Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a scale on either the Player or DM city maps for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
So I took a stab at it. If one of the small farm buildings outside the city is 10' square, and the major thoroughfares are about 60' or 70' wide (going by some of the images in the Enchiridion), then that makes the North Gate gatehouse approximately 150' wide at its widest point. That seemed like it wasn't out of the question. Working from that in TopHatch's Concepts iOS drawing program (which lets you set a scale to your image, then measure the length of anything in the image, including a squiggly line!) I worked out the following:
Waterdeep is about 3/4 of a mile wide (from Seaeye's March to the Cliffwatch), and not quite 2 miles long (1.86 mi from Troll Gate to Deepwater Isle)
The walk from North Gate to South Gate, on the High Road, at a normal pace, would take about half an hour (not accounting for traffic, weather, etc.)
Does that mesh with what everyone else thinks? Is there canon on this?
Notes: The line I drew for the walk was 8,350 feet long, according to Concepts. At 300 ft/min for a normal pace, according to travel pace RAW, that comes to 27 minutes. At a fast pace, it's not much shorter, 21 minutes, and you get -5 Perception for noticing things along the way. You could stealth the whole way (or try, but you'd be going at a slow pace) and it would take you 42 minutes.
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ey/em/eirs, or they/them works, too (just not he). Role-playing since that keep on those borderlands. I love it so.
tl;dr - Someone tell me how long the designers imagined it would take to walk across Waterdeep, north to south? Please? Save me from myself!
So. Using that map (which is so geeky cool!!!), my scale is way off. According to that map, the trip from North Gate to South Gate is 19,045 feet (they actually have it in meters, which is cool), and would take a little over an hour. So a little more than twice the scale I had going. The North Gate gatehouse would be 360' wide at its widest point. I can definitely buy that. But the High Road thoroughfare would be 165' wide (or 50 m). That seems... big.
I'm not complaining! I'm just curious about what the designers intended.
Can you walk the length of Waterdeep in half an hour? An hour? It's supposed to be big, so I like an hour better. How to account for the extra wide roads, then? Easy! You ignore what it shows on the map and describe the roads as being as wide as you think they should be. We can do whatever we want with our made up world! Yay!
Edit: My conclusion from below. An hour to walk north to south, the grandest avenues are 120' wide. Done.
The End.
Now, if you're mental like me, here are some things I looked up on the internet. For fun!
Half the length of a football field (oddly, either American football or futbol, though the latter has varying lengths, RAW)
Two and a half times the length of a bowling lane
You could fit six London double-decker busses across it (for comparison, my dumb ass calculations of the High Road being 70' wide is about two and a half London busses)
The Champs-Élysées in Paris is 70 m wide (230'). So the High Road at 50 m would be a little less wide than this. I found a picture of the Champs-Élysées, and then I went to Google maps and found a spot where I could get walking directions across the street. Basically, 50 m is from (and including) the first row of trees to the next row of trees. Still seems big, but maybe just "grand," not "unlikely?"
Then I went really crazy. Here's a photo of Oxford Street in Victorian London (Waterdeep, in the adventure's images, seems modeled after Victorian London), and the same Google Maps sleuthing. That puts it at about 90' wide (27 m), more like my original calculations and a little more than half as wide as the Champs pics above. It actually doesn't seem, in the photo, wide enough for how the widest avenues are described in Volo's Enchiridion, as having islands in the middle for people crossing to get to safety from the carts and drays going by. Maybe I'm not thinking of the sidewalks? The Enchiridion does say the widest avenues have sidewalks.
So, in the end, maybe the grandest avenues in Waterdeep are over a two hundred feet wide! Take that, Eldritch Blast range! But I think I'm going to, for simplicity (you didn't think I had simplicity in me, did you, after this post?), say the grandest avenues are 120' wide, conveniently the range of any number of cantrip spells. Wider than Oxford street, not quite as wide as the Champs-Élysées.
Anyway, what it comes down to in the end, despite all my minutiae, is that the interactive map is a tremendous resource and I love it!
