Why are Adventurers so Slow?

One thing I never understood about Dungeons & Dragons was how amazingly slow a person walks.

As I’ve mentioned before, my real-life walking speed is about 3 miles per hour (give or take based on encumbrance & fatigue). How does that compare to a character in the old D&D rules? As always the answer is “it depends.” But let’s walk through it…¹

Dungeon Speed

The original edition of D&D was written in three little book, about 35-40 pages each. Any given rule is scattered across the books, and movement is no exception. On page 8 of  book 3, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, there is a section called “The Move/Turn in the Underworld.” In that section we see this:

In the underworld all distances are in feet, so wherever distances are given in inches convert them to tens of feet.

Movement (distances given in Book 1) is in segments of approximately ten minutes. Thus it takes ten minutes to move about two moves — 120 feet for a fully armored character. Two moves constitute a turn, except in flight/pursuit situations where the moves/turn will be doubled (and no mapping allowed).

That tells us that we need to look in Book 1 (Men & Magic). Does Book 1 contain a section about movement? Absolutely not. Instead we need to look in the section called “Basic Equipment and Costs” because, of course “Basic Equipment” is the natural place to look for movement rates, am I right? Anyway, in that section, on page 15, is a table called “Weight which can be carried,” that contains this:

Load in Gold Pieces Equal to Light Foot Movement (12”) -   750
Load in Gold Pieces Equal to Heavy Foot Movement (9”) - 1,000
Load in Gold Pieces Equal to Armed Foot Movement (6”) - 1,500

So combining these two sections, we see that an lightly encumbered man (i.e. “Light Foot”) has a movement rate of 12". 12 inches is 120 feet. But he can move twice that, so 240 feet, in 10 minutes. Doing some quick math tells me that’s 0.27 miles per hour.

If the character is being chased and fleeing for his life, he can double his speed to 0.55 miles per hour. Remember, I walk at 3 mph, and our unencumbered hero is fleeing for his life at 0.55 mph.

That’s just silly.

Wilderness Speed

You might recall that this started in a section called “The Move/Turn in the Underworld.” So is there a section called “The Move/Turn in the Overworld” or some such? Of course not. But starting on the bottom of book 3, page 15 there is a section called simply “The Wilderness.”

This section has rules about using the map from Avalon Hill’s Outdoor Survival board game. It has rules about encountering castles, and who might live there. It has rules for how many hexes per day a man can travel depending on the terrain. Then, on page 17, is a subsection called “Wilderness monsters” that tells you how to handle an encounter in the wilderness. In that section we find:

Sighting Monsters: Players will see monsters at from 40–240 yards (inches convert to tens of yards for the wilderness) unless the monster has surprised the characters involved.

Did you see that little parenthetical note? That’s a rather important piece of information, and that’s the only place it’s mentioned anywhere across the three books.

With that information, our lightly encumbered man’s 12" movement rate now means 120 yards. Assuming that he can still move twice that, that equates to 240 yards in 10 minutes or 0.82 miles per hour. Assuming that the flight/pursuit rule is the same, his speed will be 1.64 miles per hour when running for his life.

That’s better, but still silly.

Combat Speed

Back to Book 3, page 8:

Melee is fast and furious. There are ten rounds of combat per turn.

A turn is 10 minutes, and a round of combat is 1 minute. Got it.

On page 25, under “Land Combat,” we see this:

The basic system is that from Chainmail, with one figure representing one man or creature.

Chainmail is a different game. It is another 30-40 page book.  It is for miniature war gaming. It assumes that you have a big table in your basement covered in wet sand that you turn into a model battlefield and have armies of miniatures fight. This is why all the movement you see is in inches: an unarmed man can move 12 inches on the sand table. The 12 inches represents 120 yards, to match the scale that the miniatures were sculpted at.

A lot of the numbers in D&D come straight from Chainmail, especially the movement rates of men, the 1" = 10 yards, and the 1 minute (combat) turn. In Chainmail, barring bad terrain, a “unit” (or man) can travel its full movement rate in one turn.

That means our lightly encumbered man’s 12" movement rate still means 120 yards, but it’s 120 yards per minute instead of per 10 minutes. The math tells us that’s just a hair over 4 miles per hour. It would make sense that a character would “hustle” when in combat, so that (finally!) makes sense!

Final Thoughts

It seems that, in the beginning, there was a logical basis for speed. Somewhere it got broken when someone decided that turns should be 10 minutes instead of 1 minute without updating the movement rate. Then it got further broken when it was decided to map the dungeons in feet instead of yards.

Of course characters in a dungeon are exploring, not out for a brisk walk. They’re stopping to closely examine the walls for faded frescoes; they’re stepping carefully to avoid traps; they’re stopping to listen for other footsteps; they’re measuring the corridor to make careful maps. I would like to measure my effective “travel speed” when I’m walking through a museum. I think that would be a fairer comparison rather than my hiking speed.

But if we’re talking about exploration speed, the I wonder if encumbrance should have as big of an effect. It seems that we’re already slowed down enough by dungeon tasks so much that the heavy load wouldn’t matter as much.

I think the take away for me is that at the “normal” travel speeds, characters have a lot of time to explore, and I shouldn’t add extra turns if they want to examine something.

---

1. Pun intended,↩