D&D General The 10' hallway default. How? Why?

[S'mon]

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!

 

[aco175]

I work at a college and the main buildings have halls that are 10ft wide. People can pass one another easily without needing to rub up against one another.

I mostly make them because I have lots of Dungeon Tiles from 3e days that we like to use.

 

[Larnievc]

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.

Used to be 5’ when I was a nipper.

 

[jasper]

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&D

 

[Greenstone.Walker]

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]

However small the rooms or wide the corridors at those scales - how thin are some of those walls....

But if we are assume that "10 feet" is a 1SF approximation, the walls could easily be 2 feet thick.

 

[Li Shenron]

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.

 

[Jer]

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').

 

[S'mon]

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').

Yeah, and especially as minis get ever-larger, a floor scale of 25 mm for 1 meter starts to get closer to the minis scale. It's already the case that many of my Paizo flipmats and other building interior & sailing ship maps look more like a 1m scale than a 5' scale.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

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.