D&D 5E 30 speed for all! Halflings, Gnomes, Dwarves were feeling left behind?

[Plaguescarred]

I have a feeling they changed demihuman's speed to facilitate party's overland travel movement or something for the exploration module. I mean, they always had a slower speed than human and other medium sized creatures this for the last 40 years! Its not just an appeal to tradition for the sake of it, my group always felt it made sense, as does a great deal of people apparently.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That's definitely not true. Tabletop RPGs depend on a certain amount of verisimilitude because they're open to so many options. Without verisimilitude, how does a GM make a player-predictable ruling when the game steps outside the written rules?

The two most central stats to D&D -- Hit Points and Armor Class -- are both massively abstract. Any verisimilitude is a bolted-on afterthought.

People who want to play a "realistic" game with elves, goblins and wizards have many much more realistic choices, with more of them coming out all the time -- Torchbearer is a recent entry. Arguing that a slight change to a tertiary -- at best -- stat is somehow making D&D unrealistic presupposes the game is a simulation of any sort of reality.

This board has has 11 years of SCA members, would-be novelists and martial artists howling that D&D gets various aspects "wrong" in terms of realism. And the common denominator is: It's not meant to be.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have a feeling they changed demihuman's speed to facilitate party's overland travel movement or something for the exploration module. I mean, they always had a slower speed than human and other medium sized creatures this for the last 40 years! Its not just an appeal to tradition for the sake of it, my group always felt it made sense, as does a great deal of people apparently.

During the 3E development process, they slaughtered a few not-so-sacred cows for a similar reason: If great swaths of gaming were house-ruling a rule away, that's a good sign that it's a rule worth scrapping.

 

[Plaguescarred]

I played with all kinds of folks and demihumans speed is not one of the thing people usually houserule. #YMMV

 

[sheadunne]

I played with all kinds of folks and demihumans speed is not one of the thing people usually houserule. #YMMV

We have always house-ruled speed to a standard 30 (3x) for all small and medium sized creatures (which for the most part were just player character races).

 

[Li Shenron]

I am slightly more in favor of giving all PC races a base speed of 30ft, for the following reasons:

- it's simpler as a starting point, one less fiddly bit to worry about; if you want speed differences, there can be feats to make some characters faster than others*; if you don't want speed differences, but they are there, you're going to feel guilty ignoring them because they are supposed to give certains PC an edge, so you'll end up having to use them anyway

- *or there can be optional racial traits including a speed bonus in exchange for a penalty somewhere else, or a speed penalty in exchange for a bonus somewhere else: IOW, some room for design creativity and innovation in how to handle races

- if everyone has the same speed, it is slightly easier to run combats without battlemat, or at least it's more relaxed, because you don't have to stop and think if maybe the dwarf cannot reach the orc but the elf can

- equal speeds work better with the abstract nature of combat, which is a better starting point to build upon if you want more realism/simulationism or if you want more tactical options

- in a sense, being able to move further or less in a combat round doesn't even represent certain creatures to be really faster or slower than others

- different base speeds destroy the hope for simple chase rules before even trying to design them

All of these are weak arguments, in fact I only slightly prefer equal speeds. If they are still in the game, it's not really going to bother me at all.

 

[Plaguescarred]

We have always house-ruled speed to a standard 30 (3x) for all small and medium sized creatures (which for the most part were just player character races).

Well i didnt say nobody does, but its not one of the thing i usually see among group's houserules i play with so i dont know how popular this change is.

I wished it was in a Wandering Monster's poll so we see some results.

 

[sheadunne]

Well i didnt say nobody does, but its not one of the thing i usually see among group's houserules i play with so i dont know how popular this change is.

I wished it was in a Wandering Monster's poll so we see some results.

It would be interesting to see.

Pathfinder has an alternative racial trait that swaps out Sure-Footed (+2 climb and acrobatics) for 30' speed. It would be interesting to see how many players choose that option.

 

[Plaguescarred]

Pathfinder has an alternative racial trait that swaps out Sure-Footed (+2 climb and acrobatics) for 30' speed. It would be interesting to see how many players choose that option.

Humm...now that's an interesting way to offer both options i rather like this approach!

 

[Gorgoroth]

As a matter of verisimilitude, this discussion is stupid. My dog has 10% of my size and I simply cannot cover the same distance as him in the same amount of time. As Yoda would say, size matters not. Agility? Sure. Physiology? Probably. We're talking about fantasy races here, they're as quick as the designers want to describe them to be, and there's already a precedent for "as fast as humans" small races in OD&D. Also, if anything else fails, this is the kind of thing where applying a house rule is so easy that their change has no power at all to hurt your game. Next is the "play the way you want" edition, just do that.

Cheers!

As a matter of verisimilitude, halflings exist in real life (the term is over 200 years old and has been used to describe dwarfism), and they do not run either as fast as your dog, or a normal height-unchallenged person, even most children can outrun them.

Talking about your dog running faster than you is about as pertinent to to this topic, whether 3-foot tall halflings and gnomes in D&D should have the same base movement rate as an adult human, as the price of gas is to a bird.

And no, D&D Next should not be a meaningless sludgy soup of nonsensical, absurd and contradictory rules that make no sense and cause reasonable people to go, Hmmmmm, why did they make this change? Speeds were not broken before, and now they will be. They're adding bugs (to many people) to the game, while claiming to want a 2014 summer ship date. That's not how you ship a game that you want to sell.

Cheers!