Agreed. I personally think large swathes of the hobby are overthinking this whole situation. These are games that provide light entertainment with an unusually social element and several features that promote creative thinking and free expression. That's awesome all by itself and works when it gets no more complicated than exploration, competitive fighting or puzzle solving, etc. This approach to table top gaming is front and center in TFT. It is basically why the game was made. This concept was borrowed whole-cloth from D&D (as is the case for pretty much every other game). The difference here is that the designers really carefully examined the question of how they could best craft a rule set to support this simple game-y side of play.

[ITL] Those crazy hexagonal maps

The meatiest part of the section of ITL devoted to labyrinth design describes how you create maps on a hexagonal grid. This leads them to a really peculiar looking place, so it is worth asking why they did it. The starting point is the system of movement in tactical combat in Melee (also used in Wizard and the rest of the TFT family of games). Any game that tries to describe tactical movement concretely has two choices: Either measured distances through a continuous space (defined either in 'game space' terms - feet, meters, etc. - or 'table top' terms - cm, inches, etc.), or some discrete number of steps or spaces in a gridded space. Many miniature war games (e.g., Chainmail) chose the first approach, and this is the approach adopted by most editions of D&D, Runequest and many other rpgs. The second approach is used by Chess, most marker-chit war games (e.g., squad leader, etc.), and a small number of rpgs: The Fantasy Trip, Dragonquest, 3rd and 4th edition D&D, and perhaps a few other obscure ones, like Boothill, Snapshot (the traveller tactical combat game), Behind Enemy Lines. The advantages of these latter sorts of systems is that they allow for very concrete rules governing movement, nuanced tactical decision making during the movement portion of play, and obviate the need for rulers, tape measures, etc.

If you are going to use a gridded space to resolve combat, you have a limited number of choices regarding your grids: if the gridded space is going to involve tesselation of a single equant shape, you can only do it with triangles, squares and hexagons. Triangles are an irrational choice, as they have to tesselate in a way that effectively amounts to hexagonal gridding subdivided into triangles that point to one another. If you think briefly about how movement and facing would work in such a space you will quickly decide it is stupid. Squares make sense in many respects: they are familiar (see: Chess, Checkers), and it is easy to relate their boundaries to the edges of common landscape features (walls, road edges). On the other hand, motion through a square gridded space is very 'chunky' when moving along diagonals, and most rules for dealing with this result in large changes in speed or effective range depending on the direction of movement or aiming. Also, there are many other landscape features that don't map well onto rectilinear spaces (trees, cave walls, meandering streams, etc.). Hexagons are better when it comes to most of these issues. Given that you have only two choices (square or hexagon), it is therefore unsurprising that many games use a hexagonally gridded space for tactical combat. So, while squares are also an acceptable solution, TFT made a solid, common choice in going with hexagons.

The question is, when you move from the playing field for tactical combat to a map for a dungeon, tower, city, cave, etc., how should you relate the mapped features to the gridded space? You have two basic choices: (1) create the map as if space were not gridded, representing buildings and trees and cave walls and so forth as they really appear, and then overlay onto that map a hexagonal grid. I would say this is the obvious and most functional choice; the only significant question it raises is how you handle cases where some non-hexagonal feature cross cuts your hexagonally gridded space. There are many games that provide the obvious answer to this problem: treat each hex as being composed of whatever landscape feature makes up the most of its area, ignoring the little bits of other things that fall within its boundaries. Or (2) actually represent all mapped features as being composed of one or more hexagons, making the outlines of buildings, paths followed by streams, etc. explicitly follow the outlines of the hexagonal grid lines. This has the advantage of being explicitly clear when it comes to rulings about movement over landscape features, etc. And, it is functionally equivalent to method (1) when you consider how one is likely to rule cases where a wall or other feature cross cuts a hex. But there is one significant disadvantage: it is bat-shit crazy.

