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View Full Version : