I toured around Pompeii on my trip to Italy. Naturally, noted a lot of things from a mapping perspective.
- rooms are pretty small. A lot of the rooms in buildings - and solo residences - were not much bigger than 10 x 10 or 15 x 20-ish. Not a lot of the giant rooms I like to stick in dungeons.
- lots of doorways in corners.
- lots of small, narrow doorways. Couple that with the door in the corner, it's enough that "face the doorway and choke the enemy off in the doorway" will be difficult. There wasn't much room for 2 people, nevermind 3, to face the doorway. On top of that, the portals were pretty tight, and it would be hard to engage someone in the doorway with a swinging weapon - the sides and top of the doorway would severely restrict that.
- ceilings were quite high, where there were ceilings. So 10 x 10 rooms were a thing, but not 10 x 10 x 10 rooms. Ceilings were way above my head and I'm over 6'.
- raised sidewalks would give a real height advantage in a street fight. Enough to justify a 45 degree angle bonus in DFRPG rules.
Given all of that, I'm a bit more likely in the future to do smaller rooms, corner portals, and high ceilings in an ancient style setting. I might also, in a realistic game, put in rules prohibiting - or limiting - cutting attacks launched into doorway hexes in a small doorway. You'd need a clever angle to get one in, and that would also limit your path of attack and logically make it easier to predict. Stabbing away would be a solid tactic in those cases.
And maybe I shouldn't make so many rooms 50 x 50 or 60 x 80 and things like that. I could be going a bit overboard.
I think a lot of the conventions in dungeon dimensions comes from the requirements of the early game. Making spaces variable and interesting when using 10' to a square on graph paper. Making corridors long enough to justify frequent random encounter checks. Trying to fill the entire piece of expensive graph paper.
ReplyDeleteI think Gygax' default ceiling height was 15' in the centre, and arched, even in hallways. Higher in large rooms. His doors were 8' wide and 10' tall, and heavy, I think to justify the difficulty of opening them.
And, of course, these spaces were large enough for ogres and dragons and other large creatures.
It's true - so much of it suits the game rules not what was done historically!
DeleteYou probably know of the Tomb of the Bull King (Mazes & Minotaurs) and the fact that it uses the authentic map of the palace of Knossos? I think it's awesome and I wonder what other ancient ruins (Pompei being one) we could convert to gaming material.
ReplyDeleteI did not know that - that's pretty cool. It would be interesting to turn a ruins into a dungeon. I wonder if Matt Riggsby has already done something like that?
DeleteI have no citable sources, but I think high ceilings are a climate thing; in colder places the ceilings are lower for cheaper heating. Underground tends to be cool, but almost impossible to heat, so no clue what ceiling height that (and construction limitations) would lead to.
ReplyDeleteI suspect large rooms entered D&D because fighting a group of monsters or a large monster in a small room just doesn't make sense.
ReplyDeletePerhaps, but I'd need to hear from the very early players saying they started with small rooms and moved to big rooms later. Unless you mean it was immediate just because they figured big rooms = big fights.
Deletelooking at things like the catacombs, most corridors were just wide enough for a man with a barrow- barely 4 feet wide and arching to about seven feet.
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