Why is everything twice as big?

[Savage Wombat]

Monte Cook built an entire campaign world once on the principle that since every building in D&D was twice as big as it needed to be for humans, clearly the dominant race were giants.

 

[77IM]

A "foot" in D&D is actually not a standard English unit of measurement; it's the actual length of the current king's foot. The current king of the implied setting is Arne II, Son of Arne. As an average male fantasy-European-equivalent (and not one of those Large-sized fantasy-Netherlander-equivalents), he's only 5' tall and his feet are only about 9" long. So a door that is 5 "feet" wide and 10 "feet" high is approximately 3.75 English feet wide and 7.5 English feet tall, which is entirely reasonable.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It would work well at 3/5 of the historical D&D scale. By using the yard as base unit, things get closer to what they should be. And it would convert well to metric.

5-foot square work well as a battle unit however, and that’s mostly what we need. 3-foot square would work well for close formation, but 5-feet is probably more realistic for skirmishes.

I’ve been using yards in the game I’m building, and we taped off some 1 yard hexes, and did some sword fighting, and it works pretty well.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

GURPS uses yards (and hexes), pretty much every SF game uses meters, clearly nothing explodes if you base a combat system on that scale.

I will, however, note in defense of the 5-foot unit that it is almost exactly equivalent to the Roman passus or pace.

 

[Li Shenron]

A bed is 10 feet long, and 5 feet wide.

That's the space a bed controls in combat

 

[Oofta]

You seem to be assuming that creatures in D&D follow normal shape and function. A little known fact is that all creatures and objects in the D&D world are actually made of blocks!



Or of course it could just be that they round up to a convenient number for simplicity. But all creatures being block shaped would explain why my brother called me a blockhead when I started playing D&D.

 

[jasper]

If an innkeeper shows me a 5' bed because that's "about" 6' I'll take my patronage elsewhere including bivouac.

My innkeeper will give you a cut rate, so don't leg it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

During the playtest I actually recommended that WotC change all their lengths from feet into meters (like they had done with their Star Wars rpgs). That way the size of a grid square and the number of grid squares were the same for ease-of-use.

So rather than having 30 feet of movement and having to do the math to divide 30 by 5' squares to get 6 squares of movement on the grid... each square would be 1 meter and your movement speed would be the same in distance and squares-- 6. And a 90' range that you'd have to math out to 18 squares would instead have a range of 18 meters and be 18 squares. Much simpler to deal with. And the fact that corridors that were 2 squares wide on the grid were now only 2 meters wide (or 6.5 feet) rather than 10 feet wide was just an added bonus of more logical proportion.

Unfortunately, they did not take my advice.

 

[Nutation]

So, a bed must be 10' long, because 5' is clearly too short.

Anyway,

Ken

In D&D, it is Procrustes' bed that must be stretched or shrunk.

 

[Satyrn]

In DnD, a door is 5 feet wide, a double door 10 feet.
A bed is 10 feet long, and 5 feet wide.

For comparison, the average european male is around 5 feet tall.
A double door is DnD is wider than your average ceiling is high.

Why is this?

It gets even bigger in metric. D20 Modern went with 2-metre squares. I don't get why they didn't shrink it down to 1 metre . . . and that made me kinda wish they shrank the 5 foot square down to 1 yard.

1 yard would still work well enough with the 10 foot wide halls, and would harken back to the AD&D standard that no one seems to remember ( where adventurers could stand 3 abreast in a 10 foot halfway)