TFT takes the second of these approaches to the hexagonal grid system, meaning every room, hallway, road, bridge, etc. looks as if it were assembled from hexagonal tiles purchased at Home Depot. It is difficult to execute, often maddening to sort out how you should best represent things you know should be more rectilinear or smooth, and results in maps that are often hard to read. In practice, I just refuse to do this most of the time, and instead just draw things more naturally and overlay a hexagonal grid when I want to resolve combat.

And yet... there is something charming about the crazy bee-hive effect of TFT's maps. I find myself strangely drawn to them. I can't put my finger on why, but I really enjoy navigating the squirmy tesselated spaces of a hexagonally gridded dungeon, and my OCD side likes that every single space and surface on the map corresponds to a specific place on the combat map, at every scale.

Before we leave this post and open the floor to discussion, I'll point out one last oddity of the ITL mapping system: how you represent labyrinths with multiple levels on a single piece of paper. Generally speaking, this is a solution looking for a problem. I don't think it has ever occurred to me that I would map a 5 level dungeon on any way other than by having 5 sheets of paper. But ITL says you should do it another way: by superimposing all of the levels onto the same piece of paper, using color or patterned filling to distinguish one level from another, and using a dotted line (a sort of mapping elipsis) where one tunnel is directly beneath another, and using a specific set of symbols to show stairs, ramps and shutes connecting levels. It is true that this approach can be used to represent one complex multi-level dungeon on a single piece of paper. And the end result has a certain charm - I actually quite like it for dungeons that have a relatively simple, open floor plan - the end result is a bit like the 3D perspective maps you get in Dungeon Crawl Classics. But in most cases it is an unmitigated disaster - you can't see shit and are constantly losing track of which room or hall belongs to which level.

Hehe.

One thing you didn't mention is the suggestion to photocopy and cut out "megahexes" (clusters of 6 hexes around a central hex, which is itself roughly hex-shaped - and used for weapon range penalty calculations) and groups of megahexes to use as tiles for creating battle maps from maps of a place.  That adds a bit of value to the suggestion to map locations on a hex grid where every hex on the location map corresponds to a megahex of tactical hexes. In fact, it can make it extremely fast to set up a combat map based on the location map, which is rather nice. What's not so nice (besides the aesthetic issues you mentioned) is that if you're using plain paper megahexes (as opposed to glueing them onto cardboard or something), they can get bumped or blown or messed up pretty easily.

The mapping system is described in great detail, and has the advantage of showing how it is possible to develop systems to be able to track lots of detail with a consistent system, which I appreciate because to me it underlines and continues the theme of the value of having things make sense and be like the actual world, and that practical physical details can matter and be interesting and so on.

The six-level sample map is pretty amazing, and not something I ever did quite like that when making my own maps, but it is pretty cool as an example of how you can show six levels of tunnels and how they relate and connect vertically as well as horizontally all on one sheet of paper. It certainly makes the point that 3D connections between levels can be mapped and are relevant to events.

I have actually used the provided tunnel map. I find it unusable in black & white, but more usable if you color-code the levels. And also you need other maps or at least good notes to show what is in each location - the level-shading makes it practically impossible to draw details inside the hexes.

After a few years, I switched to using your method (1), using the hex grid but drawing freehand for many or all things, showing how they actually are (especially square corners and straight things, like many walls). Having used the system from ITL for a while developed some good habits and concepts, even if mostly things don't follow the hexes except during combat. GURPS reinforced the move to (1) by using the same hexes and nearly the same scale, but not using megahexes and using method (1) itself for battle maps, with guidelines for what to do with partial terrain hexes.

I think part of the satisfaction of using strict hexes, though, is that for purposes of deciding what happens, the real game representation ends up being explicit per hex, so when things are clearly labeled (that hex is an officially blocked hex, that other hex is officially rough ground, etc), then you can play with it and know what to expect, and not have potential upsets from disagreements or disappointed expectations - although that can become part of gameplay too in some cases - what's going to happen if I try to move through that hex with the narrow stepping stones and the broken wall?