Had to chime in here that I used this amazing map for over a year in my Dragon Heist game, and did not realize that it had a distance feature. I'm blown away even more. I also calculated Waterdeep, mentally, to be much larger, so my players spent way too much time traveling. :-)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a scale on either the Player or DM city maps for Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
So I took a stab at it. If one of the small farm buildings outside the city is 10' square, and the major thoroughfares are about 60' or 70' wide (going by some of the images in the Enchiridion), then that makes the North Gate gatehouse approximately 150' wide at its widest point. That seemed like it wasn't out of the question. Working from that in TopHatch's Concepts iOS drawing program (which lets you set a scale to your image, then measure the length of anything in the image, including a squiggly line!) I worked out the following:
Does that mesh with what everyone else thinks? Is there canon on this?
Notes: The line I drew for the walk was 8,350 feet long, according to Concepts. At 300 ft/min for a normal pace, according to travel pace RAW, that comes to 27 minutes. At a fast pace, it's not much shorter, 21 minutes, and you get -5 Perception for noticing things along the way. You could stealth the whole way (or try, but you'd be going at a slow pace) and it would take you 42 minutes.
ey/em/eirs, or they/them works, too (just not he).
Role-playing since that keep on those borderlands. I love it so.
Measurements on this interactive map should help with travel times and distances.
https://www.aidedd.org/atlas/index.php?map=W&l=1
Oh. My. Gods.
Wow. This is... amazing.
ey/em/eirs, or they/them works, too (just not he).
Role-playing since that keep on those borderlands. I love it so.
tl;dr - Someone tell me how long the designers imagined it would take to walk across Waterdeep, north to south? Please? Save me from myself!
So. Using that map (which is so geeky cool!!!), my scale is way off. According to that map, the trip from North Gate to South Gate is 19,045 feet (they actually have it in meters, which is cool), and would take a little over an hour. So a little more than twice the scale I had going. The North Gate gatehouse would be 360' wide at its widest point. I can definitely buy that. But the High Road thoroughfare would be 165' wide (or 50 m). That seems... big.
I'm not complaining! I'm just curious about what the designers intended.
Can you walk the length of Waterdeep in half an hour? An hour? It's supposed to be big, so I like an hour better. How to account for the extra wide roads, then? Easy! You ignore what it shows on the map and describe the roads as being as wide as you think they should be. We can do whatever we want with our made up world! Yay!
Edit: My conclusion from below. An hour to walk north to south, the grandest avenues are 120' wide. Done.
The End.
Now, if you're mental like me, here are some things I looked up on the internet. For fun!
The Measure of Things website has some equivalents for 50 m (165', the width of the High Road in the interactive map):
The Champs-Élysées in Paris is 70 m wide (230'). So the High Road at 50 m would be a little less wide than this. I found a picture of the Champs-Élysées, and then I went to Google maps and found a spot where I could get walking directions across the street. Basically, 50 m is from (and including) the first row of trees to the next row of trees. Still seems big, but maybe just "grand," not "unlikely?"
Then I went really crazy. Here's a photo of Oxford Street in Victorian London (Waterdeep, in the adventure's images, seems modeled after Victorian London), and the same Google Maps sleuthing. That puts it at about 90' wide (27 m), more like my original calculations and a little more than half as wide as the Champs pics above. It actually doesn't seem, in the photo, wide enough for how the widest avenues are described in Volo's Enchiridion, as having islands in the middle for people crossing to get to safety from the carts and drays going by. Maybe I'm not thinking of the sidewalks? The Enchiridion does say the widest avenues have sidewalks.
So, in the end, maybe the grandest avenues in Waterdeep are over a two hundred feet wide! Take that, Eldritch Blast range! But I think I'm going to, for simplicity (you didn't think I had simplicity in me, did you, after this post?), say the grandest avenues are 120' wide, conveniently the range of any number of cantrip spells. Wider than Oxford street, not quite as wide as the Champs-Élysées.
Anyway, what it comes down to in the end, despite all my minutiae, is that the interactive map is a tremendous resource and I love it!
ey/em/eirs, or they/them works, too (just not he).
Role-playing since that keep on those borderlands. I love it so.
Had to chime in here that I used this amazing map for over a year in my Dragon Heist game, and did not realize that it had a distance feature. I'm blown away even more. I also calculated Waterdeep, mentally, to be much larger, so my players spent way too much time traveling. :-)
That map is astonishingly good!
Yeah, it made my game way easier when I found it.