Quote:
Originally Posted by Exallted
I think I saw someone mentioning that AD&D 1e of something had dedicated rules for time keeping inside the dungeon, so that's where the question came from.
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AD&D, and D&D before it, measured things in terms of
turns, which were like "moves" in a board game, where you could travel a certain distance along the dungeon map in a certain time (approximately ten minutes) or do things like search a section of wall or fill a bag with gold coins in the same amount of time. It measured combat in
rounds, which were approximately one minute long, and represented the back and forth of fighting over a fairly lengthy period.
Since the game had these board-gamey units of action, it expressed all its working parts in terms of turns and rounds. Spell casting times take a certain number of turns or rounds to complete. Light sources last a certain number of turns. Magic items might work for a certain number of turns or rounds.
With such simple units, dungeoneering becomes very efficient. If someone says, "I search the dead end for secret doors," the game master can just roll a die to check for success and say "That's your turn." After a combat, the GM just rounds up to the nearest turn, assuming any leftover time is spent resting, cleaning weapons, or regrouping. You can pass through a whole lot of dungeon very quickly in real time by reducing everything to these basic units.
(AD&D added
segments of six seconds each, mostly for calculating the effect of spell casting times and magic item activation on initiative determination. When you're not dealing with these things, you're mostly supposed to ignore segments.)
GURPS tends to be more detailed than this. Searching a wall for secret doors, for instance, requires one minute, less five seconds times the margin of success, and players have the option to take extra time or haste to change their chances of success. Meanwhile, movement rates are only really given for running each second, not walking over a period of minutes; characters can walk as fast as they like and are able. And the length of a combat never gets rounded up.
You can impose these D&D-isms onto GURPS if you like, but I don't really see the benefit, since GURPS is measured in real-world units for the most part — which has always been part of its stated purpose. Spell durations are given in seconds, minutes, hours, or days, etc., as needed. Each thing you want to do takes as long as it takes. To try to squeeze that into blocks of one and ten minutes, for instance, doesn't seem to lead to more efficient dungeoneering. The GM need merely decide how long something takes, and that's how much time passes.