When Dungeons & Dragons began, large parties of characters entered the dungeons.
When AD&D came along, it was basically assumed that nine people would venture into the dungeon, in a 3 by 3 square. By the rules of the time, three men could stand abreast in a 10-foot corridor.
Although D&D was inspired by miniature gaming, it quickly lost the miniatures and became what we now call “Theatre of the Mind”.
This continued for some time, but towards the middle of the 2E era, a push was made to make standard rules for miniatures combat – something that was not defined well by the original rules. This led, in Player’s Option: Combat & Tactics, to the standard 5-foot square being adopted for combat, which allowed one man-sized creature to stand in each square.
With ten-foot-wide corridors still being standard, the party was now walking two-by-two. But, as it happened, from the middle of AD&D onwards, the assumption was that 6 players would be at the table.
So, you went from three rows of three characters (9 in the party) to three rows of two characters (6 in the party).
And then, as Paizo came along with the less popular Pathfinder, they had even fewer characters available – perhaps 3 if they were lucky. So, the standard corridor size had to shrink again – to 5 feet wide.
With some of the Paizo people then moving across to D&D, they brought that mindset, and so more and more D&D dungeons have five-foot-wide corridors, which also reflect the disastrous drop in popularity of the game.
I guess with the next edition, no-one will play it, so we’ll have no corridors at all! Just rock!
Yes, I’m not serious about this – but the bane of 5-foot-wide corridors is real. I often have groups of five or six characters, and the moment you have lots of dungeons with five-foot-wide corridors, it becomes absolutely painful to run, with many of the players unable to take part in combat – they can’t reach it!
I’m finding it harder and harder to recommend adventures, because they are utterly unfun to play with a VTT or miniatures. This includes The Shattered Obelisk and The Abomination Vault.
Does anyone actually playtest these with miniatures?
I think 5′ corridors are problematic in any game, but in 5E they are truly problematic with allies counting as difficult terrain. I’ve seen combats where three players in a row can’t move at all because of this situation… they can’t move to an open space. D&D adventures seem to not understand this, and it’s unclear whether it is an issue with the cartography or if the design team themselves do not see this problem.
Thinking on this a bit more, this also links into a historic change in play regarding rooms. In many old adventures, the room doesn’t offer much of interest during the combat. Because of that, it wasn’t a problem to not enter the room and there was a tactical advantage to fighting in the corridor. We can even see this in the early gold-box video games… lots of fights are in corridors! Around 3E, with some 2E cases as well, the rooms start to become more developed and interesting. Especially in 4E and beyond, not entering the room means not getting the actual experience intended by the combat. So, we want to move the players into the room (some 4E adventures had the “start box” on the map to do away with the problem of getting PCs in the door). 5E wants to have more open and circumstantial play, which is great… but the rooms are still the highlight and being stuck in the hallway is a problem. The maps should work to lessen that problem, and a 5′ hallway really exacerbates the issues.
In Pool of Radiance, the first Gold Box Game, they were wide, wide corridors!
In most situations you are not forced to fight in a corridor. Either side can fall back to a room, if they think it gives them a tactical advantage.
Though I also think adventures don’t expect that any fights are going to happen in corridors anyway. Encounters are fixed to a room where they will start and they will end.
One of the weird things about Monday’s session was that the advantage was with the people in the corridor, since those in the room were Large and couldn’t fit.
But when you need to move THROUGH a room, and you can’t enter it because monsters block the entrance, then there’s no retreating to another room (especially with the depressingly linear dungeons often on show).
As a DM with a larger group (usually 6 – 8 players) in addition to adjusting encounters I find I often have to re-do maps for VTT use, not just the corridors but the rooms are often too small for the battles. Even for a 4 character party with encounters as written some of them seem very tight.
8 players is a lot! But yes, there are a LOT of encounters where miniature use is not considered at all – even for smaller parties.