I don't mind cutting & taping (although I prefer a hobby knife to scissors).

When I was doing the maps for my scenarios, I finally decided that providing the map as a complete poster might be the best bet - can be tiled from the PDF viewer, send as one piece to a 3rd party printing company to print as a poster, and/or scaled down to classic hex sizes fairly easily.

The only downside that I see is that typically printing a poster-sized pdf on a home printer results in less efficient use of paper than if the map is designed for home printing.

Love your map - i'll definitely cut & tape it together if/when you post it.

[Skarg]

I'm happy to do that, but would be scaling it to 1" hexes, not 1.5" hexes, so I probably have only half as much taping to do. :-)

[JLV]

Originally Posted by FireHorse

I'm having some fun designing custom mappish stuff for TFT, but it occurs to me that maybe other people don't really enjoy printing things, cutting them out, and taping them together.

For example, that ship I'm designing (an 84-foot Carrack) is going to take three sheets of US Letter just for the main deck.

Or for another example, I thought it might be cool to have a perfectly circular Gladiator Pit, complete with textures and blood stains and other atmospheric flavor.

However, if I make that thing 50 feet in diameter as I intended, it'll take 7 sheets of paper to build. (The rectangles are the print areas for each page.) So I'm not so sure whether anybody actually wants to invest that kind of time and energy into it — which means I'm not sure whether I should invest the time and energy, either…

Honestly, I'd LOVE it if you continued to do this and released it to us out here in the wild. I don't promise that I'll actually make it any time soon, but eventually I'll almost certainly find a need to do so. And just having the option available is great! (And, while you're at it, how about the rest of the ship types too? ;-) )

[FireHorse]

Okay, good. It's reassuring to know I'm not the only person who has enough Free Time to do such a thing. :)

malchidael: It would require very little extra effort (really just a few mouse-clicks) for me to produce both a multi-page and a poster-sized version. So I shall.

Skarg: Similarly, it would take very little extra effort to produce a version at 1" scale in addition to 1.5" — it's a simple matter of resizing and rearranging the artboards in the background (under the design). And so I shall. (The smaller scale means fewer sheets of paper to make it, too.)

JLV: All of them? Yikes!

Honestly though, I would like to do just that — inspired partly by David Pulver's "Ships and Boats in TFT" (in Hexagram #1), and partly by my own long-time personal love of adventure stories about sailing (the absolute pinnacle of which is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series).

I need at least two for my scenario anyway — because it would offend my sensibilities to use the same ship for both sides — and I stubbornly chose a Carrack for one of them, precisely because it is the most complex (it has the most decks), and therefore the most challenging.

And once that's out of the way… well, frankly, all of the other types are ridiculously easy, by comparison. :)

Of course, the types covered in the Hexagram article are only a tiny sample of all the types that could be done — even if we limit the choices to the 14th-15th century and earlier — and the categorical definitions it gives are rather over-simplified.

To cite just one example, it neglects to mention that pretty much all of those "Types" — which are properly defined by styles of construction and rigging and so on — can be built in a very wide range of Sizes.

Which is why the Carrack I'm doing is only ~90 feet in length (and technically only 60 at the waterline), not 120, but it's still a small Carrack, not a large Cog.

But enough of my blather… I have a Gladiator Pit to finish.

…

Oh, and a postcard…

[JLV]

Originally Posted by FireHorse

JLV: All of them? Yikes!

Honestly though, I would like to do just that — inspired partly by David Pulver's "Ships and Boats in TFT" (in Hexagram #1), and partly by my own long-time personal love of adventure stories about sailing (the absolute pinnacle of which is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin series).

I need at least two for my scenario anyway — because it would offend my sensibilities to use the same ship for both sides — and I stubbornly chose a Carrack for one of them, precisely because it is the most complex (it has the most decks), and therefore the most challenging.

And once that's out of the way… well, frankly, all of the other types are ridiculously easy, by comparison. :)

Of course, the types covered in the Hexagram article are only a tiny sample of all the types that could be done — even if we limit the choices to the 14th-15th century and earlier — and the categorical definitions it gives are rather over-simplified.

To cite just one example, it neglects to mention that pretty much all of those "Types" — which are properly defined by styles of construction and rigging and so on — can be built in a very wide range of Sizes.

Which is why the Carrack I'm doing is only ~90 feet in length (and technically only 60 at the waterline), not 120, but it's still a small Carrack, not a large Cog.

But enough of my blather… I have a Gladiator Pit to finish.

…

Oh, and a postcard…

Actually, by "all of them" I was thinking in terms of the Hexagram #1 article too. I'm sure some others would be way cool too (Roman Trireme? Spanish Galleon? Multi-deck maps would be Kick***!), but since we have effective "rules" for a list of ten or fewer, that should really be plenty! (The little ones -- rafts, rowboats, etc, don't REALLY need to be made -- there probably aren't going to be any fights on any of them that don't go immediately to HTH, and about the only ones where I would expect to see sword fights and the like would be on a barge or something, and really, that's not that far off from a regular Melee map, slightly truncated on two sides, so no need for a "special" map there...)

[Skarg]

I think small boats are pretty important, and very helpful to have ready counters/maps for. I've seen several campaigns have combat involving small boats, without any particular tendency to be simple HTH affairs.

Originally Posted by FireHorse

Skarg: Similarly, it would take very little extra effort to produce a version at 1" scale in addition to 1.5" — it's a simple matter of resizing and rearranging the artboards in the background (under the design). And so I shall. (The smaller scale means fewer sheets of paper to make it, too.)

Hooray!

[JLV]

Originally Posted by Skarg

I think small boats are pretty important, and very helpful to have ready counters/maps for. I've seen several campaigns have combat involving small boats, without any particular tendency to be simple HTH affairs.

I'm thinking more about combat ON the ship or boat, not BETWEEN them. All you need there is a hex map of a larger scale and a single counter for each unit, so you can see when (if) they get in bow range, thrown weapon range, and eventual boarding range (alongside one another).