Time, Distance and Movement | How to Play AD&D

Let’s take a look at time, distance and movement in AD&D, and find out why it is the best version of Dungeons & Dragons in this How to Play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series. Buy the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17004/dungeon-master-s-guide-1e?affiliate_id=50797

Time Stamps:

0:00 Intro
0:49 Preface
1:41 Time
3:36 Distance
4:56 Movement
6:40 Afterword
6:57 Outro

Transcript

Cold Open

Time and Movement are presented both abstractly and in incredible detail.

Intro

Welcome to another DragonLance Saga episode. My name is Adam and today I am going to talk about Time, Distance and Movement in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I would like to take a moment and thank the DLSaga members, and invite you to consider becoming a member by visiting the link in the description below. You can even pick up Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Dragonlance gaming materials using my affiliate links. I am referencing the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide for this information. If I leave anything out or misspeak, please leave a comment below!

Discussion

There are a number of rules that your home game may ignore. But if you aren’t aware of the actual rule, how do you know if it should be followed or not? Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is meant to be fluid, a game system that can fit into any play style. And I believe it accomplished just that. But there are some constant concepts that will arise beyond rolling to strike, save vs a spell or break through a door. How do you know how long it will take you to travel from one town to the next? How do you determine whether you can fire an arrow and hit a target? And how do you know if you can interrupt the magic-user who is casting a spell on your party? All of these are incredibly important aspects of the game and they can all be answered with time, distance, and movement. I have briefly discussed time and movement before, but let’s take a more granular look so that we understand it completely.

Time

Time is incredibly important in a game. It helps the DM determine whether you can pick a lock before a wandering monster rounds the corner, or how long the PC’s light spell will last. Even broader game concepts like healing, memorizing spells, and creating magic items are relevant. All these take time, and if another PC is doing something while you are, the DM must know which will be completed when, and what happens during each. This is the essence of the game. When can a PC act? How long does it take to act?

While adventuring below ground time is broken down into Turns, there are 6 Turns in an hour. So a Turn lasts for 10 minutes. In encounter and combat situations, a Turn is broken down further into 10 Rounds. So a Turn is 10 Rounds, and each Round is a minute. Rounds themselves are broken down when dealing with one-on-one combat or spellcasting. In these cases and more, a Round is broken down into 10 segments. So a Turn is 10 minutes or 10 Rounds, and a Round is 1 minute or 10 Segments. This makes each Segment 6 seconds.

When you are outdoors tracking time becomes a bit more abstract and is measured in days. This is traditionally subdivided into day and night. While adventuring, the DM should require a party to rest every six hours, as traveling for that duration is exhausting. After a particularly stressful situation like combat, they should rest for a Turn.

By way of example: Memorization of a magical spell takes 15 minutes per spell level. Praying for Cleric and Druidic spells takes a few hours. Healing takes a full day of rest for 1 hit point recovery.

Distance

When we are needing to determine distance, maps should be supplied with a scale reference. This provides you with a better ability in managing travel. When indoors, distance is tracked in thirds when it comes down to movement, missile and spell ranges. This means when you see the inches (“) symbol, it is referring to distance. Outdoors, 1” equals 10 yards. Indoors, 1” equals 10 feet. It’s always the multiple of 10, just remember outdoors is yards, and indoors is feet. Effective ranges are incredibly important, as you have to have room to fire an arrow at long ranges and it has to arc, as gravity inevitably pulls everything down to earth. The further away something needs to go, the higher it needs to fly to make it there. So a max range outside of 210 yards makes logical sense, but indoors, as you don’t have the height in nearly every situation, 210 feet would be the maximum. It’s also important to note that this outdoor measurement of distance is for missile and spell range only, not spell area of effect! Area of effect will always stay in feet measurements rather than yards unless otherwise specified.

Movement

Movement is kept as flexible as possible in order to deal with a multitude of applications like dungeon movement, city travel, outdoor treks, and combat situations. Encumbrance always affects movement speed. Everyone begins with a base movement of 12”. Heavy gear and armor, or 70# may reduce it to 9”. Very heavy gear and armor, or 105# reduces it further to 6”. And encumbered and armor, or 105# reduces it to 3-4”. There is also reference to how many miles a party can travel in a day, and how fast separate modes of travel are for overland or waterborne adventuring.

This is all incredibly important when planning travel, but even moreso, when in combat. If a group of monsters are going to attack the party, and the magic-user is going to cast a fireball, it takes 3 segments to cast the spell. Casting a spell when simply referencing initiative occurs at the end of their initiative. And all attacks against the spellcaster occur on their initiative. Multiple attacks occur with one at the beginning and one at the end. It really comes down to how granular you want to get with time, distance and movement.

I like to consider weapon speed, casting time and distance: If the enemy can get to the caster before the end of the spell and strike them, the spell is lost, no matter how close they were to finishing it. So, if you have a movement rate of 12”, in one round without attacking, you can travel 120’, that’s 12’ a segment. If you wanted to stop a caster and can close the distance in under two segments with the fireball example above, you could slap the caster which is a speed factor of 1, and ruin the spell.

I hope this is all helpful and lets you in on how and why time, distance and movement is relevant to your AD&D game. In addition to how fluid or granular you want to detail it out, as all the information is there, albeit in many different places and a couple of different books.

Outro

But that is all the time I have to talk about time, distance and movement in AD&D. What do you think of how movement is handled in AD&D? Do you prefer a more abstract approach in combat? And finally do you use movement restrictions in combat? Leave a comment below.

I would like to take a moment and remind you to subscribe to this YouTube channel, ring the bell to get notified about upcoming videos and click the like button. This all goes to help other Dragonlance fans learn about this channel and its content. Thank you for watching, this has been Adam with DragonLance Saga and until next time, remember:

Role-playing isn’t storytelling. If the dungeon master is directing it, it’s not a game.