QFT. Hallways, rooms, and boats (in particular) are all wider in tactical gaming than in real life, to make life easier for people moving little figures around a grid.Because squares are 5 feet, and two characters aren’t allowed to occupy the same square for more than 6 seconds. Having to walk single-file down hallways would be a pain.
Exactly this.I'd always assumed because the default indoor scale was 1" = 10' so when you sit down with your graph paper to design a dungeon you use 10' as the unit, and it's most convenient to draw rooms & corridors along the lines.
First time I saw it was 3e, though late-era 2e might have done it also. A few outlier modules from 1e used 5' squares, and there's one (in Dungeon mag. I think?) that had my DM swearing a blue streak until he finally realized the written descriptions only made sense if the map was seen as having 7-and-a-half foot squares!1" = 5' has always been much closer to the nominal 25mm (more like 30+) scale D&D figures have always used. Was it 3e or late 2e that finally got around to adopting that?
No I think it was strictly graph paper and scale related.The correct answer is almost certainly that the designers weren't architects and just picked a round number.
I still don’t see it. What are you pointing at?Sure, that's transparently obvious.
I was walking along some long corridors in a hospital earlier this year and I noticed they where pretty close to 10 feet wide. Celings where about 10 feet high too.
That is a really good way to look at it.Also consider, most PCs don't walk around dungeons with tape measures. It doesn't make sense for characters to estimate distances to more than one significant figure. It makes more sense to describe a room as "about 40 feet across" than "37 feet across" or even "35 feet across". The maps can then be seen as approximations, not accurate blueprints.
The minimum corridor for a modern hospital (in the USA) that will accommodate patients in beds is 8'. Things can only get bigger from their (also forget if that does or does not include the bumpers - I don't do a lot of hospital work).
So large monsters can come and go as they please?
I still have some old minis, and, yes, they're noticeably smaller than the current plastic ones, but not, like 15mm vs 25mm smaller.
However small the rooms or wide the corridors at those scales - how thin are some of those walls....zenopus said:The rooms would be pretty tiny at 5' per square, but are reasonably sized at 10' per square.
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.5mm to .7mm usually but mine are .9mm.However small the rooms or wide the corridors at those scales - how thin are some of those walls....
10 to 20 ft tall, from Hill to Storm. Trolls 9+, Titans 18+.Yeah, the size of modern plastic minis have gotten...odd. The original 1e giants were fairly small.
I think I still have one of those (I eventually settled into using painted minis for PCs and tokens for monsters).The plastic hill giants are now the same size or smaller than some of the trolls. Seriously, the trolls are HUGE in 4e, out-muscling nearly every giant figure.
To be clear, I was talking about the code minimum. One rarely designs a hospital to the code minimum.Well, this was a UK hospital, and I think that part dated from the 50s or 60s. The main corridor was wider.