What is your optimal duration for combat rounds and why? 

Is this different than the game(s) you usually play?  If so, what is stopping you from changing it?

For me, the big consideration is the trade between having a short enough time avoid too much planning or confusion, but a long enough time that the characters can accomplish something. 

I've been playing around with shorter rounds where melee typically attacks every round but bows require load times and spells require preparation time (i.e. multiple short rounds to get a shot or spell off).  This has a lot of nice features, not least that it provides interesting hooks for movement rules and makes warrior types a big threat, but the players typically don't like it as much and/or are confused by it. 

It makes the old D&D 1 minute round not look so strange.

A lot depends on the setting and the level of abstraction you're willing to accept.

One minute rounds work well with AD&D's assumptions of large parties skirmishing on maps with 10' squares with either large monsters or fairly large numbers of human-sized mooks.

By contrast, a game with Three Musketeers sized parties skirmishing with mooks and some more elite swordsmen would lose a lot of their feel and sense of action if you were just checking for results once per minute.

From the other thread where this first got brought up, I think the issue of the crossbow is that it's damage has always been balanced around one-minute rounds relative to the damage a warrior could do with a melee weapon in a minute... so when the time scale changed they just kept the damage numbers and dropped the reload time to unrealistic levels.

I think the alternative that would work better is to treat any crossbow you can't hand cock as balanced like 4E's encounter powers or similar limited use resources. You get one use per battle because reloading takes longer than most combats last.

I like 6 second rounds. Being able to multiply by 10 to get a minute feels natural for someone accustomed to the metrics system of base 10.
At the same time some games have 5 second rounds, maybe because the makers are more used to calculating in the imperial 12 inches to feet.

But to me 6 seconds feel right up the alley of chambering a round and aim a rifle through a scope at a moving target 90 meters away and shooting before the round is over and the target enters cover.

I recall reading a post (either here on on Reddit) about GURPS having 1 second rounds and how they are way to short and one poster pointed out how 10-12 seconds are more realistic in a squad combat scenario on how first Observe, Plan an action, Order the squad have them Perform the action. -But I think that would be a game focusing on group combat not individual combat.

Quote from: Wntrlnd on August 10, 2021, 09:10:59 AM
I like 6 second rounds. Being able to multiply by 10 to get a minute feels natural for someone accustomed to the metrics system of base 10.
At the same time some games have 5 second rounds, maybe because the makers are more used to calculating in the imperial 12 inches to feet.

But to me 6 seconds feel right up the alley of chambering a round and aim a rifle through a scope at a moving target 90 meters away and shooting before the round is over and the target enters cover.

I recall reading a post (either here on on Reddit) about GURPS having 1 second rounds and how they are way to short and one poster pointed out how 10-12 seconds are more realistic in a squad combat scenario on how first Observe, Plan an action, Order the squad have them Perform the action. -But I think that would be a game focusing on group combat not individual combat.

   1 second round are realistic IMO.  What they are for is as you said, adding in plan, maneuver, evaluate, etc.   To do the old, you swing, I swing sort of combat, they seem very rushed.  I do not particularly like them because it does give a very rushed feel to a combat encounter, but most real combat is decided pretty quickly once the parties engage one another if they are both capable of doing real damage to one another.  I would say this is very realistic even in an individual combat scenario.  It just takes into account your character deciding to do things that would to a degree be abstracted in a longer round.   Again though, i do not love them, but I certainly see the point that they are more realistic, but too much realism is not always all that fun.

Five to ten seconds. Never could get a good mental picture of a combat round lasting a full minute like in AD&D. I understand there is a lot boiled down into the single combat roll, but a minute is just a hell of a long time.

There are times when I want two different round lengths, because the up close and personal timing is in seconds while the ranged sniping and sneaking through cover is a much slower pace.  This is one of the things that Burning Wheel gets right, making the "Range and Cover" combats have a very different feel than the closer stuff.

On the other hand, that's a lot for players to learn.  Thus my interest in possibly trying something like a 15 to 20 second combat round to split the difference, even if it isn't optimal for either melee or ranged skirmishing.  There is also something to be said for breaking things down into thirds.  One minute round is still too long for me, but I can see it working where "you get to make 3 major decisions about tactics" in 1 minute, and each of those decisions will either be a spell, a ranged shot or two, or a flurry of melee, along with some movement.

It varies.

Shooting people should take less time than 2 guys in hand to hand combat where they have to feel the opponent out. Having done some BJJ, not a lot (I'm terrible at it, but it's fun!), it depends on situations. Watch any combat sport and you'll see big interludes where almost nothing gets done. I'm not sure how this would be covered faithfully in a game.

For hand to hand combat I'd want a D&D styled system for HP with some sort of modification to crits because some people drop on the first punch whereas they took 100 punches from their previous foe.

Not experienced enough with swords to comment on melee combat.

Shooting combat should go a lot quicker.

Genre makes a HUGE difference as well. A mecha combat game with 1 minute rounds would be ridiculous because one round would be longer than some entire action sequences in the genre (personally for mecha/modern combat I default to 3 second rounds with characters able to do two things during their turn; i.e. move+shoot, move twice, shoot twice, aim+shoot, etc.).

Generally speaking I think there's a sort of formula for turn length that could be roughly expressed as "the smaller the number of combatants and the higher the tech level, the shorter a round needs to be to feel right."

So platoon level combats with medieval tech can feel okay at a minute per turn because the number of combatants is high and the tech is low. Mano-a-mano mecha combat requires very short rounds because the number of combatants is tiny and the tech is extremely high.