If you really commit to thinking of TFT as just a game with its own internal logic (rather than as some sort of magical-realism simulator), then the mapping system is fantastic, mostly for the reason you suggest: there is a totally concrete connection between the paper (or screen) map of an adventure setting and the table-top representation where play is resolved. This is particularly true if you construct your table top gaming environment out of little hallway and room modules, as you suggest. This is a very satisfying thing to do, and amounts to a cardboard version of the expensive dungeon-tile gear some groups use.

Not long ago, SJG put out a deluxe giant boxed set version of OGRE. When they did it, I had an extended delusional fantasy about the potential for such an expanded, high-class reproduction of TFT, where you get a really nice set of die cut counters (a'la the ones that come with Melee, Wizard and the boxed set solo adventures), AND a set of cardstock hexagonal map features - hallway segments, rooms, overlays of various kinds. This could probably be done at relatively modest cost and would be amazing. In this case, you would really want your map to be strictly hexagonal so that it could be used as instructions for gradually assembling the table top gaming space as the characters work their way through the dungeon (er, labyrinth).

A couple of comments:

A). Thanks for starting this thread. It's been a great read, and very informative. I don't play much in the way of Fantasy Rpgs these days (dungeon-crawling or otherwise), but if I chose to I would definitely reach for TFT to scratch that itch.

B). A few years ago, I bought a bunch of cheap HeroScape tiles (which Omega mentioned about 5 pages ago) that I intended to use for TFT. I thought that they'd be perfect for TFT - plus I've got quite a lot of 28mm fantasy miniatures stashed in my garage. The varieties of tiles, combined with stacking to create 3D landscapes, and some cool specialty tiles to reflect spell effects (darkness and hexes on fire) really got me excited for the potential. (Unfortunately I didn't get much buy-in from other members of that gaming group so nothing happened).

Quote from: K Peterson;910297A couple of comments:

A). Thanks for starting this thread. It's been a great read, and very informative. I don't play much in the way of Fantasy Rpgs these days (dungeon-crawling or otherwise), but if I chose to I would definitely reach for TFT to scratch that itch.

B). A few years ago, I bought a bunch of cheap HeroScape tiles (which Omega mentioned about 5 pages ago) that I intended to use for TFT. I thought that they'd be perfect for TFT - plus I've got quite a lot of 28mm fantasy miniatures stashed in my garage. The varieties of tiles, combined with stacking to create 3D landscapes, and some cool specialty tiles to reflect spell effects (darkness and hexes on fire) really got me excited for the potential. (Unfortunately I didn't get much buy-in from other members of that gaming group so nothing happened).

My pleasure! I agree that Heroscape tiles are a cool addition to a TFT table top. It is possible that the cost (~1$ per hex) could get prohibitive for many people if you wanted to have enough to basically play through a dungeon by laying it out in sequence on the table top. I suspect you could create a cardstock version of that experience for ~50$, whereas you would end up spending $500 to do it with tiles.

Yeah, there's no way that Heroscape tiles would be anywhere near as affordable as a DIY cardstock version. But the expense is really going to come down to the complexity of the dungeons you create - the overall size of all levels, the width of passages, and how large the chambers will be.

You're probably already familiar, but the HS tiles came in a number of layouts, not just single or double hex formats. There are megahex sized-tiles and larger pieces (an example image) that could go a long way to filling out your needs, if you don't mind some larger passages and rooms. If you do have your heart set, however, on single hex-width passages and small rooms it could certainly get expensive.

With patience you could likely find some affordable eBay lots, and buy a varieties of tiles. Primer them all the same grey, dungeon color. Paint-wash them if you want and then seal them. Still not a bargain like cardstock, but I think you could come under that $500 estimate with some work and patience.

