I've recently been experimenting with 1:20 scale combat in my own solo OD&D campaign. This experiment was prompted by a few lines of text in the 1973 OD&D draft which states that when normal-types are fighting fantastic types, "It is suggested that the 1:20 Combat Tables be used." but such an approach is not so straight forward in practice due to the Post Melee Morale system that should technically apply to any melee conducted in this manner. The Post Melee Morale system is used to test whether one side of the melee will move back, rout, retreat or surrender. The problem with the Post Melee Morale system in an OD&D context is that it relies on specific Morale Ratings for individual types of creatures, i.e. normal troops (light foot, heavy foot, armoured foot, cavalry and so on), fantasy creatures such as elves, dwarves, goblins and of course the stronger monsters. The Morale Ratings in CHAINMAIL do not cover all the monsters and super-normal (character types)
In OD&D's "Underworld & Wilderness Adventures" movement rates are given as numbers of hexes per day which can be travelled according to type. This is followed by a suggested scale of 5 miles per hex. So, a figure on foot who has a rate of 3 hexes of movement per day would therefore travel 15 miles in a day. This works fine when making longer journeys on a typical referee's wilderness map, but what about if a journey is being taken to reach somewhere that is only a few miles away? For purposes of time keeping you may wish to compute how much time this would take. OD&D Movement Speeds as Miles per Hour To calculate how many miles per hour a figure can move first you need to figure out how many hours are in a typical day. Presuming a medieval European setting the day would be measured from dawn until dusk, so we are really only dealing with the daylight hours between. For a temperate climate you would typically have about 12 hours of daylight in spring, 16 i