[Hose Rule] 3 second combat turns.

[Thamior]

I wouldn't touch the turn length to get the cinematic feel you strive for. I would rather make tweaks to approximate this with existing rules. Something like:

• Make a penalty after each attack that goes away after 2 turns.

• Make weapons unready after attack and increase number of turns to make weapon ready.

• Make evaluate necessary by having penalty for attacks without evaluate.

Some other not very realistic but familiar restrictions seen in games and shows. You get the idea.

[Tenchi2a]

Excuses me if I am getting the wrong idea from you comments, but it seems to me that your complaint is that the PC's are doing to much for 10 rounds to feel like ten seconds. To me this comes off as a personal perception issue and not a problem with the games turn length.

The issue is that most if not all the actions you can preform during a 1-second turn are very realistic, but most RPG games (Thanks to D&D) hamstring the combat speed to make it more cinematic. So for players coming from one of those games it would seem like 10 turns is too short.

In truth, most real world combat (not full battles) does only take a few seconds to resolve. Most of the time in a battle is spend maneuvering into position, when that is done the fight will be over in seconds. Watch Waterloo and you will see that when ever there is fighting it is quick and to the point, its the troops move into attack position that takes the time.

I would suggest if you want your fights to take longer, don't mess with the turn length just start with the PC's further away from the enemy or provide more cover.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by Tenchi2a

E Most of the time in a battle is spend maneuvering into position, r.

Even with actual combat the mode of combat can change the feel. I had an encounter during a Cliffhangers campaign where everyone was lying on their belly and doing a sort of "Aim and fire" drill with Mauser rifles.

The result was not at all like the usual Gurps melee. Even with usual Gurps melee about 10 Turns is when the players get their fill of the routine. Even Nyx the Barbarian (who was all about the cathartic violence) was ready for the rest of the orcs to run away after she'd killed the first 20.

This also holds true for many non-Gurps games in my experience. I wouldn't regard the issue of how many in-game time units had been used to be of any great importance. In OD&D through 2e it would have been 10 minutes instead of 10 seconds. It helped a little with suspension of disbelief problems that combat time units became shorter with D&D 3e but it wasn't truly important.

[Kromm]

I'm not sure there's really much wrong with just saying, "We ran through the combat sequence x times in that battle, so when the smoke clears, 3x seconds have passed." If you find it odd that small and large fights take exactly the same amount of time, go with something more like this: "We ran through the combat sequence x times in that battle involving n fighters, so when the smoke clears, 3nx/2 seconds have passed."

That kind of thing black-boxes the idea that there were probably flurries and lulls, without making them mechanistic and annoying to track. You can hand-wave away excessive time as pre-combat maneuvering, and post-combat checking for remaining hostiles, wiping blood off blades, picking up dropped items, etc. It has the benefit of not changing the combat mechanics in ways that require relearning, or that hold up the game whenever you run into a little-used rule that assumes one-second turns in some new context. Yet it means fights "generate" a lot more time for parallel noncombat actions, like lockpicking.

And note that the time for noncombat actions needn't be abstract at all. If you use 3x seconds, then when the rogue says "I need a minute to pick this lock," the others know they'll each be committing 20 turns to tying up the enemy. If you prefer, say, 3nx/2 seconds, then in a fight between the three remaining heroes and six foes (n = 9), the others know they'll each be committing about five turns.

The actual amount of action possible in a second really, truly isn't excessive. What's debatable is whether that pace is sustainable. With the above tricks, you can have your cake and eat it, too: You get realistic amounts of action per turn but also a time frame long enough that the fight isn't just a blip.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Kromm

when the rogue says "I need a minute to pick this lock,"

It's exactly those external actions that make the combat duration matter. If it's just a self-contained battle in room 17 on level 1 of the dungeon, it doesn't really matter how long it takes (until you start running out of oil flasks for the lantern or days of iron rations). It's when there's some external non-combat event that the story is trying to synchronize that the time matters, entirely for the sake of dramatic suspense. When the PCs are trying to hold out until the cavalry en route can arrive to save them, ten or twenty seconds of combat isn't much delay, so either the PCs lose, or the charging cavalry become irrelevant because the PCs already won.

(It turns the encounter into the punchline from the movie "Road to Rio". Hope and Crosby are off having a series of misadventures, and periodically as their troubles mount while they dodge authorities, the film cuts a number of times through the picture to shots of sidekick Jerry Colonna leading a cavalry charge to the leads' rescue. At the very end of the picture, after everything's wrapped up, except those charging cavalrymen, there's one last shot of Colonna in front of his troop looking into the camera and saying "What do you know? We never quite made it. Exciting, though, wasn't it?")

Since it's just ("just") narrative drama, the GM can adjust everything to fit. That is going to leave a lot of players dissatisfied, though. Why didn't those orcs just overrun us in the remaining twenty whole minutes before the cavalry showed up? But the attempts at imposing some sort of rule-based pauses I've seen don't solve this problem, either. The fighters may have to stop and wait, but it's still really, really, hard to launch the cavalry at the right time for their dramatic appearance, or guess in advance how long that lock should take to pick so the thief opens the escape route just in time for the party to flee.

