Longer combat rounds.

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Brett

The things in RPG combat systems that chew up real time, and therefore make the fights run slowly, are

• players making tactical decisions
• die rolls
• dealing with rules procedures (eg. looking up scores, looking up rules, checking tables, doing calculations, performing condition tests, communicating results).

Increasing the length of a combat turn and the number of actions per turn will not reduce any of those things.

Exactly. None of this has much to do with turn duration, which is a totally abstract mapping of the above three items onto real-world time. If one says that each turn covers 2, 3, 5, or 10 seconds instead of 1 second, one hasn't actually simplified much. It's true that one could glom together movement and offense, aiming and offense, or any number of other things to justify longer turns that encompass a bigger chunk of action, but then one would be losing useful distinctions between people who are good at one but not the other part of these composite actions, and between tactical decisions. Of course, one could introduce those "extra procedural rules for action sequencing within a turn" to restore such detail . . . but then one would lose any speed benefits one might have had. I think that the most important tool for speeding up combat is learning the system and forcing quick decisions.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Gigermann

I recently ran into the same issue in my game—everybody got used to the melee stuff, and then somebody decided to break out a bow, and violá—disappointment. Those still engaged in melee were happily hacking away while the guy with the bow drew his arrow, nocked it, aimed, and eventually fired.

The situation tends to be reversed if the PCs can spot the badguys from 200 yards away (especially if they can get themselves up on a hilltop and the badguys don't have cover - archer heaven).

Melee doods: "I run. For 33 turns. I guess I make two HT checks for sprinting."
Archer: I shoot them 11 times! And after the melee guys engage them and pin them down, I shoot them some more!

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Bruno

The situation tends to be reversed if the PCs can spot the badguys from 200 yards away (especially if they can get themselves up on a hilltop and the badguys don't have cover - archer heaven).

Melee doods: "I run. For 33 turns. I guess I make two HT checks for sprinting."
Archer: I shoot them 11 times! And after the melee guys engage them and pin them down, I shoot them some more!

Yes. Lazy GMs who kick off all low-tech (and other) combat at sword's reach are more to blame for odd player perceptions here than are purely game-mechanical considerations. If you have hostilities open in equal proportions at close combat (requiring knives, pistols, wrestling, etc.) and at distances of a few yards (where melee dominates, and you'd do well not to try ranged weapons less handy than modern SMGs), a few tens of yards (where combat progresses from ranged weapons covering a melee charge to melee action screening ranged bombardment), many tens of yards (where the entire combat is ranged), and hundreds of yards or more (where only "snipers" are useful), you would probably get more sensible player expectations.

A lot of whining comes from players creating degenerate combat builds that are worthless in two to four of these regimes. Such complaints aren't especially valid, and certainly have nothing to do with the game's time scales for shooting arrows vs. swinging swords, or for that matter for grappling and pinning vs. swinging swords. Why should in-your-face shoving contests, fast-and-furious swordplay, running skirmishes, and sniping all give an equal return on character investment in every battle? All that would do is give every fight a certain sameness, which would make an exciting activity (combat) boring.

Part of the problem is that some people seriously expect a gridded-out combat system with measurable ranges and time slices to have the same fluidity seen in many comics and movies. In those media, you never get to see the big picture, or the scenes where people are simply moving from A to B, or in fact anything but the action. Everything is edited down to the spotlight scenes. While it's easy for ranged and melee fighters to get to work at their favorite distance and time scales in such fiction, games with tactical combat rules aren't that fiction. They aren't even a good emulation of it in most cases.

I hate to say it, but I don't believe that RPGs that use real-world times, distances, ammo capacities, etc. – like GURPS – are the right tools for gamers who want gonzo fights where wrestlers, swordsmen, acrobats, pistoleros, and snipers are all equally useful and have equally many flashy action scenes in all encounters. They better suit gamers who understand that bows and sniper rifles are slow, precise ranged weapons that get set aside when the violence moves up close.

[Azinctus]

I tried longer turns in my 1923 pulpy-historical game. The PCs were split up (one in his tent, one on guard outside and one in a young lady's tent 50 yards away).

They were attacked by a group of riflemen (with single shot bolt action rifles) on a hill 200 yards away and some sword and pistol dudes creeping through the ruins about 30 yards from the tent.

The main shooting was between the riflemen and two NPCs with BARs. I said: "the NPCs are exchanging fire with the riflemen the occasional random bullet is falling in the campsite" And gave them turns of 5-10 seconds to act. I was deliberately vague about the time frame.

It was enough time to get up, get half dressed and leave the tent, or stay in the tent and put on two pistol holsters and get your sword cane. When a PC came to blows with an NPC we gamed that duel in tactical combat with one second turns and no else got to act. But then at fifty yards armed with pistols there wasn't much they could do to aid the PC with the 10G shotgun in melee with a swordsman.

Anyway the other PCs were busy with long actions (starting the biplane and a Model T Ford).

It worked ok, when the NPCs specifically shot at the PCs I was very clear about who was shooting and the chance of hitting - "A pistol man at 60 yards he used his long turn to get the maximum aim bonus." The NPCs vs NPCs was vague - I made gun noises and described the brass landing in the sand.

But in the final analysis I wouldn't do it again. It made the PCs nervous - "how much can I do?" And I made mistakes - "How come the other pistol guy hasn't fired at me five times?" asked one player... Indeed, why didn't he? "Um... They are undisciplined."