I liked Moldvay's Basic Rules where a combat round was 10 seconds long.  When I switched over to AD&D everyone I played with still assumed a 10-second combat round, so I guess I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

For larger battles, a 1-minute round makes sense.  Especially for Medieval through early modern warfare where everyone is fighting in formations, reloading weapons by the numbers, and moving large groups of soldiers around as one.  So anything greater than twenty combatants switches to battle scale.

The six-second rounds of 3rd ed and later are fine.  But the one-second round that Palladium uses seems a bit clunky.

Shadowrun has 3 second rounds which makes a ton of sense in a world where man meets magic and machine.

I feel 6 seconds is just too short for D&D.  I'll echo others who say 10 seconds is more ideal (it's also what Earthdawn used   ).

Quote from: Svenhelgrim on August 10, 2021, 11:21:02 AM
I liked Moldvay's Basic Rules where a combat round was 10 seconds long.  When I switched over to AD&D everyone I played with still assumed a 10-second combat round, so I guess I wasn't the only one who felt this way.

For larger battles, a 1-minute round makes sense.  Especially for Medieval through early modern warfare where everyone is fighting in formations, reloading weapons by the numbers, and moving large groups of soldiers around as one.  So anything greater than twenty combatants switches to battle scale.

The six-second rounds of 3rd ed and later are fine.  But the one-second round that Palladium uses seems a bit clunky.

Palladium uses 15 second rounds for most of their games. 1e Palladium Fantasy used 1 minute rounds. The only place 1 second comes into play is that, despite them telling you to calculate yards/minute or melee round the actual Speed attribute works out to precisely one foot per second.

I'm a fan of the Gygaxian time frames. Multiple time frames and scales to suit whatever it is your doing. In 1E, you've got segments (used as surprise rounds BtB), melee rounds (most often used), and turns (used in mass melee). And that's cool because it gives a good range of broadness of brushes to paint with and scaling by a nice round factor of 10 each time. Dangerous Journeys also does this, though it goes from 3 seconds, to 30 seconds, to 5 minutes.

Lejendary Adventure hits an important time frame, the 12-second Action Block, which I find best for syncing up "realistic" rates of fire. In fact, the RoF on 1E missile weapons sync up perfectly if only you were using 12-second rounds. Problem is, switching scales by a factor of 10 would give you some pretty awkward units. 1.2 seconds on a finer scale. The 2 minutes on a broader scale isn't bad, and for whatever reason when Gary hashes out base rates of movement in LA, he uses 2 minute intervals as his basis. Perhaps this is exactly what he had in mind there. On the finder end, AB's do break down into ABCs of 3 seconds each. 3 seconds per ABC, 4 ABCs per AB, 5 ABs per minute. The 3-4-5 motif may not be as nice looking as the base 10, but the mathematician in me does admire the Pythagorean triple there.

Ultimately, the time it takes to "get the job done" in terms of in-game time ought to be in the ballpark of "realistic" when it comes to ordinary men. However that is sub-divided, it has to be synced to movement in a way where missiles have the appropriate level of advantage. Not too much, not too little, and using "realism" again as a basic. And then in terms of utility and simplicity of game rules, a round of missile fire ought to be mechanically similar (and thus similar in deadliness) to a round of melee. And then, finally, I want the possibility for movement into a melee underway to be reasonably feasible to maximize participation.

Once all these parameters are in place, the range is going to be between 12-second rounds and 1-minute rounds, with the understanding the former will likely take more dice rolls to resolve than the latter. Which could be a good thing in some cases, a bad thing in others. So I'd also like the freedom to float between the two. I play LA cognizant of both the 3-second ABCs and the 12-second ABs, and hopping back and forth between them as fits the situation, and quite honestly, I don't really think I'd be missing much in the way of finer detail to jetison the shorter rounds entirely. I don't think I need anything on that scale.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 10, 2021, 08:26:11 AM
What is your optimal duration for combat rounds and why? 

For me, the optimal duration of a round is measured by the number and type of actions you can take in a round. Attempting to sync that to a clock time invariably winds up being a shoehorn operation for at least some actions, and in my experience adds nothing to the game.

At my table, a round is "1 main action and 1 side action" long (one of the few things 3e got right). No extraneous bolt-ons required to translate that to "seconds" for "realism". I find the game feels just as "real" with or without the attempted clock-based explanation.

Quote from: Jason Coplen on August 10, 2021, 10:42:59 AM
It varies.

Shooting people should take less time than 2 guys in hand to hand combat where they have to feel the opponent out. Having done some BJJ, not a lot (I'm terrible at it, but it's fun!), it depends on situations. Watch any combat sport and you'll see big interludes where almost nothing gets done. I'm not sure how this would be covered faithfully in a game.

For hand to hand combat I'd want a D&D styled system for HP with some sort of modification to crits because some people drop on the first punch whereas they took 100 punches from their previous foe.

Not experienced enough with swords to comment on melee combat.

Shooting combat should go a lot quicker.

   I think a BJJ match could be hard to simulate in some ways, but a system that allowed contested results would probably meet that need (and in the case of something like a high level grappling match, MMA match, or Boxing match) and the time where we see "nothing" happening tend to be mostly hard to see small transitions or attempts to get leverage where the two parties are countering one another in that battle for inches.   

   As an aside, how much BJJ have you done?

Well, what you see from the outside and what is happening are two different things.  Don't know about BJJ, but in sports fencing, once you get out of the raw beginner territory, there is a ton of nuance that is practically invisible to people who don't fence. 

For fantasy combat, my ideal would be that it looks a lot like the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser fights, notably in "The Jewels in the Forest" and "The Seven Black Priests", both in "Swords Against Death".  The running fight in the forest in the former is great, escalating to a tense build up for the more frantic, brutal action to follow.  Those are exciting fights where a lot of time passes compared to quick rounds.