Much easier not to have a rule that says "picking a lock takes a minute" while the GM is improvising a bit of description every time that thief gets their moment of spotlight time to show some progress, until the final die roll which just happens to be the one that will put the task completion over the time if sufficiently successful. (Assuming you're willing to have the party die, trapped in a dead end, when that one roll fails, that is. Helps to be either okay with TPKs or else have a number of backup plans for exit strategies so the party can keep trying until one works.)

Book / movie / TV authors have the luxury of being in complete control of their timing, not to mention not having a visible external clock driven by published rules and random events, so their job is a lot easier than a GM's to start with.

[Kromm]

The approach of the GURPS Action 2 chase system might be preferable to some. To greatly summarize the relevant text:

Action takes place in rounds. A round has no specific duration beyond "time enough to try something cool." Anyone who isn't involved in the action can perform any one task that takes at most a minute. When the action ends, any time-critical tasks it interrupted are now at -1d for haste, no matter how many rounds the action took.

Using that definition, an entire battle could take a round (made up of an arbitrary number of turns per fighter), moving to the next battle could take a round, and the second battle could take a round. Meanwhile, one PC could thoroughly scout three different areas, another could disarm a trap, pick a lock, and search what's beyond, and a third could bandage three wounded NPCs. And when they all meet again afterward, they'll be at -1d on the Tactics roll for mass combat against the orc horde that moved up on them during that time.

[DangerousThing]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Much easier not to have a rule that says "picking a lock takes a minute" while the GM is improvising a bit of description every time that thief gets their moment of spotlight time to show some progress, until the final die roll which just happens to be the one that will put the task completion over the time if sufficiently successful. (Assuming you're willing to have the party die, trapped in a dead end, when that one roll fails, that is. Helps to be either okay with TPKs or else have a number of backup plans for exit strategies so the party can keep trying until one works.)

Book / movie / TV authors have the luxury of being in complete control of their timing, not to mention not having a visible external clock driven by published rules and random events, so their job is a lot easier than a GM's to start with.

My suggestion is to not design/run games as if they were books or movies. I used to be guilty of this in my younger days, but rpg's are very different from books or movies.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The approach of the GURPS Action 2 chase system might be preferable to some. To greatly summarize the relevant text:

Action takes place in rounds. A round has no specific duration beyond "time enough to try something cool." Anyone who isn't involved in the action can perform any one task that takes at most a minute. When the action ends, any time-critical tasks it interrupted are now at -1d for haste, no matter how many rounds the action took.

Using that definition, an entire battle could take a round (made up of an arbitrary number of turns per fighter), moving to the next battle could take a round, and the second battle could take a round. Meanwhile, one PC could thoroughly scout three different areas, another could disarm a trap, pick a lock, and search what's beyond, and a third could bandage three wounded NPCs. And when they all meet again afterward, they'll be at -1d on the Tactics roll for mass combat against the orc horde that moved up on them during that time.

[Takes furious notes.]

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

My suggestion is to not design/run games as if they were books or movies. I used to be guilty of this in my younger days, but rpg's are very different from books or movies.

And this is hugely important!

Book: One mind* – the author's – has the final say regarding story, and nothing is left to chance. Readers are passive†, in the sense that they cannot change the outcome. A limited "story budget" in the form of pages, counted down as readers progress through the book, provides a clue as to when the story will end.

Film: One mind* – the director's (or rarely, the interfering producer's) – has the final say regarding story, and nothing is left to chance. Viewers are passive†, in the sense that they cannot change the outcome. A limited "story budget" in the form of runtime, counted down as the film runs, provides the viewers with a clue as to when the story will end.

RPG: Many minds – the GM's and the players' – influence the story, and there's also an element of chance in the form of the dice. Players are active, and can change the outcome. An indefinite "story budget" in the form of game sessions which can vary in length and relevance means the players are never entirely certain when the story will end.

Anybody who thinks that last thing has anything to do with the first two is reaching. About the only overlap is that books, films, and RPGs all require settings and characters. Those are static elements, however. Most of the thrill comes from dynamic elements – and in that regard, RPGs have far more in common with, say, cocktail parties, sports matches, court cases, or sessions of government than with books or films.

—

* I'm well aware of creators who claim their characters have lives of their own and change the story. That's just a manner of speaking; those influences still come from their mind!
† I'm also aware of the ideas of "active viewing" and "active reading." Those don't affect the outcome of the story, either – only how that fixed outcome is experienced or interpreted.

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The approach of the GURPS Action 2 chase system might be preferable to some.

Seems promising -- a useful framework that's not too rigid, yet not completely arbitrary, so it can retain some "game" instead of being pure GM narration. (One of the most difficult tricks in RPGs to me is balancing the RP with the G. Take out either, and you're working in a different medium. Pure storytelling systems aren't RPGs which aren't pure simulation wargames.)

Originally Posted by DangerousThing

My suggestion is to not design/run games as if they were books or movies.

I quite agree they're all different media, and all the same tricks from one won't necessarily work in another. But they are still related in some ways -- player inspiration, of course, but they're also all dramatic forms, so elements like story arc and drama matter. RPGs with no characters, no story, and no suspense are dry level grinds, with a pinnacle about the level of the roguelikes. (Diablo got to be a big hit not just with eye candy, but with story and character additions to the gameplay.)