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.
Part of the equation is what happens outside of combat. Declaring actions and resolving combat is relatively time-intensive. If each player averages 1 minute for their entire action sequence, that's pretty good. Four players plus the DM might mean 5 minutes per round, and 3-4 rounds of combat might end up being 15-20 minutes. Breaking every action up into 1-second increments (and thus multiplying how many times you have to go around to everyone) increases the time it takes dramatically while creating more 'non-action spaces'. Giving the player enough actions to do things but not so much that combat completely changes is a balancing act. The number of actions MATTER.
Now, whether you say that number of actions is 6 seconds or 15 seconds of real time has more to do with what you're comfortable with. If a combat is 3-4 rounds, that's 18-24 seconds of 'game time'. Personally, I'd feel a little more comfortable with that being a minute or more - so people who hear combat have a chance to do something to prepare if nothing else. I think 10/12/15 are all good numbers and better than 5 second/6 second rounds in terms of balancing a reasonable 'set' of actions and having the appropriate amount of time happen in the world while combat is happening.
About 10-12 seconds seems best. I did like my friend Bob's system with a 15 second combat round broken down into 4 phases. It was designed to integrate squad level & individual combat; the squad leader making decisions each round while combat resolved in phases. It suited the different durations of the OODA loop at the two scales - not that we had heard of John Boyd in 1991. :)
I don't care about the specific in-game duration of a round because I want characters to be able to do dramatic stuff in combat, play off of enemies and allies, taunt, make speeches, etc. What's more relevant to me is making sure the combat isn't just Rock-em-Sock-em robots and that combats can progress characterization and plot.
Another element that can play a factor in figuring out an ideal "time per round" is range and movement.
Basically, if your system uses any sort of miniatures, even optionally, then you need turns long enough that pieces can move at least one unit of distance, but not so long that they can cross a reasonable play area in a single round.
So for human scale and movement you're looking at about 15-ish ft/s at a run... so 6 seconds is a run/charge of 90'... eighteen 5' squares (or 1.5 feet at an inch per square) or nine 10' squares (9" at an inch per square). At a minute that's a run of 900' during the round or ninety 10' squares or 7.5 feet at an inch per square (15' using 5' to the inch).
That's one reason WotC's rules for modern vehicles have always had issues; because they kept using 5' squares.
Meanwhile games custom built to take that speed into consideration like Mekton use both large units per inch (Mekton uses 50m hexes) with short real time turns (10 seconds) to reflect the great speed that most mecha can achieve.
So turn length isn't just an independent variable, but one that interplays quite heavily with movement and range.
I like 10 seconds. However I really think it depends on what is happening. If two groups are charging at each other from a long ways away I don't really want to go through 20 rounds of "I keep going" to reach the other group. Similarly playing hide and seek in limited visibility. On the other hand if I wanted to do a good job simulating the various martial arts I'm familiar with, 1 s rounds are about right. I've yet to find a system that does a good job with variable length rounds though.
3.6 second rounds because speeds in meters per turn are equal to speeds in kilometers per hour.
Quote from: Steven Mitchell on August 10, 2021, 08:26:11 AM
What is your optimal duration for combat rounds and why?
It makes the old D&D 1 minute round not look so strange.
1: In game it honestly does not matter how long the round really is as long as you know the progressions of initiatives, cooldowns, chargeups, etc.
Out of game I usually let a combat take as long as needed with occasional prods to get moving on those rare occasions someone is stuck deciding. And for me that has been very rare. Usually my players have their actions planned out by the time its their turn. I rather like the overall speed that 5e combats tend to play out in. On average they tend to last about 5 minutes. Sometimes longer, sometimes shorter.
2: AD&D really had a good system going with its rounds and segments of rounds to be used as needed.
