Room Sizes...

[Celebrim]

Still, 16' x 16' is larger than most bedrooms.

I've very rarely had the PC's fight in modern bedrooms. Most of the time when it was a bedroom, it was a state bedroom suitable for conducting court in.

16'x16' might be larger than most real rooms, but it would have always been considered a fairly small dungeon room.

I try to model my floorplans off of real world architecture - with a few changes to suit the needs of adventuring, typically somewhat grander scale and copious asymmetry. I don't want to have to scale up every room to gymansium size to accomodate the game.

 

[Harshax]

I don't know if this sounds silly, but since I've only seen mention of 'squares' I had to say this.

Where does it say a 'square' has to be a 5' square? Why not a 2' square? That turns a typical 10'x10' room into a 5 square by 5 square room, as oppose to 2x2. This seems reasonable, and it makes tactical movement reasonable too.

ymmv

 

[Ipissimus]

15' square seems pretty realistic. Of course, this is a fantasy game, more in tune with The Mines of Moria than real life dungeons and catacombs. I liked 3E scaling back to 5' squares from 10', which reined in some of the excesses of 1E and 2E dungeons (10' wide corridors everywhere? So much for cramped confines).

However, I think the key to designing encounter areas won't always be picking one plain room and going with it. Alot of the challenge in large rooms will be window dressing: Pillars, statues, traps... actually, the idea of playing in a Medusa's garden actually has me excited about the tactical possibilities. On the other side of the coin, I think alot of encounters will need to take place in a collection of rooms in order to give the PCs the needed variety while still maintaining the tactical challenge of close quarters combat.

 

[frankthedm]

An easy way to update older adventures is to knock out a few walls. Thankfully D&D has no shortage of burrowing horrors that make dungeon remodeling easy and semi plausible. Reduce a good portion of the walls to difficult terrain, leaving a few functioning pillars and blamo, instant oversized encounter area.

 

[Hussar]

I've very rarely had the PC's fight in modern bedrooms. Most of the time when it was a bedroom, it was a state bedroom suitable for conducting court in.

16'x16' might be larger than most real rooms, but it would have always been considered a fairly small dungeon room.

I try to model my floorplans off of real world architecture - with a few changes to suit the needs of adventuring, typically somewhat grander scale and copious asymmetry. I don't want to have to scale up every room to gymansium size to accomodate the game.

Actually, I think you can have your cake and eat it too.

4e mechanics are supposedly tailored so that "encounter" no longer equals "room". So, while you might need 120 squares for the encounter, you don't need to put all those squares within 4 walls. Your encounter area could include three separate chambers with passageway's in between.

I think this is where the OP's question is going off the mark actually. He's asking what the average size of an encounter room is. The answer isn't that the room has to be bigger, it's that instead of writing a 5, 6 and a 7 on your map key for those three rooms, you write 5 and circle all three rooms.

At that point you decide the xp value of the encounter, and build from there. The initial contact point might contain a couple of minions and an artillery piece. The other rooms may have a leader and more minions. Whatever. Then you figure out from there. Stagger the entrance of the other critters and you can reduce the overall size of the encounter while maintaining mobility for all combatants.

 

[TerraDave]

At the same time, some of Design & Development articles and some of the staff blogs have emphasized the idea of not thinking in terms of rooms but in terms of encounter areas: multiple interconnected rooms and hallways in which a battle takes place.

Right encounter space may be big, but it not nec just one big room.

In the XP playtest, the encounter areas where pretty big, requiring multiple rounds to move across, and with only the wizard and ranger being to shoot from side to the other. But they had various things breaking them up, and essentially room like spaces within the encounter area. And they also did the monster coming from various sides thing.

Outdoors really is the obvious place for this. Indoors, you could imagine large natural caverns with all sorts of features to break them up. Warrens of interconnected rooms and tunnels with various ways to go place to place (to limit chokepoints). Or more open building/courtyard type spaces with rows of pillars, alcoves, and other features. Each of these might be somewhat "realistic".

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

At the same time, some of Design & Development articles and some of the staff blogs have emphasized the idea of not thinking in terms of rooms but in terms of encounter areas: multiple interconnected rooms and hallways in which a battle takes place. That is, when a fight starts out in Area 3, the monsters in areas 4 and 5 join the battle. So, the party is getting hit from several directions at once or can hit the monsters from multiple directions.

I think this is the way it will (and should) go. A single big room is not all that exciting (or plausible). Multiple spaces joined by halls or archways, galleries overlooking open levels below, etc - these are more interesting. I've always tried to make interesting environments for combats to take place, to encourage movement, and to allow for interesting interactions between combatants and locations.

 

[DM_Blake]

I would much rather design places based on what their in-game actual use is than some sort of general combat optimization. Plus, I like when characters are forced to think creatively to get around the circumstances of the combat environment, whether it be climbing, jumping, bullrushing, grappling and moving your foe, easily blocking off egress with spells, furniture or bodies, etc.

Had to get to the 15th post before someone said this.

/sigh

The architect who designed, or the builders who built the dungeon, castle, tavern, tower, etc., didn't construct each area based on how easy it would be to fight a battle there, using their crystal balls to see the future and know exactly how many creatures would be in the battle and how fast they are.

Each room was built according to what that room would be used for. A feast hall in a large castle might be very large indeed - even if a group of 4 PCs is fighting a medium-sized illithid. And the room designed to be the princess' servant's bedchamber might only be 10'x10', even if a party of 8 PCs is encountering a dozen kobolds in it.

Building structures costs money. It costs more money if you make it bigger because it requires more building materials (or more excavation). It also takes longer. If a king wants a castle built, he's going to wait 5 years for it to be finished (unless he has powerful mages, or maybe earth elementals, etc., to do magical/unearthly construction for him). But if he wants every room large enough to handle a battle between 2 dozen of his soldiers fighting a dozen invading ogres, that same castle will take 20 years to build and cost 10x the coin.

I can see the king now, inspecting his new castle. "Why is my royal closet 100' wide by 150' long?" and the answer being "Well, sire, it seems that 400 years from now, the kingdom will have fallen to ruin and a vile necromancer will live here. He will animate 40 hill giant skeletons and he will store them here. Then a party of heroes will arrive and fight them in this very closet. So we built it large enough to accomodate that battle."

I cannot even imagine building a dungeon (or any other structure) around the idea of making each room large enough for the encounter that might be fought in it.

 

[Wormwood]

I cannot even imagine building a dungeon (or any other structure) around the idea of making each room large enough for the encounter that might be fought in it.

I do, every single time.

Because the encounter space isn't built by an architect.

It's built by a set designer: me.

 

[Jeff Wilder]

Bear in mind that the size of the room in "number of squares" and "appearance on the battlemat" will depend on whether it's drawn on the diagonal. Any given room of X by Y squares will be fully twice as large when drawn on diagonals, and contain nearly twice as many occupiable squares.