B/X Dungeon Movement Rates

The Basic Rulebook says a character can "explore and map an area equal to his or her movement rate in one turn" (B19). So, an unarmored character carrying no treasure can explore a map 120' in a single 10-minute turn.

That is slow.

But wait! the rulebook also says, "The DM may wish to allow characters to move faster when traveling through areas they are familiar with." But it doesn't say how much faster.

To figure that out, we might turn to the AD&D Players Handbook. It says characters following a map or moving through a familiar part of the dungeon move five times faster. That is, a character whose normal speed is 120' per turn could cover 600' in a turn when moving through a familiar area.

That's still just 60' per minute, for a completely unencumbered character. It may not include mapping, but it must include a certain level of caution and quiet.

But what if the character is moving through familiar areas known to be safe? How far can they go in a turn?

In that case, the character might move 10 times as fast as normal, rather than only five times as fast: 1,200' per turn rather than 600' per turn, or 120' per minute. That amounts to about 2 miles per hour, which might be reasonable.

So we have an answer: Moving through familiar territory, characters move five to 10 times as far in a turn as they do when they are exploring and being careful.

It's an answer, but it's wrong.

Consider a typical party whose slowest member moves 60' per turn. That party would be able to move 300' to 600' per turn in a safe, familiar area. That's the right answer to the wrong question, though. The right question is this: When the party is moving through a safe, familiar area, why are you tracking turns at all?

You are probably tracking turns so you know when to make wandering monster checks and so you can tell when spells end or light sources go out. And those things do matter. But when the party is in a safe, familiar location, they probably don't need to travel for a full turn to get somewhere where they will have an encounter or do something else that takes a turn. So, at that point, you can just ignore travel time altogether. It's subsumed in the assumption that encounters or whatever else the characters do takes a turn.

This is an example of an important principle of RPG timekeeping. Once you've settled on the relevant units and scale, everything that happens must be rounded to that scale. Anything that takes less than ten minutes must be treated as taking up either 0 turns or 1 full turn. The rule books say a "turn" is 10 minutes of game time, but that's not always the best way to think of it. A turn is how long it takes to have an encounter or do something else significant—such as exploring for 10 minutes. But you almost never need to track fractions of turns.

When an encounter starts, for example, the time scale shifts from turns to rounds. When it ends, you don't count each round that elapsed as 1/60 of turn. Instead, you count the whole encounter as a turn; the end.

If the party is going from area to area in a safe, familiar part of the dungeon, the travel time is much less important than the time they spend doing other things. And that time elapses at a rate of about 1 turn per significant thing being done—most notably, encounters and searches (at 1 turn per 10' x 10' area). Movement rates only matter when movement is the significant thing the party is doing. When it's incidental, the rate is unimportant.