It's a staple of old-school D&D-- your party is wandering through the dungeon, and you see a door. What's behind it? Why, it's a 10x10 room, with an orc guarding a chest.I never really thought much about it. For years, it was just sort of there. But this weekend, whilst painting my bathroom ceiling (whose dimensions vaguely approximate the aforementioned room), the thought occurred to me, to wit:
Let's be generous, and have the orc stand over the chest. Put them both in the corner. Now, orcs are what, 5 feet tall? Ish? And humanoid in shape, so they'll have an arm span of about half that (see the Vitruvian Man). Give them a short sword, and that's another 2 feet. So the orc, by itself, with minimal room to swing a sword, already takes up about a third of the available space (roughly 14 foot diagonal).
A typical human fighter is closer to 6 feet tall, and uses a long sword. So he will use up closer to half of the available space.
This means if the fighter obligingly wedges himself into the opposite corner (very gracious of him), the two of them will have just enough room to swing their swords at each other without overlapping. If they're using fencing foils, that might work out, but can you imagine an old-school orc fencing? Any sort of decent swinging/cutting hack-and-slash weapon and the visual starts to get a little silly.
And now that we've established that, here's the 64 gp question-- where, exactly, during all of this derring-do, are the wizard, the cleric, and the thief standing?! Out in the hall, I guess. Otherwise someone's going to be the recipient of an unfortunate elbow, if they're lucky.
A 10x10 room? Are you sure you're remembering correctly? I'm pretty sure 10x10 was one square of graph paper on a standard dungeon layout, and one square was a closet, not a room.
ReplyDeleteI suppose we could look it up, somewhere.
I Googled it to be sure.
Deletehttp://loadingreadyrun.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=13075
http://www.toplessrobot.com/2008/04/a_20point_letter_of_protest_regarding_the_new_4th.php
http://dungeonsmaster.com/2010/03/the-evolution-of-the-dungeon-encounter/
etc.
The answer is: both orc and human fighter use thrusts (yes, you can thrust with short and long swords). The others can't be in the room. I'd actually give the orc an axe.
ReplyDeleteWell, of course you can, but that will look even sillier than if you're doing it with a foil or epee. An axe might be shorter (depends on the axe), but you're back to needing to swing it around, so I'm not sure that's much better.
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