Size (And more importantly Distance) Matters

More info hopefully soon on the kingdoms and stuff for the ACKs campaign. In the meantime..

Have you ever noticed that some DMs, like myself, have no real sense of scale?

I think this is an endemic problem and contributes to a lot of the goofier and more extreme aspects of bad descriptions. See, a problem I have is gauging distance and grasping it. Like most Americans, I don’t think of travel in terms of miles and feet, I think of it in terms of time.

Half an hour to the mall, an hour and a half to work, ten minutes to a local restaurant, and so on. And all of them are wildly divergent distances as the crow flies because of the difference in speed of my car (I can ride a highway to work, the mall is all back roads, etc).

Grasping distance is important because it /applies/ to the time factor that a game typically encounters. How long does it take for us to race horses to the king’s castle to warn him, what if we air walk, what if we turn ourselves into zephyrs and travel at 60mph?

Distance means different things at different times to different games. In a fantasy game, something two hundred miles away is really, really sodding far. According to Pathfinder, a heavy horse can get you about 28 miles in a day of travel. A day of travel being about eight hours.

Now, let’s unpack that.

Washington D.C., is roughly 146 miles from Philadelphia, Pa.

Per Pathfinder, it takes about five days. Five /days/ for someone to travel from one to the other.

Punching it into google maps, and getting directions and a time estimate, I’m helpfully informed that my car will get me there in about 2 and a half hours.

Now, see, that, that right there is where the trouble for DMs like myself and others, when scale comes in.

An airship is not a fighter jet. A horse is not a car. But, a DM will typically have a capital being a thousand miles away to make it seem further away. At one point I almost considered making a continent three thousand miles wide, until I realized that’s basically the width of the sodding Atlantic. All because I was worried that travel times would be too quick.  We forget how small modern travel has made the world. I can get on a plane and be in England by tomorrow. That used to be a grueling months long affair.

This comes up more frequently in map making. A mile. A mile is sodding big. A mile on a highway doesn’t seem like much, but that’s because they’re tiny little markers zinging by. ACKs gives us the 6-mile hex, which at first seems to be tiny, but in reality, is pretty damn large.

I kind of thank ACKs for making me have to really grasp what a 24 mile hex was (New York metro area) in terms of size.

I’ll be trying to think of how to help deal with the size thing as time goes on.