In the fantasy games I am most familiar with, the rules say either 1 minute or 5 or 6 seconds. Yet what players are allowed to do in a round tends to be roughly the same in all those games. When I think about what makes sense, I arrive at ten seconds, and that is how I visualize things regardless of what the rules say. I can't remember the last time that number made any difference. Probably never.
Quote from: Wntrlnd on August 10, 2021, 09:10:59 AM
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.
I never read that post so I don't know to which game it refers to. However there is a jet warfare boardgame, "Air Superiority" designed by a real jet fighter pilot, J.D. Webster. In the designer's notes Webster says that he choose "12 seconds/turn" because, in his experience, that's the length of the aforementioned decision cycle by
a pilot in a jet vs. jet combat.
3E GURPS' 1 seconds turns were the worst rule in the game. It was easy to see how "acting" was the result of the decisions and observations made in a sort of "external time" - i.e. while other players and the enemies were taking their turns.
Even worse, if for some reason you character blew his nose you were out of the game for 5-6 rounds or more, so, possibly, one hour of real time. I had players who hated casting a 3 seconds casting time spell because it meant pulling out a book and wait (no phones to fiddle with at the time).
We ended up house-ruling that a round was 1d6 seconds long. After each round the GM rolled a die and moved the time forward accordingly. The reasons for a "6" were narrated: someone checking the result of his firing, two fighters circling each other with their swords, sudden lulls in combat and so on.
It was not perfect, but it added a lot of tension, combat flow was more realistic, and it killed the "I don't bother about the spellcaster: he will cast his spell during the next session anyway!" problem.
Right now, I like CoC 7E rounds duration: "Enough for everyone on the scene to do something meaningful".
One thing I have noticed may be a factor is that the ratio to round time versus the next unit up affects decision making for the players. A good example is D&D when there are a lot of 1 minute spells. With a round of six seconds, the spells are nearly always "all combat long". In 5E, I think this is deliberate, so that they can use "1 minute" as the duration without saying "1 fight" and invoking the angst of people who didn't like encounter duration in 4E. On the plus side, you effectively don't need to track the duration of such spells.
When I switched my play test from 6 second rounds to 10 second rounds, it changed the feel of that. Now, I know that most fights are over in 6 rounds, because I designed the system to move fairly quick. However, the players are used to 5E. So for them, they hear "1 minute" and they start thinking that the spell will wear off during a fight. And it could if they monkey around, but more likely only if both sides whiff a lot early. The end result is that they don't monkey around, because they know the counter is ticking. I need to keep track of it (which is trivial), they hurry things up, which means I don't really need to track it for most fights.
Will be interesting to see if this holds up over time as players in the test discard their D&D influence and absorb how the game works.
5-10 second rounds for Cryptworld, but I think a bigger issue is how long combat should take in real time. I just had one battle last week between my party and 5 zombies take 1 1/2 hours to finish, and the creatures almost wasted them. In game time the battle amounted to around 1 minute. As grueling as it was, I think it makes sense for a lot to happen in a 1 minute battle, and that no creature is necessarily an "easy" 20 second kill.
Quote from: Chris24601 on August 10, 2021, 10:50:06 AM
(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.).
This is my favorite as well, which I use in my homebrew designs. Something like 3.X, where each round, you can do one of the following:
* move and attack
* attack and move
* move twice
* use a skill or a power
Spycraft modified the 3.X action economy so you could attack twice. But I don't like the later versions of 3.X where they added swift rounds (like Star Wars Saga) which is too fiddly.
The actual seconds of a round (3, 5, 6, 10) doesn't matter that much to me.
Quote from: Reckall on August 12, 2021, 06:47:58 AM
3E GURPS' 1 seconds turns were the worst rule in the game. It was easy to see how "acting" was the result of the decisions and observations made in a sort of "external time" - i.e. while other players and the enemies were taking their turns.
Isn't that true of any RPG, though? I don't mind it if a player makes a decision from information observed when it's not his turn, assuming his character would have seen it, of course.
Quote from: Reckall on August 12, 2021, 06:47:58 AM.
