08-04-2011, 10:28 AM | #21 | |
Aluminated
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: East of the moon, west of the stars, close to buses and shopping
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
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This isn't a problem with turn length, I think, so much as possibly not understanding just how much the character is designed to be a badass. This is a cinematic Western gunslinger or a guy in a John Woo movie. If you don't want this kind of character in your games, you'll want to, as you noted, restrict Extra Attack.
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08-04-2011, 10:36 AM | #22 |
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
GURPS has cinematic advantages and mundane ones. My advice is to run your first games using mundane ones only, Get the basics of running the game down first then bring in cinematic options later on.
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08-04-2011, 10:55 AM | #23 |
Join Date: Feb 2011
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
That's pretty much what I'm expecting to do. I'll start things slow, then have a big turning point in the story where I'll allow the buying of more cinematic and/or "magical" skills/advantages.
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08-04-2011, 11:04 AM | #24 | |
Join Date: Jul 2007
Location: San Antonio, TX
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
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This marks actual progression in the character, and also is a good way for them to feel that their character is being empowered along the way. They can also compare what their character can do "now", in the future, to what they were once like -- and see the differences between realistic and supernatural abilities. I'd also recommend allowing them to buy a "dumbed down" version of an ability as things progress -- such as Extra Attack 1 with the Costs Fatigue limitation, for instance. Or an Innate Attack/Affliction that starts off minor and hardly useful, but slowly gains abilities as things go along -- such as a small bolt of fire that can barely light a campfire eventually turning into a natural fireball/dragon breath or the like. Just as a random example. Also compatible with Schrodinger's Advantage; you can allow them to reserve half points for an advantage that comes up during play. If combat is getting too tough for the characters, you can allow them pull out the special ability, and get put into debt for any CP they can't afford the ability with -- this suits the trope "have to be driven back into a corner until I unlock my special ability". You'd have control over what the "special ability" is, of course. Another way to make things interesting is to have the abilities be "thematic" -- having a specific cause in the world -- you can have them include certain disadvantages and the like to coincide with the advantages, or even precede. In a low fantasy world I'm currently in, the "spirits" are the explanations for supernatural abilities -- which include such things as Luck, Danger Sense, etc., for abilities that are more in the background than visible. To precede the spirits aiding them, however, first the spirits are trying to contact them, and having trouble doing so; leading to the Voices [-5] disadvantage, and Nightmares, as there's enough troubles in "translation" to cause problems.
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08-04-2011, 11:05 AM | #25 | |
Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: Eindhoven, the Netherlands
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
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But like I said, D&D abstracts a lot of things out. Exactly what is Rain of Steel? What's a hit point? Why can't I use Hack and Hew on the same target? That's just how the game works. You can try to make sense of it later, but ultimately, it's trying to create interesting gameplay, not telling a narrative of every stroke and technique you used to defeat your foe. GURPS relies on distinct, actual actions. In that one second, you're stating exactly what you're doing and depending on the optional rules in play, that can get very detailed indeed, down to the grip on your blade, how far and where you shuffled your feet during your defense, how close you let him get before you snapped off the attack to launch a counterattack of your own, and so on. The reason we have 1 second turns in GURPS is, first of all, because it makes it easy to calculate real-world things. If a gun fires 120 rounds per minute, then it has a GURPS ROF of 2. Easy. But, more importantly, it's because of the detail of GURPS' actions. I find some people have a hard time grasping this because they're grown accustomed to D&D's "one turn is enough time to do something meaningful." Nobody in D&D would spend 3 turns setting up a move, but that's common in GURPS. If you keep the combat flowing quickly, swiftly, so the seconds really feel like seconds, then I find people become less worried about "wasting" seconds with Evalutations and Aims and Feints.
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08-04-2011, 11:36 AM | #26 | |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
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GURPS tracks each weapon swing, shield defence attempt, drawing an arrow from the quiver, cocking the pistol ... all of it. Combat takes very little game time, much less than in D&D, although it takes approximately the same time to play through. The time GURPS says a combat takes seems to match individual combat fairly well. It doesn't address the problem of "why do large battles take so long?", because that isn't part of the game's heritage, or a central problem for it. |
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08-04-2011, 11:42 AM | #27 |
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Caxias do Sul, Brazil
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
In my more realistic campaigns, players usually start with 100/50 points, and the most unrealistic thing that one could do was to hit an eye with skill 11(targeted attack)...
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08-04-2011, 12:15 PM | #28 | |
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Lawrence, KS
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
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D&D's big innovation was the idea of "man to man" combat. But especially in the early versions, it was kind of scaled down from wargaming with lead soldiers that represented small units; it began, I believe, with Chainmail saying that if one hero was a match for a dozen normal men, then one figure could represent either a small unit or a lone hero. But it was Steve Perrin who took his experience at the Society for Creative Anachronism and turned it into a system that attempted to actually represent the flow of actions in a fight. He explicitly said that the fumble table derived from experience at SCA combat sessions! I think his representation had some problems, but nonetheless it had a realistic agenda that was quite different from what D&D was aiming for. Bill Stoddard |
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08-04-2011, 12:52 PM | #29 |
Night Watchman
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: Cambridge, UK
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
I'm pretty sure you're right - and RQI was much like RQII in this respect. I got to skim-read a friend's copy once when researching the Greg Stafford bibliography. T&T certainly didn't work like that, Traveller didn't, and after a quick read, C&S didn't. That's the major first-generation games. Incidentally, C&S uses melee rounds of 150 seconds, which has to be a record.
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08-04-2011, 12:58 PM | #30 |
Join Date: Sep 2004
Location: Canada
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Re: Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale
I've heard people try to explain the low accuracy of low level D&D characters (and low number of attacks compared to high level characters) as handwaving all their missed attacks as contributing to the (roughly) 50% hit chance. And low hitpoints are supposed to be an abstraction of the characters poor ability to defend themselves.
This makes my head hurt (apparently 1 HP kobolds are flinging themselves on your weapon, but you still are terrible at hitting them) and completely ignores the idea that numbers were chosen mostly for making a "fun game". If nothing else, give D&D 4e full credit for wearing its gamist logic and Rule of Cool stylings loud and proud. It seems to have cut down on people mistaking its detail for "realism" :)
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