Quote:
Originally Posted by roguebfl
So say a turn can be longer than a second it now meanless to track seconds becuse unless you saying everying thing in the gasme happens in real time the no way to tack game time left in the system
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I have no idea what you mean here.
To clarify how I think of turns, I think of them with the standard English meaning - they have no in world duration (or if you prefer, it's always zero, so there is no issue concerning them lasting longer than a second, they never lasted a second in the first place. Your defenses are not part of any of your turns, they take place *between* them, on the *attackers* turn.
A technique I haven't used in a long time, but which I think clarifies GURPS turns a lot is to get a bunch of index cards with the character's names and speeds written on them (use colored cards for the PCs and their allies, makes it easier to separate them from the NPCs after every combat). Make a similar set for the opponents in each fight, and sort them together in numerical order. When the fight starts, take all the cards before the character that started it (made the first move, did whatever discovered the enemy, etc.) off the top, and put them on the bottom. The card on top is whose turn it is. When he acts, take it off the top, put it on the bottom and repeat. If you want to track spells by turns, when somebody casts a spell, insert a card for the spell on the bottom of the deck immediately after you move his card there.
You can now forget about seconds and just cycle through the deck. When your card comes up to the top, and you don't want to act yet, simply move it down in the deck however much you like instead of taking a turn now.
If there are occasional rules that don't work with this scheme, they're probably a result of a broken understanding of the turn sequence in the first place and ought to be fixed anyway. I don't think there are many outside some minor tweeks to the surprise rules, but the turn sequence seems to confuse people, even some GURPS writers, a lot more than it ought to for something so fundamentally simple, I think mostly because people insist turns have durations.