Those can look pretty cool and be fun to play with, but using paper & transparencies or dry-erase battlemats or computer & printer and/or photocopier has no limits, is fast, costs very little, and has no issues with physical objects. It's nearly impossible to represent a complex pig/corpse/object pile that results from some dense fights (well even more so in GURPS, where fallen bodies are two hexes and it matters which one is the head end, etc).

The farthest I went with physical figures was to make plasticine figures with tinfoil armor, and indicate bleeding with actual cuts & punctures and red food coloring... oh, and lighter fluid burns for dragonfire... :eek:

[ITL] The World Outside

Following the detailed, quirky discussion of labyrinth design and mapping, we are served a thin, forgettable page of material providing advice to the game master for adventures outside of labyrinths, including topics like mapping villages and towns, sorts of encounters that might happen in such settings, getting lost in the wilderness, and a couple of wilderness encounter tables. There is little to note here, particularly when you can turn the page to one of TFT's more interesting, developed bodies of campaign rules: money, economics and jobs...

[ITL] Economic System

The next section presents something that remains unusual in roleplaying games: a treatment of money, jobs and income that is sufficiently structured that it can easily serve as the foundation for campaign play. Important activities that happen between adventures add enormously to a table-top roleplaying game - one could argue that they are the primary way for players to really influence the world and shape the development of their characters and the arc of the campaign.

There are a number of games that do this well: Traveller is an obvious and excellent early example. En Guard! is a second, less well known game where the week-to-month timescale activities take up most of a player's attention, and are organized into a structured, scheduled calendar of specific things you may do each week. Actually, I think it is fair to say En Guard! is both the best designed and most concise campaign-scale table top roleplaying game ever. D&D encourages campaign play in many ways, and clearly the designers and early players thought that the whole point was for the players to exert control over the lives of their characters rather than just drifting from one DM-dictated adventure to another (unfortunately a good description of the woeful state of 95+ % of our hobby!). But, D&D has struggled to come up with a game structure that promotes this.

Consider: when you play D&D you have pages and pages and pages of rules telling you how to structure the activity of a bar fight, and scads of statistics that govern what happens when one person bops another on the head. But what happens when you ask your boss for a raise? Or you want to buy an estate from an impoverished noble? Or you worm you way toward a promotion in your Arch Bishops Curia? Of course all these things can be done in the game, but you make them all up as you go along, or co-opt vague mechanics intended for some other purpose. There is nothing in the game that tells you how long any such things take or what sort of status you have in the eyes of NPCs or anything else like that.

TFT doesn't present a full treatment of these elements of the campaign game, but it takes a good shot at a slice of them. First, there is a brief but functional and complete description of money, taxes, banking, taking out loans. Missing are rules for investment and property (major gaps for campaign play, as clever players like to do things with their money). Next, there is a nicely detailed set of rules for your job, covering how you get one, what it pays you, possibilities for disaster or reward during each month of campaign play, asking for raises, changing jobs, loosing your job when you miss work because of an adventure or injury, all accompanied by a list of several dozen sort of generic jobs. The length and complexity is just what I like in a game: 2-3 pages that quickly and efficiently lay down instructions for ordering your character's mundane goals and life between adventures, with enough detail that you really have something to think about and decisions to make between adventure sessions. It is no En Guard!, but it is enough to get any gaming group moving in the direction of a rich, nuanced campaign without having to make up every single detail.

Lars - In 2016 the chances of someone deciding to play TFT as a full roleplaying campaign and then getting hung up on the particular details of how to handle cityside shopping has got to be mighty slim, right?

Also..that's spelled En Garde!

Quote from: Kellri;911491Lars - In 2016 the chances of someone deciding to play TFT as a full roleplaying campaign and then getting hung up on the particular details of how to handle cityside shopping has got to be mighty slim, right?

Also..that's spelled En Garde!

