Quasqueton said:
See, I'd say it was more than just "compatible with". The ranges and movement rates were all given in table-top scale. (This is kind of ironic considering how D&D3 assumes the use of minis and 1" = 5' table grids but gives all ranges and speeds in feet instead of always only in squares.)
This tells me that you don't really understand miniature wargames and their relationship to role-playing games.
In miniature wargaming, scales are very fluid. They change depending on how many men each figure represents, how big the figures are, and how much playing area you have. If you have 30 figures of 25mm size and you want to represent an army of 2,400 men, that's 80 men per figure. If these men are arranged in a typical set of three ranks, that's about 27 men per rank per figure. If the figure's base is one inch wide (a typical amount), that means there are 27 men filling up one inch of ground scale. Historically, a soldier requires about three feet of horizontal space, so that makes our ground scale 1"=80'. Note that figure scale is unrelated to this — if measured by ground scale, a single figure in this army would be taller than a house!
If you have a different number of figures, men, room, or figure (base) size, these numbers will be different. You'll always be left with two things, though: a figure-to-men ratio and a ground scale. Notice that miniatures wargaming does not use a grid as a measurement tool.
For a good explanation of wargaming, see
Beginners' Guide to Wargaming by Bruce Quarrie.
In
Chainmail, which assumes you have some wargaming experience, you are given some standard measurements around which the rules are based. If you're using 30mm figures, the figure-to-man ratio is 1:20 and the ground scale is 1"=10 yards. If you use smaller figures, they tell you to change to a 1:10 ratio. Naturally, the circumstances of your playing field and available figures may change these numbers.
Because
Chainmail was written for a standard set of scales, and because D&D derives directly from the Fantasy Supplement of
Chainmail, D&D inherited
Chainmail's measurement system. After all, thought Gary, D&D will be played primarily by wargamers, so they'll know what all this means. And if they want to play out some battles as a wargame, I'll give 'em the scale measurements.
As we all know, the real audience for D&D turned out to be non-wargamers. Gary soon realized this;
The Strategic Review has, early on, a D&D FAQ geared toward non-wargamers. But the wargaming background was already there, and Gary and friends were wargamers themselves, and that's how they thought of the game. You'll note that Gary has often commented that he and his group rarely used miniature figures during D&D games. At most they were there for show.
Since Gary wrote the AD&D text, the wargaming scales stayed. Notice that all editions of D&D that Gary didn't write himself drop most of the wargaming scales. (Only the
turn survived.) AD&D suggests that if miniatures are used, 25mm figures be used with a ground scale of 3"=10' in dungeons. It doesn't talk about using figures outdoors — probably because this would just lead us back to
Chainmail, except with a 1:1 ratio.
D&D and AD&D assumed that players were
not using miniature figures, but since its systems were derived from a wargame, that's how they were measured. d20 does not derive directly from a wargame — it is loosely based on earlier editions of AD&D, and adds dedicated 1:1 ratio rules to handle combat, putting much weight on their use.
