TTRPG Movement Speed Exploration

Hand me the shovel, this rabbit hole has been here a while.

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How do you get around?

I read a lot of roleplay and boardgame rules, and mostly there is a consensus regarding moving within the representation of a physical space. As long as the rules are the same for everyone involved, it doesn't seem to matter what the exact movement value in feet is. Even the super tactical games that say it’s important to have sizes and movements be exact, will have times where you have to fudge it to what seems reasonable to the situation in the moment. This has not stopped me from going down a rabbit hole in analyzing move speeds as it is a building block of tactical gameplay.

This has some overlap with my day job in that I program machines where humans are loading parts into an automated device and there exists a stringent calculation for determining the "safe-stop" distance. How fast can the device halt in the case of triggering an emergency stop condition? This takes into account the average speed of a person in motion to determine how far away a safety device must be to keep people safe from the inherently dangerous automated motion.

The Numbers

There are two numbers assumed for human walking speed:

Standard: 1.6 m/s velocity

Stringent: 2.0 m/s velocity

So using these numbers we end up in the ballpark of what most heroic fantasy games use for their movement and we can also see where the original B/X D&D numbers for in and out of combat come from:

I like the clean graded meters per second numbers of 2/4/6. There's variance in reported average running/sprinting speeds - some said 5 m/s, some said 3.5 m/s average running speed - so 4 is between them and is twice the walking speed which is convenient for rules writing. The same for sprinting, 8 m/s came up in searches, but I am sure keeping that lower when considering the likely environment of a dungeon is not far fetched.

The more popular heroic and epic fantasy games use 30 and 60 ft of movement in their latest iterations of tactical combat and don’t bother differentiating out of combat exploration.

OSR games, like B/X D&D has listed 40 ft in combat and 120 ft in 10 minutes of exploration (1 turn). This makes more sense to me as to why my current favorite game, Shadowdark, uses "close", "near", "double near" and "far" as these concepts could be translated to either distance schema without issue.

Older school games can be very matter of fact with how deadly they are to player characters, but I find the up front difficulty more interesting than having a super hero that can’t do the thing they’re best at because they’re 5 feet short of interacting with something in the room that they could feasibly push themselves to reach. There is something to be said about the different statures of ancestries having different move speeds in 5E, and that is i’m not a fan. Early in my 5E playing I thought this added some tactical nuance, but my conclusion on this fits with my overall viewpoint that you could say every character can move 40 feet (2 meters) in most cases and if two combatants are in the same room that would be built to be inhabited by humans, they’re going to be able to get at anything in that room in a six second period. Obstacles, hazards, traps, other combatants will surely get in the way, but making one character move 5 ft more or less doesn’t feel tactically interesting anymore, it just feels like an excuse for a PC to have a blown turn.

Thanks to some other enthusiastic and friendly writers on Substack, I’m starting to read more OD&D and may even read Chainmail which are the wargame rules that Gygax and Arneson used to resolve combat in the infancy of D&D. I may come across something that changes my mind.

Sidebar: Tabletop Wargaming

What I feel DOES call for exact movement measuring is in the case of tabletop war gaming. Situations where you declare a specific action, and must do so before you’re allowed to measure to see if it will work, are tactically interesting.

As I’ve stated before, TTRPG combat systems originated with wargame rules for resolving combat, so It makes sense there is a need to have spatial measurements in the same fashion, but many games have done away with this and it has not hurt the tactical gameplay. To me, the different angles of approach to telling the story of what’s happening in the tabletop situation drastically change the answer to this question. Wargames are telling a story of what happened just like a table top role playing, but wargames are about commanding from above, while TTRPGs are about inhabiting the combatant. Many board games have systems that do both of these things and depending on what the fun is the game is using its rules to present, depends on if the movement restriction follows my thought processes here. A game like Gloomhaven is a very board-gamey rule set where movement distances are critical, but you have only a handful of ever-dwindling options each turn and I would argue it feels mostly like commanding from above.

An Idea To Try

Declare movement speed before moving and then see if anything gets triggered. Taking from the wargame vein, if the game wants to make exact movement distances important, how can we turn it into a tactical decision for the players? I’ve got two things to try here:

1. In exploration rounds in a dangerous area, players declare how fast they want to move before they move the figure, and the different speeds allow for farther movement but you there are known possible negative effects from doing this

2. Let the player move their figure as far as they want, but if they move beyond the “slow” pace of 40 ft, then any traps, hazards, or effects they didn’t know about will be triggered and they will be backtracked to the point of triggering.

I tried this once but the table had 10 people at it and even then it kinda worked for two cool moments at the table.

Using our table up above, the players are given these speed with these features:

Slow:

• 40 ft a round, plus one additional action (probably attack).

• Auto find traps, carefully maps new territory.

Fast:

• 80 ft a round, no additional action.

• Spring previously unknown traps,

• Doesn't spring previously known traps.

• Maps new territory without detail.

Sprint

• 120 ft round, no additional action.

• Spring all traps even if previously aware

• Candles go out, Torches go out on 1/6 chance.

• Cannot map new territory.

Thanks for Reading!

What do you think? Would you try this idea out?

I used it in the one shot I ran this year at Gencon but I am thinking of putting this in as an “alternate rule option” for the Shadowdark module I’m creating from that game.

Till next time.

Please like, share, and comment your thoughts!

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