To be honest I couldn't tell you how much time is represented by a combat turn in the games I am currently running. My standard is "enough time to take one significant action". Some actions, such as picking a lock, will take more than one combat turn.

Regardless what rules say I found that two thirds of players (if not higher) instinctively equate one roll = one swing of the weapons, or in modern combat one pull of the trigger.

That most players preferences fall in what they can do in combat is a move and an attack i.e. two actions one of which is to attack a target.

Any more confusion results like the action point system in FASA Star Trek. Less the players feel straightjacked like GURPS 1 second round and you can do one thing and one thing only each round.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;919429...Does the one minute turn break verisimilitude?

Yes, unless the combat system resolves most battles satisfactorily in one turn, or you just ignore the rule and have the GM figure out how long a battle took afterward.

It's possible for a real fight to take minutes, but that would tend to mean it includes a lot of no one actually being hurt. Stand-offs, shifting position without fighting, struggling to open/close a door between parties, grappling & wrestling in armor.

The problem is mainly one of precision. For one thing, if you want to include detailed back & forth of specific actions, fighting actions don't take very long, and if they take someone out, then other things can happen. So if the one-minute turns don't include the possibility of one person attacking many enemies, or taking out and enemy and then doing other things, including possibly leaving the scene, then your turn size is making it impossible for things to happen that otherwise could. A lot of things can happen in one minute, including running, hiding, killing several people using different weapons, making clothing & equipment changes, getting on and off of horses, traveling quite a bit of distance, etc. And all of those things would create opportunities for everyone present to react to them and do different things in response. That interaction and multiplicity of actions, and determining who has what opportunity in what order, is what turns allow.

The GM can try to track and narrate much of that in his head, but then your combat system is largely the GM's imagination and the player's conversational interface to the GM. Perhaps that's the intention.

Quote from: Bren;919480How many arrows is your archer shooting in that one minute round?

Some.

And the magic arrow represents waiting for the good shot.

And I sleep very well at night.

D&D is a GAME first and foremost, and every decision I make as referee is to make the GAME play better (in my estimation.)

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;919549Some.

OK. So are you tracking torches burned but not arrows expended?

QuoteAnd I sleep very well at night.

You are fortunate. I find that the older I get, the more restless my sleep becomes.

I take a 1-minute turn with a grain of salt. It's not more abstract to me in play than when I play Savage Worlds and I go Full-Auto and that translates to a hail of bullets that bounce off my target wearing a T-shirt because of a bad damage roll.

I can squint and play through. I confess for some odd reason I prefer a ten-second round. Totally arbitrary. I also don't mind just doing an initiative-track.

I guess this thread reveals to me that I don't care as much as I thought. Interesting.

Quote from: ZWEIHÄNDER;919514On a bell curve, without taking under consideration anything but raw Damage using average Primary Attributes for Damage and soak, it would be three Turns for two bog standard Characters - not fighters - to kill one another.

Additional stunts, exploding Damage rolls, Talents, Traits, differences in Primary Attributes, equipment and positioning can change this, either reducing it down to one Turn or many Turns.

In the Italian language, we call this "la supercazzola sbrematurata con lo scappellamento a destra, come se fosse Antani".

Or, as Bren said, "3 combat turns".

Three minutes to kill one single enemy.

Sorry, but this breaks my very personal suspension of disbelief. If I were you, I would make some appropriate considerations. And I only say this because I find the other details of your game Very Promising and Well Devised.

I've found the push for very short (e.g. six-second) combat rounds is the effort to chase "realism" on the tabletop, which I get.

The fallacy is, however, believing that just because someone can accomplish a given task in that six-second period, they can thus string six-second actions along sequentially without pause. Thus, move-move-swing-swing-move-unlock-move-swing-parry-swing-move-blah-blah-blah with robotic precision.

Actual humans dither, hide, hesitate, stop to catch their breath, and otherwise waste lots and lots of "rounds" doing nothing.