It was a good scene and tense but it would only have been better at proper combat time. The time saved was probably wasted in hand waving and explaining this ad hoc system.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Kromm

Exactly. None of this has much to do with turn duration, which is a totally abstract mapping of the above three items onto real-world time. If one says that each turn covers 2, 3, 5, or 10 seconds instead of 1 second, one hasn't actually simplified much. It's true that one could glom together movement and offense, aiming and offense, or any number of other things to justify longer turns that encompass a bigger chunk of action, but then one would be losing useful distinctions between people who are good at one but not the other part of these composite actions, and between tactical decisions. Of course, one could introduce those "extra procedural rules for action sequencing within a turn" to restore such detail . . . but then one would lose any speed benefits one might have had. I think that the most important tool for speeding up combat is learning the system and forcing quick decisions.

Classic example of this for our group was 7th Sea. In 7th Sea, you could have as many as 8 action in a single turn (though in practice it was more like 2-5) depending on a particular trait.

But one friend commented "Depending on how you roll, you can get one action at the beginning of the turn, and then have to wait for everyone to finish all of their turns (5 players each with 3 turns is 15 turns) before you can take your next action. It really destroys the flow."

I think he would strenuously disagree that allowing everyone to take 5 actions in a turn would actually "speed things up."

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Kromm

They better suit gamers who understand that bows and sniper rifles are slow, precise ranged weapons that get set aside when the violence moves up close.

Right. It seems like bows (not crossbows) in real life were used in two lethal modes:

Short range "sniping" for hunting for food. Stalk to within a distance where success is highly probable, then let your future dinner have it.

Volley fire en masse for war. Dozens to hundreds of archers raining hell and distraction on an enemy force.

The third use would be long range "sniping" for sport. The Koreans still do their archery competitions at something like 145m/158yds.

The Legolas/LotR-like (and DnD-like) use of bows inside a room (or in a dense wood, for that matter) is a staple of fiction, but not terribly useful - or fun! - when "real" loading times and accuracies are factored in. For that, there's hundreds of words on things like Heroic Archer and instant Zen Marksmanship to force things to work. But it's no more real than the animated (and fun) but pointless discussions of mecha vs tanks on the other thread, or the discussions of how to make swords as good as assault rifles...some things just are better, and some things just won't ever work without major handwaves.

[knarf]

I think it's also partly that D&D and other games create the need to be "effective" (doing damage) every round and if this doesn't happen, then players tend to feel useless. A longer round would abstract out reload times and other minor annoyances to allow every player to be "effective" every round.

[LemmingLord]

Making rounds a little more ambiguous sounds good to me.

Has anyone tried making every TURN equal to a second and not every round?

Player 1 does x, 1 second has now passed
Player 2 does y, 2 seconds have now passed
Player 3 does z, 3 seconds have now passed
etc, etc?

It would seem to me that this would be more story appropriate. Technically everyone is doing "something" for each of those seconds, but you don't worry about resolving until it gets to your turn.

Player 1 takes cover, 1 second has now passed.
Player 2 takes aim, 2 seconds have now passed.
Player 3 concentrates on casting a spell, 3 seconds now have passed.
Bad guys shoot, players get dodge if hit, 4 seconds now have passed.
Player 1 has cover; he decides to wait for a lull in the shooting to begin his own supression fire; 5 seconds have passed.
Player 2 shoots at a bad guy at a bonus of 3 seconds of aiming; 6 seconds have passed.
Player 3 has a 3pt fireball built and launches it at the bad guys; 7 seconds have passed.
Bad guys take cover; 8 seconds have passed.

To me this seems like a better playbale and believable pacing and gives everyone the same amount of table time AND probably cuts the amount of table time spent per in-game moment considerably.

Consider that to do the same amount of action would probably have taken eight times as many passes around the table and you can see why something like this would provide a significant advantage to getting to more adventure.

I'm sure we've all had battles that took way too long. I mean... Assuming you have four hours to play, do you really want to spend three of them in one battle sequence where more than half of your turns are spent doing the same exact thing you did the turn before?

The first one of these I remember had us fighting a big mess of giant crabs that were climbing up onto our ship at sea. It was not satisfying because every turn ended up being "I attack the next crab" and then we ended up with less than ten seconds of game time having taken three hours of real time. To me, it is more fun and more realistic to NOT focus on what character's do every moment, but rather find out what the characters are doing in key moments..

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by knarf

I think it's also partly that D&D and other games create the need to be "effective" (doing damage) every round and if this doesn't happen, then players tend to feel useless. A longer round would abstract out reload times and other minor annoyances to allow every player to be "effective" every round.

. . . or the GM could help the players unlearn that rubbish about "effective = doing damage" and create situations where effectiveness is rated more broadly.

I recently ran a huge firefight where most of the PCs weren't doing damage every turn. They were, however, moving from cover to cover, shooting at foes to make them keep their heads down, and generally outmaneuvering the enemy. Thus, everybody got to be "effective" even though only half of the PCs really damaged opponents.

In my previous fantasy campaign, one PC calmly aimed at the Big Bad for three turns as the other PCs screened him and damaged mooks. Then he shot the Big Bad once and ended the fight in one strike. I'd hardly call that ineffective.

The key is to get the players to think in terms of the big picture for their side, with a view to the goal of the entire fight, and not in terms of the selfish picture for their character, with a view to showing off this turn. Gamers who insist on looking at things the second way tend to be troublesome out of combat, too, where combat rounds don't matter. That's because they can't put group goals ahead of personal ones or long-term objectives ahead of short-term gains, both of which are rather immature, selfish behavior patterns.

[Mailanka]

In my Space Opera Military game, during the climactic battle, one character couldn't even stand up for the entire battle, and just spent the entire engagement radioing in the coordinates of the enemy to the artillery battery off the map.

He was, of course, the most lethal character in the fight.