Spelling correction noted, but as for the rest of your post I don't know what you are talking about. What does 'cityside shopping' mean? I didn't say anything about whether TFT did or didn't provide price lists for things you might buy in a city. Why would someone in 2016 think any differently about that issue than in 1980? Is there some new trend where people don't use money in roleplaying games anymore?

Quote from: Larsdangly;911482Consider: when you play D&D you have pages and pages and pages of rules telling you how to structure the activity of a bar fight, and scads of statistics that govern what happens when one person bops another on the head. But what happens when you ask your boss for a raise? Or you want to buy an estate from an impoverished noble? Or you worm you way toward a promotion in your Arch Bishops Curia?

1) The reason that TFT has anything on economics, jobs, and down-time activities because that was characteristics of the second wave of fantasy RPGs in the late 70s and early 80s. The audience expanded and likewise what people tried to do also expanded. So depending on what the author wanted to focus they built in support.

2) D&D has downtime activities just not what TFT covered. In OD&D there are notes on building castles, and doing reasearch among other things. The reason for this is because of D&D's birth in the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaign. The specific items that the rules overs reflect what the players did in those campaign. And from the published stories in books like Playing at the World and Hawk and Moor, I feel comfortable say that those players were not focusing on jobs and advancement in an organization with a hierarchy. While a lot of things were tried and done, for the most part the early players strike me mostly as fiercely independent and competitive freelancers out to make their own mark on the world and not as somebody else flunky.

As tabletop roleplaying expanded we start to see campaigns that revolved around living the life of the setting which of course including things like the campaign being centered on being part of a large organization like a medieval church. So it makes sense that game designer, like Steve Jackson, when faced with a blank page to build in support for those kinds of campaigns.

3) While it nice to have some information and mechanics, the area of downtime mechanics, and the other types of roleplaying you mention work just as well with ad-hock rulings and common sense based on how the referee's setting works. What make this different than combat or magic? Because most of the activities center around social interactions that doesn't lend itself to hard and fast rules. Hence a referee's personal judgment often winds up working just as well.

I think that ITL's jobs etc section provides at least two levels of value over the "referee's personal judgement". It shows that it's possible to have thought-out numbers for various things like risk, wages, and chances of success at various social things (getting a job, winning a court case, bribing the town guard, ...), and offers a set of numbers and chances and so on for all of that as a baseline. From experience using the tables in ITL, and from the experience and math/statistics exercises of others, even with all this work, there can easily be sneaky unwanted side-effects if you get the numbers not quite right, such as the grain of the risks and the rewards given leading to chances that mean too much danger and too much chance of developing too-experienced characters from mundane work. Just using intuition seems unlikely to provide more consistent and unproblematic numbers. The example numbers provide a lot of food for thought. How much should it cost to bribe a town guard? Off-hand, one might think not all that much, but ITL points out that unless the guard is unwise, it should probably take more to bribe them than the risk of losing a big chunk of their salary if they get caught.

One player read that section, and made it his PC's goal to get a job where he would get to take bribes from NPCs. :-)

Oh, and while the travel rules aren't very exciting, they are at least a functional set of rules that require mapping the world on hexes with terrain, possibly getting lost, etc., which many players of other games seem not to do, or to handwave. Even this basic system led to a major focus of our gameplay on maps and exploration and travel, which is another one of those things that seems sorely missing when I play in games without them.

Quote from: Larsdangly;911482[ITL] Economic System
...
Next, there is a nicely detailed set of rules for your job, covering how you get one, what it pays you, possibilities for disaster or reward during each month of campaign play, asking for raises, changing jobs, loosing your job when you miss work because of an adventure or injury, all accompanied by a list of several dozen sort of generic jobs.

I liked the more generic information, like expected spending to maintain a lifestyle if you didn't have a job, and so on. But the job rules with specific chances to increase an ability versus risk of taking a known amount of damage were far too specific for my taste. (Did players ever decide to work for a number of weeks at risky jobs hoping to build up money and abilities without dying, like some sort of Traveller character generation process?)