



A couple weeks back, a few different people (thank you!) sent me the link to the Dutch martial-arts HEMA group HVN's testing of combat with swords and daggers in current D&D-canonical 5-foot wide squares.Very cool stuff, so glad they could share this with us. The main critique they have coming away from the test is that the squares are kind of a bit on theside -- they find themselves standing mostly on the back end of the squares, and say that there isn't enough room to use the swords in thrusting style (so: cutting and hewing only).And that's an interesting take, because my question for many years has mostly been whether the 5-foot size is maybe tooto be realistic. (Whenever I find myself on a tiled floor I look around and gauge whether 5 feet seems like a reasonable for combat space or not.) That's probably some bias resulting from Gygax's assertion that 3 fighting men per 10 feet should be the default (OD&D Vol-2 p. 12, AD&D 1E DMG p. 10). Really comforting to know that the 5-foot size is within the bounds of reasonability.