Great White Games/Pinnacle Entertainment Group

[peregry]

You're not gonna believe this:

But we actually have used BattleTech Mech Scale Hex maps to represent things at "personal" scale before. Any map that's a pure outdoor map works well enough without any conversion, and there's one arena map that has an indoor section that works surprisingly well as a warehouse.

BattleTech hexes are one inch hexes, so things work perfectly. Even if they were larger (or smaller), hexes work perfectly because you simply change the range numbers to a number of hexes, and unlike squares, you don't have to worry about either artificially long diagonals or offset counting of diagonals (where ever other diagonal counts as two), you just count in a straight line and it works.
_________________
- Peregry
It is always giant stompy robot time!

[Virgobrown72]

We've always used tape measures for calculating ranges...
_________________
"Anything smaller is just fiddly, and fiddly is not one of SvgW's three Fs..."

[jcayer]

We've tried just about everything during our 3.5 year D&D 4E run.

Gridded whiteboard, worked well, but you can only show one map at a time and then you have to erase, redraw, etc.

Then I started drawing maps in Dunjinni and printing them out. Taping them together took far too long.

Then we started getting closer. I got an old LCD projector and started learning maptools. I set it up to project down onto the table from above. It was cool, but way too much work to setup/takedown, especially at 1 AM.

Moving on, we started projecting on the wall. Better, bigger canvas, but once again, setup/breakdown took too long.

Since moving to SW, we don't need nearly as large a play surface for sheets, dice, etc as we did for D&D. So I took an old PC and hooked it up to my 50 inch TV. Players sit on the couch and use tray tables or the coffee table. The GM gets a 2x4 foot table, and laptop.
In many cases, the map isn't necessary at all. My group is really starting to get theater of the mind.
This has been a great combo. I can prep larger maps as needed, but just use TotM for quick/improvised stuff.