Quote:
Originally Posted by Exallted
Ofc, GURPS models that with the ready action, but I think some more diversity among the weapons could be interesting.
One of the things that make characthers less idle in combat is the way movement works in Hackmaster...
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It's nice that GURPS does allow for some diversity in weapon speeds, but it really is quite limited. (I don't mean that as a criticism; this is a hard thing to do in RPG rules, and I'm not aware of
any system that has revealed something amazingly realistic and playable in this area.)
On the topic of movement, there are a lot of calls out there (including some fairly recent threads here, I think) for allowing more movement – and readying of arrows, and aiming of missile weapons, and casting of spells, and lots more – to take place between GURPS' flurries of 1-second attacks. A commonly cited example is that a PC who's a few rooms away in the dungeon, or a few dozen yards away on a flat map, can "rush" toward the sound of his colleagues in battle, only to find that the fight's long over by the time he gets there. In GURPS, that's a thing.
What to do about this, or whether to do anything, is a tough call. I tend to accept realism here: if my fighter
could hack at a monster a half dozen times or so and take it down in under 10 seconds, then the rules should allow for that; if that means the wizard in the next room and the unready archer don't get to take part, well, them's the breaks.
But that style certainly doesn't maximize group fun! A lot of games use what I think of as "fiction time" or "comic panel" time – that is, forget "realistic" time measures; every round, everyone can probably do
something interesting, because that's
fun. Rules like that don't care about sword speed vs axe speed, or bow readying times; when your turn comes, you can attack. If you're far off, you may still need to spend your turn moving, but the system might rule that you move as far as needed to do something interesting next turn. And so on.
There are some nice discussions on this forum about making GURPS combat more fun for those out-of-the-violence-loop PCs. There may not be much to be done for the PC who's stuck 60 yards away from the brawl and needs to spend 10 turns sprinting in, but there are, for examples, proposals to turn Aim and Evaluate into rolls that make those maneuvers into something fun (if still not
as fun as immediately pounding on a troll). There have been sensible proposals for allowing Ready and Attack as a form of All-Out Attack, something that lets polearm wielders join the fray more readily. And scattered throughout GURPS are all kinds of ways to speed up missile fire, aid colleagues from afar with Tactics rolls and Leadership-based encouragement, etc.
There's even one aid for that movement issue: Basic Combat, which doesn't seem to get discussed much on the forum. Basic Combat doesn't deal with mapped positions, so the GM is free to just wing it and say "yeah, you're close enough to strike" or "okay, just Move for one turn, and then you can join the battle." For those "my PC has nothing to do" issues that still remain, everything noted above about Aim, Evaluate, Ready, etc. can be brought over to Basic Combat.
Hm. Somewhere out there is a GURPS variant waiting to be written up by someone: Cinematic Basic Combat (or some better name), reworking combat expressly into that "fiction time" or "comic panel" time model. Each round (i.e., each cycle of character turns) wouldn't be a strict one second; it'd be 2-ish or 5-ish seconds, or whatever seems cinematically right for the scene. Heavy weapons would ignore their special Ready requirements (the "U Parry" business alone would differentiate them from nimble swords just fine). Missile attack rates would be sped up. Aim and Evaluate could still exist, but would use rolls to make them more fun, and would offer potentially big bonuses to make them meaningful. And movement would simply stick to the existing Basic Combat model: just talk the GM into ruling that, yes, you can run across three rooms and join the battle next turn. : ) (Or, if actual distance moved mattered, Move would be much greater that 5 yards/sec or so, given that each turn represents several seconds.)
Well. That's a bit of a tangent for this thread, as this "Cinematic Basic Combat" would really depart from Hackmaster's detailed weapon speeds. On the other hand, it would seem to share an "everyone gets to do something" approach with games like Hackmaster (and D&D and many others).
Anyway. If the topic of combat timing interests you, I have an old three-part article, beginning
here, that looks at how different game systems approach the topic. The article may not give you anything useful, but it is relevant to this thread: it briefly discusses a theoretical action-point system that's really the same thing as Hackmaster's "count up", including a version I actually used long ago (again, essentially the same as "count up", though I used randomly-rolled attack speeds).