I once worked in Astlie Ainslie hospital in Edinburgh and also noticed the 10' corridors!
D&D General The 10' hallway default. How? Why?
- Thread starter Sacrosanct
- Start date
I once worked in Astlie Ainslie hospital in Edinburgh and also noticed the 10' corridors!
Larnievc
Adventurer
Used to be 5’ when I was a nipper.
jasper
Rotten DM
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&D
Greenstone.Walker
Adventurer
As an aside, I measured the hallway in my house. It is a little over 900mm (that's 3ft for all you non-SI people 
.
.
Paul Farquhar
Legend
But if we are assume that "10 feet" is a 1SF approximation, the walls could easily be 2 feet thick.
Li Shenron
Legend
I used to think that 10ft was chosen pretty much to avoid having to line-up characters or monsters if a fight occurs in a hallway, but actually I think it's more common than 5ft in real life... private houses might have 5ft hallways, but public places, factories and offices usually have larger ones. The closest thing to a dungeon I've been has been castles and mines, and they also were closer to 10ft than 5ft.
It's not that every dungeon or locale needs to have this size of passages, of course, but it makes sense to me that most places do.
It's not that every dungeon or locale needs to have this size of passages, of course, but it makes sense to me that most places do.
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').
Man in the Funny Hat
Hero
I'm no SCHOLAR on the topic, but...
D&D has always used miniatures. Not EVERYBODY used miniatures for D&D, but D&D was heavily derived from tabletop wargaming and use of miniatures. Currently the accepted miniatures scale is 25MM but it used to be smaller (20MM?) - because miniatures were again initially taken from table wargaming which had figures representing a lot more than one individual and it was desirable to have a smaller scale to better fit lots of miniatures to a table. As miniatures companies began providing miniatures for RPG's they initially kept to the same scale.
Distances in D&D were measured in scale had differing scales for indoor and outdoor action. Outdoors it was more like a straight-forward tabletop wargame. Indoors it didn't cover nearly as large an area, movement of individuals was more restricted and range of weapons and spells was also reduced to fit the smaller scale of the action. As D&D was developed the use of multiple scales for measurement was dropped entirely, and only ONE scale became used - 1" on a table top=5'. Miniatures also increased in size, which better fit that scale and they also then lent themselves better to painting details on them.
From the beginning/early days of D&D, dungeons and structures were being drawn out on graph paper. This provided multiple benefits. For one thing you didn't need to be an architect, just able to make it LOOK like something appropriate. But also in early editions elapsed time for exploring dungeons was carefully marked in turns but distances moved in a turn altered according to the other actions the party was taking. Mapping as you go meant much slower movement, then there was looking for traps or secret doors, etc. As DM, by drawing stuff in big, obvious, 10' squares you make your job of tracking how far the party has moved MUCH easier. And then of course a 10' corridor meant at least 3 PC's could line up abreast, with a second rank with missiles, spells and occasionally reach weapons and combats were more dynamic and interesting. Rooms were even LARGER and combats looked more like they did in open terrain outdoors (even if the movement, along with spell and weapon ranges were reduced).
Was it unrealistic? You bet. Still is. Hopelessly so. But it makes for FAR better game play.
D&D has always used miniatures. Not EVERYBODY used miniatures for D&D, but D&D was heavily derived from tabletop wargaming and use of miniatures. Currently the accepted miniatures scale is 25MM but it used to be smaller (20MM?) - because miniatures were again initially taken from table wargaming which had figures representing a lot more than one individual and it was desirable to have a smaller scale to better fit lots of miniatures to a table. As miniatures companies began providing miniatures for RPG's they initially kept to the same scale.
Distances in D&D were measured in scale had differing scales for indoor and outdoor action. Outdoors it was more like a straight-forward tabletop wargame. Indoors it didn't cover nearly as large an area, movement of individuals was more restricted and range of weapons and spells was also reduced to fit the smaller scale of the action. As D&D was developed the use of multiple scales for measurement was dropped entirely, and only ONE scale became used - 1" on a table top=5'. Miniatures also increased in size, which better fit that scale and they also then lent themselves better to painting details on them.
From the beginning/early days of D&D, dungeons and structures were being drawn out on graph paper. This provided multiple benefits. For one thing you didn't need to be an architect, just able to make it LOOK like something appropriate. But also in early editions elapsed time for exploring dungeons was carefully marked in turns but distances moved in a turn altered according to the other actions the party was taking. Mapping as you go meant much slower movement, then there was looking for traps or secret doors, etc. As DM, by drawing stuff in big, obvious, 10' squares you make your job of tracking how far the party has moved MUCH easier. And then of course a 10' corridor meant at least 3 PC's could line up abreast, with a second rank with missiles, spells and occasionally reach weapons and combats were more dynamic and interesting. Rooms were even LARGER and combats looked more like they did in open terrain outdoors (even if the movement, along with spell and weapon ranges were reduced).
Was it unrealistic? You bet. Still is. Hopelessly so. But it makes for FAR better game play.
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.
Image from: D&D: Have You Ever Wondered What A Five Foot Square Actually Looks Like? - Bell of Lost Souls
Well it was 1e AD&D, so he had different space requirements for different weapons. You could fit more gladius-armed Romans or spear-armed hobgoblins into your frontage than axe-swinging gauls or flinds swinging flails.
Greenfield
Adventurer
The default was basically mechanical.
In the original D&D the standard of measure was that each map square indoors represented 10 feet. It was 10 yards outdoors. And since most dungeon designs were drawn on what's essentially graph paper it was really hard to plot a corridor that was smaller than that.
That original game also called for using the map board from an Avalon Hill game called Wilderness Survival as the standard for outdoor terrain. Like many mapped board games that board was divided into one inch squares.
So an "inch" indoors was one square on the graph paper, and represented 10 feet, while an "Inch" outdoors represented 10 yards.
Part of that was the idea that things like archery are inherently limited when in doors: Range is limited by how high the arrow's trajectory. the "arch" of archery, could be. Can't be higher than the ceiling indoors, while the the lowest limit outdoors would be the height of the forest canopy outdoors.
So the default standards were that distances were always expressed in "inches", with an inch representing 10 feet indoors and 10 yards outdoors.
In the original D&D the standard of measure was that each map square indoors represented 10 feet. It was 10 yards outdoors. And since most dungeon designs were drawn on what's essentially graph paper it was really hard to plot a corridor that was smaller than that.
That original game also called for using the map board from an Avalon Hill game called Wilderness Survival as the standard for outdoor terrain. Like many mapped board games that board was divided into one inch squares.
So an "inch" indoors was one square on the graph paper, and represented 10 feet, while an "Inch" outdoors represented 10 yards.
Part of that was the idea that things like archery are inherently limited when in doors: Range is limited by how high the arrow's trajectory. the "arch" of archery, could be. Can't be higher than the ceiling indoors, while the the lowest limit outdoors would be the height of the forest canopy outdoors.
So the default standards were that distances were always expressed in "inches", with an inch representing 10 feet indoors and 10 yards outdoors.
I'm not sure if this was mentioned in the thread, but there was a specific rule in AD&D for miniatures where each 10' square depicted in the maps would be split in a 3x3 grid for miniatures, each 1" square being equal to 3 1/3 ft. Sounds confusing, but it worked for us for years.
AD&D 1E DMG, p.10
AD&D 1E DMG, p.10
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