Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

How about a house rule that says for every third round past the fifth without a Concentrate (Observe) maneurver characters suffer cumulative penalities on things like defending from side hexes, Tactics rolls, etc.?

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

This would work quite poorly with basic Magic and somewhat poorly with any other time-limited magic. That's assuming that you still count FP expenditures by the 1 second Turn. If you fiddle Spell Durations and maintenance intervals to match Melee actions that might be a different problem.

Soem characters really don't stand around ;looking at stuff while they make up their minds what to do. Their "tactics" are already decided upon. I present as an example Nyx the Barbarian.

What Nyx is going to do every round of comabt is either Attack with a Flail in a TA to the Skull or Move to set up such an attack if she's killed everyone within flail's reach. Oh, and she's going to do this scary fast because she has an Item that casts Great Haste on her.

These things are baked into the character and you're just excluding this character concept from your game. This would be your right as GM but Nyx's player would pout.

It might also disrupt gun combat. Gun combat is one thing Gurps does comaprativley well becaue it uses realistic ROFs. Soem characters might jsut stand in place while they look at things but msot should be moving whiel they look of delay their observation phases until they have achieved hard cover. WWI type machine gunners with water-cooling and long belts also attack somewhat like Nyx for long seconds at a ime.

I also don't quite see the point if PCs and NPCs stand around looking at stuff symmetrically. If Moves and Evaluates and other non-Attack Actions aren't hapening in the added time, The added time appears to be msotly a phantasmal addition.

You say there is time being spent but it doesn't affect wehat's happenign in the game except for Spell timing and other time-based measurements like vehicle speed. Be they chariots or airplanes vehicles do not stop while a command and control phase is taking place.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

Martial Arts addresses this somewhat via the rules for flurries. There's also a Pyramid article somewhere where every action requires spending "Action Points" which eventually need to be replenished by taking certain maneuvers like Evaluate or even Do Nothing. When I've run mock combats to test the "Action Points" idea, though, it felt like it could use some more baking, so to speak.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

Moving and evaluating are both things that can happen during non-discrete actions. In fact, I explicitly listed movement in the examples for both Discrete and Non-discrete Actions.

Your Nyx the Barbarian's strategy would not happen in this theoretical game, no; but basically any house rule is going to advantage, disadvantage, allow, or disallow some characters. So frankly, I don't see this as an actual objection.

Your other points are good ones.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

That (action points) also feels like something of a blunt instrument. "You cannot act until you look around, even though there's someone trying to stab you in the face."

However, Donny Brook has a good idea that could be combined with Action Points that I'll address next.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

I like this. The rate of accumulation needs testing, but I think this could be really good combined with the Action Points suggested by Michael Thayne - that is, taking said penalties after running into the negatives for Action Points, and based on how far into the negatives you are.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

I'd suggest keeping them separate, but possibly using both. Donny Brook's suggestion addresses 'you lose situational awareness if all you do is focus on one thing.' (speaking of which, I'd make those penalties not apply to the one thing you're focused on even if, say, that one thing moves into your side hex.) Michael Thayne I think is referring to "The Last Gasp" (Pyramid 3/44) which is an expanded fatigue system that covers getting winded by flurries of high-intensity activity, and the kind of handful-of-seconds breather that makes a difference there.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

that's not how it works. You start with Action Points, usually equal to your HT, and then spend them for a while Doing Stuff. If you do too much stuff, too fast, you have to stop and take a breather. If you run out of AP, you can still act, but you burn a FP to replenish AP.

In many GURPSy fights, it doesn't last long enough to burn through your AP. The 12-14 AP most line combatants have is good for five to seven rounds of combat unless you're doing a lot of All-Out, Rapid Strike, or other 'burst of energy' activity, or - as written - sprinting around the battlefield like a particularly hyperactive ferret.

I'm not saying it's perfect (it's not). But it never has behaved as suggested (look around before you can do anything). The purpose of it was to organically introduce lulls and flurries into combat (which it does, by all reports) by having a currency.

It also allows using an outlast strategy, where a very fit fighter with high HT and/or other purchased advantages to pull what is effectively a Rope-a-Dope: making the other fighter wear themselves out faster than you, after which their options are extremely limited.

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

Potentially, but I'd contest that that doesn't scale upward the way you have it. If there's dozens of people on the field it's a sure thing that most of them aren't keeping track of or coordinating with most of the others on a micro time scale. (If there are hundreds, either they just aren't coordinated or a significant chunk of them are staying out of the fighting to do the coordination.) In active close combat it's probably impossible to keep track of more than maybe half a dozen people at once and taking time to improve awareness would be both ineffective (you don't have room to see what's going on anyway) and extremely unsound (because taking your eye off the people trying to stab you right this second for a larger picture gets you stabbed.)

Re: Fixing round length in GURPS
 

If all you are doing is Action, then you are going to lose focus on the "bigger picture", which is exactly what Donny Brook's suggestion is talking about.