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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhensley" data-source="post: 4053295" data-attributes="member: 1604">In a game I ran a couple of nights ago, I felt that the big fight of the evening was somewhat spoiled by the room size being too small.  It featured a group of 5 pc's fighting against 4 large monsters in a 40' x 55' dungeon room.  Now that sounds like a decent sized room and it looked decent sized on the graph paper when I drew it up, but it felt very cramped in actual play and greatly hindered the monsters' options.  So, in order to avoid this happening again, I sat down and tried to figure out a simple formula that would produce the minimum area needed for a good encounter.  Here it is:Take the number of squares that the pc's cover and multiple that times their average speed in squares.  Example- in my game there were 4 medium sized pc's and 1 large pc (cleric who is almost always enlarged).  They take up 8 squares and have an average speed of 6 squares so by themselves they need 48 squares.Now do the same for their opponents in the encounter.  Example- for the fight above, there were 4 large devils (4 squares each) with a speed of 8 so they need 16 x 8 = 128 squares to live in.  128 + 48 = 176 squares total encounter space.  A 13 x 14 room will do nicely (182 squares) and would have played much better than the 8 x 11 room I actually used. So in summary:  Minimum Encounter Area  =  (Area of PC's x PC Speed) + (Area of NPC's x NPC Speed)</blockquote>