We ended up house-ruling that a round was 1d6 seconds long. After each round the GM rolled a die and moved the time forward accordingly. The reasons for a "6" were narrated: someone checking the result of his firing, two fighters circling each other with their swords, sudden lulls in combat and so on.
In the 3E Combat Compendium there was an optional rule for lulls in combat, which sounds something like what you describe.
I'd say anything much beyond 3 or 4 rounds of combat, starts to drag.
Of course, an epic battle with a big bad could certainly go 5 or 6 rounds.
I'm in favor of short turns, and fast gameplay.
Quote from: Jam The MF on August 12, 2021, 11:05:13 PM
I'd say anything much beyond 3 or 4 rounds of combat, starts to drag.
All depends upon the context. With side-based rounds and a streamlined system, each round could be fast enough that having a few more might feel fine. Especially if the game is a modern/sci-fi game with a ranged combat focus. IMO - melee combat focused systems need to have fewer rounds generally as standing and swinging at each-other can usually only be tense for a round or three at most. There's more leeway if you're running from cover to cover and tossing grenades in a firefight etc.
But I totally agree with you for D&D style systems.
As to the length of each round - for fantasy games, I'd say 6-12 seconds, while for games with firearms I like shorter rounds for two reasons.
1. With a gun every 3-4 seconds is enough to make significant choice of target.
2. More importantly - the shorter rounds let you lower movement speeds substantially. If characters have 10 seconds to move before being shot at, it's far too easy to close the distance to melee - or you have to add extra rules etc. to give an edge to firearms. With 3 seconds you can even say that moving more than a few feet in the round costs you your attack without it feeling wonky.
Steven,
I think it depends on what is accomplished within the round and how that translates into die rolls.
Some older D&D versions mentioned that in a fight you might strike several times in a round, but you are actually rolling just for that one good punch, slash, bowshot, whatever. In this case, a round should be on the longer side.
If you literally want to roll for each strike, then the round is probably shorter, but I guess it depends how aggressive each fighter is in sizing up the other guy, playing it cautious, etc. Maybe they go at it, maybe they circle. In a mass combat like a war where each side gets all tangled up with opponents all around, shorter might work better because fighters are maybe more opportunistic, looking for the opponents that's not paying attention - I don't know, I've never been in a real mass combat situation, I'm just thinking it through in my head.
Personally, I like a fluid combat round and not an exact time. You might say a combat round lasts 5-8 seconds. If a fight lasted 6 rounds, it would be fine to say the total time was 30 seconds or 45 seconds - you leave the call up to the GM if it even ends up being necessary.
Quote from: Vic99 on August 16, 2021, 06:57:04 PM
Some older D&D versions mentioned that in a fight you might strike several times in a round, but you are actually rolling just for that one good punch, slash, bowshot, whatever. In this case, a round should be on the longer side.
I think one thing that might not be stated enough about the length of AD&D rounds is, 1E still had a foot in the tabletop war game. And you can still play 1E as a tabletop war game. If you've got a couple of hundred figures on the battlefield, the LAST thing you want is to have to track hit points for each and every one of them. So 1E retains this calibration towards one-hit-kills being the norm. And that has to balance melee with missile with movement. And I think it's from that that emerges the turn length.
One thing I noted earlier that if you had 12 second rounds, the RoF rates in 1E would be exactly historically accurate. So it needs to be about 5 times as fast. I don't think it's a coincidence, though, that the cost and encumbrance of ammo are both about 5 times what is historically accurate. I think there was an intentional effort to get certain metrics right, but to speed up the game--well, apparently 5-fold--so that human participants can actually manage large scale battles.
I like how some people are thinking about things in terms of decision cycles. But if you're going to be doing big battles, I agree with 1E's calibration to one-hit-kills which sync best with one-minute-rounds. It's just that big battles aren't the ONLY thing I want to do. I still want to do them now and then, though.