Quote from: darthfozzywig;919594Actual humans dither, hide, hesitate, stop to catch their breath, and otherwise waste lots and lots of "rounds" doing nothing.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Always assuming they don't isn't a better solution than always assuming they do. Rounds of short duration with enforced fast action declaration can provide hesitation. Of course that hesitation is based on player ability rather than on the ability of the character.

I like the idea of one-minute rounds. I'd have each action take x-seconds, so you could do a number of things during this time.

Quote from: vgunn;919599I like the idea of one-minute rounds. I'd have each action take x-seconds, so you could do a number of things during this time.

But at that point, why even have rounds? Just use tick marks, action points, strike ranks, or what have you in a numerically increasing sequence. There's really no need to demarcate the beginning or end of a round.

I personally find even six seconds for one action.  I did some boxing back in the day, and lemme tell ya, a LOT can happen in less than a second on a one on one fight.  One minute breaks any suspension of disbelief that I have and shows that most game designers have never been in a a school yard brawl.

Quote from: AaronBrown99;919429So I was reading through the Zweihander kickstarter pdf, and when I got to the combat chapter, I saw the rules specify a one minute combat turn.

It really deflated my enthusiasm. I mean I know D&D had one minute turns, where the attack roll represented the "one good strike" in a flurry of activity, but then how do you justify parries? Special results, grapples, etc?

What do you all think? Does the one minute turn break verisimilitude?

The same way you resolved parries, grapples, and other special results in D&D? I'm not seeing the problem here. In fact, it opens up a lot more room to interject "color" into the scene, from either GM or player side. (That said, I may have just "crossed the streams" of two topics... so everything might now blow up. My apologies.)

Quote from: Opaopajr;919624The same way you resolved parries, grapples, and other special results in D&D?

Meaning, we didn't?  I don't have my AD&D 1st edition DMG here, but does the word "parry" occur even once in the book?

It did in my 2e books, in both the PHB and the Fighter's Handbook optional Parry.

It's all about the opportunities that open up in a minute. Yes, even one's arrow shots.

Instead of tabulating how many arrows were shot about, just like sword swings, you calculate the opportune shots — the ones that could actually damage the arrow and not be easily recovered on the battlefield mid-combat. Then we'd use the optional rule of recover half, so that some risked arrows needed repair, from glancing off armor or caught in brambles, instead of harmlessly skidding along, or sinking into soft soil/sand. In the end it also just played out faster as HP bloat and action micro-management didn't stall out the game.

You'd be surprised how quickly a combat can end; two to three rounds is not uncommon, nor is ambush, surprise, done in the 1st round of combat. Had more than one new school player remark how much more could get done with such fast combats. Low HP, KO%, and the like really sped up combat.

(edit: Story time!

I had one awesome scene where I had a somewhat reluctant player play an NPC wizard who had Punching Specialization. It was roughly a festival of imprisoned, gagged wizards forced into a pugilism arena for festival entertainment. They had to fight it out without magic as the crowd cheered and placed bets.

Well that lucky son of a gun kept rolling crazy well on the KO% chart. Sure he had a little advantage with his Punching Specialization (any class can have this from CH:F). But the luck on his KO rolls were bizarre that night.

After a while he ended up at the final of the "tournament" and people were chanting his nickname "One-Shot! One-Shot!" By then he already one-shotted four other wizards, either from damage or KO% roll. His last bout was a duel and in his first swing he rolled disgustingly well, another 2 damage hit, plus his +1 for specialization, and he got the KO% roll! So it was something out of Bloodsport, a one-hit KO, but with wimpy wizards all sweaty and stripped down to their shorts.

He still ended up retiring that NPC, but it still lives on in that campaign. It's currently the wizard attachment to a group of employed county marines, privateered to capture ships from nearby or docking pirates. He got a pardon and employment all in one festival. And, well, he's earned the respect of his fellow marines, too.

"One-Shot! One-Shot! One-Shot!")