Explaining the 1 second/turn rationale

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Xplo

Well, it's not GURPS' fault that you can't make up your minds quickly. If one-second turns feel strange when it takes you forever to deliberate on what to do, blame yourselves. ;)

People who do this generally assume familiarity with the combat system. If you're all new, I'd extend the time limit; 30 seconds or a minute should be plenty. But unless you all want to have the possibility that someone could spend five minutes looking up, say, grappling rules on their turn before deciding what to do, you probably should have some sort of time limit. Think of being able to make quick decisions about whether to use obscure combat options the reward for learning them.

Tips to make combat go faster:

1. Require that players have their maneuver ready as soon as their turn comes around, or within a certain time limit (I favor 5 seconds). You can extend this for people with Combat Reflexes and Enhanced Time Sense.

2. Help people learn the basic maneuvers. e23 has some free combat cards, if you favor the D&D approach.

3. Want some complicated moves? Work them out in advance. List a series of "signature moves" for each character that have all the detail of exactly how that move works listed on a piece of paper, so that when they need to pull off something tricky, there's no flipping through the book to figure out how it works. You can even spend a point to make them into trademark moves, worth +1 to the entire setup.

4. "When in doubt, roll and shout." GURPS isn't as hard as it looks. There are two major GURPS GMs in my area, myself (I'm a serious stickler for every rule and every modifier, most of which I have memorized) and a friend of mine (who constantly improvises and never looks at the rules). Fascinatingly, if you ask either of us what a modifier for a particular situation will be, my picture-perfect knowledge almost always matches his off-the-cuff estimate, within +/- 1. Nobody's going to call the cops if what you came up with on the fly is slightly off, and you can always check the book later to see if you were right or not (how I came to memorize all those numbers).

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

2. Help people learn the basic maneuvers. e23 has some free combat cards, if you favor the D&D approach.

Have those been updated yet, or are they still missing the attack options from the Basic Set and everything from Martial Arts, High-Tech, and so on.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by RussellChamp

Hello!
My local group of GURPS players and I have nearly finished our first campaign. Rah rah rah! Anyway, one thing that has been bothering me is the fact that GURPS defines one turn rotation as taking one second. To me, at least, this seems an insanely short amount of time in which players draw weapons, drop weapons, attack (often multiple times), defend (often multiple times), and frequently a combination of the above. Players also talk as a free action but often communicate large ideas in 20-30 seconds "real time".
My first question is this: Why was one second chosen as the time taken for one round? Is there any rationale here or was it just a number pulled out of a hat?
On the flip side of thing, DnD turns take six seconds (as far as I can remember). However, as a low level player, this is equally annoying as you are typically limited to a single attack per six seconds!
Second question: This fall I'll be the one running a campaign. Could we make a compromise and call each round 2 or 3 seconds? Would this completely break the game? Am I foolish for even trying to trifle with "the system"? Do I not know with what powers I contend?
Thoughts and comments would be appreciated!

Ok, the big difference here is not that DnD "lets you do less in a second," it's that it abstracts out a bunch of things. In my D&D 4e game, I have several moves that give several attacks (like Hack and Hew) or a huge swarm of attacks, like Rain of Steel (which may or may not consist of attacks, depending on how you look at it). In a single turn, my fighter could inflict 1[W] damage on every enemy adjacent to him, and thereafter use Hack and Hew to hit two different targets, and then if someone tried to move away from him, make an Attack of Opportunity to hit him. That's up to 11 attacks, depending on how you look at it.

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.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

But like I said, D&D abstracts a lot of things out. ... GURPS relies on distinct, actual actions.

This is the basic difference. D&D explicitly assumes there are multiple weapon swings, defensive moves, and so on in a combat turn. This has evolved due to the way it originally descends from a miniatures wargame, where things take much longer in game time than seems necessary, because that models how long actual large low-tech battles took, more or less.

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.

[gilbertocarlos]

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)...

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

To the best of my knowledge, that approach was introduced into rpgs by RuneQuest. At least by the time of RuneQuest II, they had the attack roll for each individual attack; the parry roll; the Defense score, which was subtracted from your attacker's attack skill to represent your chance of staying out of the way; hit locations; criticals and fumbles; armor stopping damage from getting through to you, rather than making you harder to hit; and the whole idea that hit points represented real, physical tissue destruction, not some notional compound of health and size and luck and skill.

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

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

To the best of my knowledge, that approach was introduced into rpgs by RuneQuest. At least by the time of RuneQuest II, they had the attack roll for each individual attack...

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.

[Bruno]

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" :)

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by johndallman

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.

You seem to be omitting Superhero 2044 and Villains and Vigilantes. But neither of them worked that way; V&V was a lot like D&D, and S44 had a really strange hybrid system, though I think it might have used 3d6 for some things.

Bill Stoddard