[Hose Rule] 3 second combat turns.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Kromm

The actual amount of action possible in a second really, truly isn't excessive.

Well, depends which actions you're talking about. It's physically impossible for a human to move 5 yards, both starting and ending in a stopped upright position, in one second (athletes doing sprint testing can occasionally get a 5m split that's under 1s, but they're not starting from a standing position, they're not coming to a stop, and the people doing that probably have move 9+).

For combat, a the problem is that GURPS only spends actions for the 'Act' part of an OODA loop.

[Kromm]

Acceleration is just a pain for RPGs, really. Fortunately, flat-out Move is mostly where this matters. The vast majority of action in GURPS is built around the one-yard step.

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

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.)

On the other hand, stories can and do emerge without explicit mechanics to add them in ahead of time. To take the trivial case, real-life has created tales as good as any an author could write. Ideally, characters interacting with each other and their environment, doing what they think is best at the time, can result in stories just as good (and more satisfying to some- myself included) than characters doing what would be "dramatic".

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

On the other hand, stories can and do emerge without explicit mechanics

Sure. That results in a form somewhere in the space from storytelling to improv theater. "Games" need some sort of rules and mechanics understood by and shared among the participants that regulate what happens. As the "rule-ness" increases, you move through the shades of RPG from story-uber-alles to simulationist the-dice-decide-all, toward wargames and even more pure and abstract games like chess, checkers, and Nim.

Humans being human, there aren't hard boundaries to the categories. Avalon Hill back in the late 60s used to pitch their wargames with a fair bit of what now sounds like RPG lingo -- "YOU take the role of general, how will YOUR actions change history" kind of stuff. Many people will even imagine stories about their chess pieces or even the checker that wanted to become king. But the native worlds of those game pieces are less and less fertile for the imagination, and their behaviors tightly constrained. (Toss the rules of chess to tell how the queen and bishop left the board to have a illegitimate son who became a knight and returned to dispose the old king, and you're no longer playing the game, but imagining some story inspired by it.)

[ravenfish]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Sure. That results in a form somewhere in the space from storytelling to improv theater. "Games" need some sort of rules and mechanics understood by and shared among the participants that regulate what happens. As the "rule-ness" increases, you move through the shades of RPG from story-uber-alles to simulationist the-dice-decide-all, toward wargames and even more pure and abstract games like chess, checkers, and Nim.

Sorry- by mechanics, I meant "mechanics emphasizing story-formation as opposed to mechanics simply to generate results". In terms of the latter, reality technically has very strict ones, since the results of a given action are determined by the laws of physics with no room for judgement calls by the GM. When you brought up roleplaying-games-learning-from-movies-and-books, my mind went to those RPGs which have explicit rules for trying to follow the structure of fiction- with "scene" as a defined construct in the rules, and giving character bonuses for "creating drama", and suchlike, which were always very much not my thing.