Combining GURPS and Hackmaster combat system?

[borithan]

Originally Posted by baakyocalder

HackMaster combat speed presumes that the attacker is also defending. Movement can happen during combat, so while a PC may not be tap-dancing, they may be circling about a foe.

That is what I understood as well, that like d&d it is dealing with "effective" attacks, not individual blows (and compared to old d&d's minute per turn actually positively blazing action).

You also have hold-at-bay with polearms and ranged weapons. For firearms, while the time scale is different, Aces & Eights: Shattered Frontier introduce the Count System.

And I suspect this is why the system feels slow. It was designed for a game which literally counted 10ths of a second. This is all well and good when doing a high-noon style duel, as you get to simulate that "fastest gun in the west" idea where fractions of a second in quicker reaction time count, and players get to choose whether they risk those fractions of second aiming for a better shot or go for the quickest shot that might just miss. However, it is far too detailed for most players as a practical combat system, especially because it worsens the movement vs action choice. Movement is so slow (literally 5 or 10 "pulses" between moving 1 space, depending on speed) that it makes it even less of an interesting option than it is in many games ("Ok, I have waited 10 pulses and I get to move 1 space on the battlemat... woo"). For their fantasy set presumably they decided they wanted to allow a bit more movement, so ends up with the 1 second per turn (which allows everyone who wants to move a space every count), but then the action part of the equation becomes unrealistically slow as they decided to retain the reaction speed element of Aces and Eights but on a unrealistically large timescale.