Assuming I'm not missing an obvious joke (totally possible; I have low Insight), it's just a matter of spacing on a grid. Just as a small or medium creature doesn't take up the entire 5 ft space, a door is just 3 ft wide with a frame (or two 3 ft wide doors), and the rest is still just wall. Similarly a bed is slightly larger than a 5 ft space, so it takes up a 10 ft square, without filling up the entire space.
Why is everything twice as big?
- Thread starter Yunru
- Start date
Yes, but a double door and frame should fit into a 5ft space, but instead takes up the majority of 10ft.
Obviously it's not a problem with self-drawn maps, but I've seen it on official maps a lot.
In D&D each adventurer in combat takes up a 'five foot square' and you can't have two characters fighting in the same 'five foot square'. The whole point of a 'double door' is that it's wide enough for two people to fit through, possibly one going out while one goes in. Otherwise you could use a single door. So if you want that to be clear to the people reading the map, you draw it as ten feet wide. As for the bed.... if you want to make it clear that more than one person can sit, stand, or otherwise fit on the bed, you need to draw it so it clearly takes up two 'five foot squares'.
Says who? Where? I take it this is either a joke or a troll. I haven't seen this description of a door in any official product, and even in maps, doors are depicted at whatever size the map drawer considers appropriate. Many commercial mapsheets scaled at 1" = 5 feet have "typical" doors represented at around 3 feet wide - which is reasonably close to normal human scale for door width (check out my faves - Heroic Maps - for example). IIRC, 1E DMG described the "typical" door in a dungeon as being 8 feet wide, allowing up to three PCs to attempt to open it simultaneously, which would seem to correlate roughly with the size of the boxes that represented doors on the blue-background maps typical of that era.
Cheers, Al'Kelhar
Convenience. Its an abstraction.
But it works so much better if you just halve the scale.
Even with tokens, a large creature takes up 4 squares, so if it's got no space around it, it's squeezing.
Huh? Ok if you see altering the scale as better, thats fantastic. Hope your game gets twice as awesome for it.
Not really. Average modern door size today is about 2' 6" for internal doors, and 3' for external ones. Add in a 2" frame on each side and you're looking at 5' 4" for an interior double door and 6' 4" for an exterior door. Add to this that the doors and frames of medieval European castles (the baseline for fantasy design) are usually much larger than this, giving a double door the spacing of 10 feet isn't unreasonable. Of course, there should also be smaller doors (used by servants), but they wouldn't be double doors, easily fitting within a 5 ft space.
Edit: upon further consideration, something you might want to consider was an idea I cooked up a while back. Instead of using 5 ft squares, reduce them to 2.5 ft squares. It allows a much better level of granularity, but it will take some time to get used to. With this level of detail, you can have your beds and double doors at 7.5 ft in length, which is much closer to reality.
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Laurefindel
Legend
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.
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