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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Quixote" data-source="post: 5261142" data-attributes="member: 694">Huh.  You're right about Moldvay suggesting a five-foot scale on page B61, but it contradicts itself on page B19 ("If miniature figures are used, the actual movement of characters can be represented on a scale of one inch equals ten feet.  A movement rate of 60' per turn would mean that a miniature figure would move 6 inches in that turn.")  This text is reproduced almost verbatim in the Mentzer Basic Set ("Scale Movement," bottom of page 57 in the Player's Manual), and it's even more explicit in the Rules Cyclopedia that the ten-foot scale applies to combat as well as dungeon exploration (page 87, "When you use miniatures to conduct combat, 1" on the table surface represents 10' of distance.")All the versions of Basic D&D are consistent in stating that characters must be within 5' of each other to conduct melee, but these days, I just read that to mean that meleed characters are standing in the same 10' square, dueling and wrestling and whatever else one might do in a foggy, chaotic scrap.  And as more and more combatants enter the melee, it actually helps to clarify why Basic D&D is so insistent on distinguishing Fighting Withdrawal vs. Full Retreat for characters trying to disengage from hand-to-hand combat.  (Personally, I find this much easier to adjudicate and keep track of than threatened squares and attacks of opportunity.)I like the ten-foot scale for many practical reasons.  I can put lots of battlefield or dungeon on my tabletop all at once; it doesn't seem like the monsters and characters can cross said encounter area as quickly as if I were using a five-foot scale, so it feels like there's more room to maneuver tactically; and one ten-foot square is such a large area in terms of "game space" that there's plenty of room for abstracting the combat action, and for imagining what's really going on in melee situations.  That said, I just can't conceive of using regular-sized miniatures on that scale, hence my oddball quest for alternatives.</blockquote>

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