A Rule of Thumb for Movement Rates
If you're playing old school D&D, tracking movement through the dungeon 10' square by 10' square can be a pain. Many times over the years I've stopped counting, and resorted to eyeballing. Unfortunately, I like it when movement rate matters, and I want it to be a hard choice to laden yourself down with heavy armor and gear.
We can speed this counting up considerably by choosing larger units. I like to make the assumption that, on average, a room is about 30' from door to door. Then I divide all movement rates by 30' and count room to room. The classic movement rates instead look like this:
| Feet/turn | Rooms/turn |
|---|---|
| 120' | 4 |
| 90' | 3 |
| 60' | 2 |
| 30' | 1 |
One knock-on effect is that hallways now feel different. A long hallway by standard movement rules is primarily a timesink. Using these rules, a hallway still counts as one "room", and thus feels more like a quick way to move through the dungeon. I personally like that, and think it makes sense.
Does this make moving through the dungeon faster? Probably for a lot of dungeons, though it will vary based on what scale the designer likes to use. But the movement rate through dungeons is already an abstraction of mapping, searching, careful movement, etc., so it doesn't bother me to tweak that scale.
I am positive someone has come up with this quick rule of thumb before, but I've never seen it lain out (feel free to tell me how late to the party I am). I know Errant does something similar, by tracking movement in "rooms", but that's part of a more complicated system and doesn't track with the classic D&D movement rates.