Well, this was a UK hospital, and I think that part dated from the 50s or 60s. The main corridor was wider.
I once worked in Astlie Ainslie hospital in Edinburgh and also noticed the 10' corridors!
Well, this was a UK hospital, and I think that part dated from the 50s or 60s. The main corridor was wider.
Used to be 5’ when I was a nipper.10' is a pretty good distance. The other thread about a 5ft square helps put things in context of the actual scale. Which makes me wonder, "How did the 10' wide hallway become the default size?" That's an incredibly wide hallway, and real life tunnels and dungeons and castles don't even come close to being that wide. Especially odd to consider when the builders of D&D tunnels and hallways are small goblins or kobolds.
And yet, pretty much every dungeon passage and castle hallway in early D&D is 10' wide and 10' tall.
Because graph paper generally came in two colours. Blue which most kids had access too. So a square was 10 feet and you could doodle your dungeon in math class. Those crazies with their green graph paper were not allow to play D&D10' is a pretty good distance. The other thread about a 5ft square helps put things in context of the actual scale. Which makes me wonder, "How did the 10' wide hallway become the default size?" That's an incredibly wide hallway, and real life tunnels and dungeons and castles don't even come close to being that wide. Especially odd to consider when the builders of D&D tunnels and hallways are small goblins or kobolds.
And yet, pretty much every dungeon passage and castle hallway in early D&D is 10' wide and 10' tall.
But if we are assume that "10 feet" is a 1SF approximation, the walls could easily be 2 feet thick.However small the rooms or wide the corridors at those scales - how thin are some of those walls....
Gygax used 10' halls and suggests 3 men can fight abreast in such.
Which fits with my preferred scale of treating squares as a meter on each side instead of 5' (though I'll typically also have corridors that are narrower and only 2 meters in width instead of 10').
Gygax used 10' halls and suggests 3 men can fight abreast in such.
I'm tempted to use colorful language but... Gygax was just incorrect on that one. YOu can construct cases where it'll work, but it doesn't generalize.
Below is a man in a 5' square. Imagine lopping 2' off each side of this - you could stand in it, sure, but taking vigorous action with bladed weapons and not lopping your neighbor's head off would be challenging.