Aaaaaand. Speaking of horses...

This gave me an idea and after a little researching hit on this. Might as well call it the Rapidash... ahem.
Tabaxi: Monk 14, Thief 2, Druid 4. + every freaking speed boosting item can lay hands on for +100 MOV.
Wildshape into a Riding Horse with all gear ready. Speed is now 195. Haste and boots of speed jack that up to a MOV of 780.
Dash like a maniac to accelerate yourself to a MOV of 3900 which gives us a velocity of 443.18 mph in short bursts.

Now... If you could stack a Potion of speed with Haste, and far as can tell, you can not, then you could blast off with a MOV of 5850 going 664.73 mph.

So looks like 443 mph may be the speed barrier. Least for land movement.

The giant Eagle has a flight MOV of 80. Do-able with a Moon druid. Otherwise need a level 8 Druid. Crank base movement up to 215 then air-dash up to a MOV of 4300 which gets our meteor birdy up to 488 mph. (MOV 6450 and 733.95 mph if you could add that potion into the mix.) That may be a but less though if one of the speed bumping items is not allowed. Which might even out the speeds of bird and horse.

And it goes without saying that all of the far end stuff is pretty much impossible without a VERY VERY generous DM. But there you go. With tons of finagling you can get up to just short of the sound barrier. And even without the allowance for the speed potion you can still get up to well over half the speed of sound. You could cover over a mile in just one round at full tilt or just under a mile without that potion allowance.

30ft per round is pretty standard movement rate throughout D&D.  However, it's not necessarily meant to be "walking speed". It's a standard move in a COMBAT round when you aren't charging (which would be a sprint), but it's still conceivable that a person moving at 30' in a combat round is moving more than at a slow steady stroll.

Somewhat. In AD&D movement was at the rates given because the assumption was the PCs are moving slow for various reasons such as in combat you are moving around in a space trying to dodge getting mortally hit which is part of what HP are, dodging. And then presenting rules to move faster.

Whereas 5e movement is apparently the assumption the PCs are not moving cautiously and then presenting rules to move slower.

BX explained it better while presenting its own system simmilar to AD&Ds.
There your base move was 120ft in 10 minutes and your movement per 10 second round was 40ft. Running speed per round was 120ft. That translates to a per round movement of 0.45mph and a running speed of 1.3 mph. Armoured and encumbered characters moved slower. It feels as if someone forgot that the base movement was really slow when adjusting for running. But then monsters are under the same movement restrictions.

And I note a mistake I made in calculating the AD&D movement. I forgot a round in AD&D is 60 seconds, not 6. I'll fix that.
Lets see. With a MOV of 120 per turn that is the same as BX. Which is really slow and for good reason. Along known or mapped routes speed increased 600'. Which is still pretty slow. And fleeing speed was 1200' which is still slow at a little over 1mph.
Movement per round was base 120ft so that is 1.36mph. Around a 5e MOV of 12. Again with alot of ducking dodging and maneuvering abstracted into that. And same alterations for movement along known routes and running which brings movement up to 6.81mph and running to 13.6mph. Which would be in 5e MOVs of 60 and 120.

Had a glance at 3e and seems that they have things fairly detailed. Standard walk is 3mph, hustle x2 is 6mph, run x3 is 9mph and run x4 is 12mph. Normal sized races have a speed of 30, short ones have a speed of 20. Weight carried adjusts that down. These translate to 5e movement rates. with a mov of 20 being 2.27 mph. Encumbrance dropping movement to 20 and 15 respectively and a 15 MOV is 1.7 mph. With notes for terrain slowing speed down.

A 3e PC can for short bursts then without magic get up to a MOV of 120.

Barbarians can gain a +10 speed.
Monks could gain an extra 60 speed, (40 if you were a short race) instead of 5e's +30. So a human monk using run x4 would hit 360. The Run feat would allow 450.
Interestingly Haste here does not add to speed. Nor does the potion of Haste or Boots of Speed. Boots of Striding though did double speed which would allow a monk with Run to go at 900.
Broom of Flying had a speed of 90 and a small carpet of flying had a speed of 210.

3e hammerd the details of things down alot more than 5e does!

Quote from: Omega;1066032And it goes without saying that all of the far end stuff is pretty much impossible without a VERY VERY generous DM. But there you go. With tons of finagling you can get up to just short of the sound barrier. And even without the allowance for the speed potion you can still get up to well over half the speed of sound. You could cover over a mile in just one round at full tilt or just under a mile without that potion allowance.

I'm less bothered by the magical boosts to speed; magic should give some crazy results or it wouldn't seem very magical. And who knows how fast wood elves or tabaxi should sprint? I am a little disturbed that rogues at second level, and apparently not for magical reasons, can go 50% faster than anyone else (of the same race) at a run (so world record sprinters are presumably all variant humans with the Mobility feat and 2 levels of rogue). I am disappointed by my flying carpet that moves only 30 feet; even if you can dash with it (not at all clear), it still feels more flying golf cart than Thief of Bagdad.

But ultimately the speed per round is chosen not so much for realism (treat a combat round as 8 seconds or 4 seconds or whatever to make it seem right to you) but to balance out the combat mechanics: if movement is too slow per round, then ranged attacks rule as combatants sluggishly move together, and if it's too fast then "you can't reach there without dashing" never happens.

I get the feeling that it just did not occur to them when they added the cunning action ability to hustle, later renamed dash. I'd guess they thought a player would use it to dash and their regular action to attack. Or that any dash-dash actions would be few and far between.

And oooh yeah heh. I went "wha?" when calculated out the speeds of the broom and carpet. and the bigger carpets are slower! In my own campaign I introduced upgrade modules to both that improved speed.

But otherwise I think overall non-magic boosted movement seems ok-ish within the various abstractions.

It has also given me some ideas for NPCs, PCs and villains based around speed.

Quote from: RPGPundit;106636630ft per round is pretty standard movement rate throughout D&D.  However, it's not necessarily meant to be "walking speed". It's a standard move in a COMBAT round when you aren't charging (which would be a sprint), but it's still conceivable that a person moving at 30' in a combat round is moving more than at a slow steady stroll.

Just the fact that rounds in general are always six seconds, regardless of circumstances, highlights to me that they are using a convenient shorthand for consistency's sake, rather than focusing too clearly on realism. Whatever a round now means (and one's opinion on how abstract D&D combat is), it is clearly also defined as 'a meaningful exchange,' and that realistically is going to be different if you are doing skirmish fighting in boundary-less difficult terrain, formation fighting near a strategically important location, or dagger fighting in a narrow tunnel.

Very true. I think D&D has a good middle ground between abstraction an everything nailed down in that a round while technically 6 seconds long in reality can be shorter just as AD&D rounds could simply by all the action getting done sooner than later. Depending on your initiatives everyone might finish a round within the first few seconds. Or it could span the whole. So in a way you get your variable length time without the need for additional mechanics to bog things down.