Movement With Miniatures In Labyrinth Lord

How do you keep track of movement in your Labyrinth Lord game?

In a game I played a few days ago we wanted to figure out precisely where we were during combat. We pulled out the D&D Miniatures and the game mat. The rules for movement in Labyrinth Lord are on pages 53 and 44. On page 44 there is an optional rule for weight. I like the idea that a Fighter wearing plate mail should not be as nimble as a Thief wearing nothing or leather armor. Thieves should have a mobility advantage. But there was no way I was going to have the players sit and add up the weight of everything they were carrying.

So, we applied the weight of just the player character's armor to the chart and assumed they had enough stuff to put them one more level below that with regular equipment. Here's an example:

A Fighter with plate mail (50 lbs) puts them at move 90'. One more tier below that for regular gear, puts them at 60'.

The final movement score after applying the formula is what the player character can move during a turn. That's important if you are tracking time in a dungeon. A party can only move as quickly as it's slowest member. This is especially true as Fighters are usually placed in the front and rear of marching order. So if the slowest member of the party moves at 60' and your dungeon map has 10' squares, when mapping every 6 squares mark off a turn.

Combat movement is easy to figure. So combat movement is 1/3 of regular dungeon movement. That puts our Fighter in the previous example moving 60' during turns, moving 20' during combat. So on our mat, squares are 5 feet, the fighter in plate mail could move 4 squares during a combat round and still attack.

We allowed player characters to move up to twice their combat speed if they were not going to attack. During the same round. But if an enemy was adjacent that counted as a full retreat.

Once you have these base movement mechanics down you can apply whatever house rules to movement you want.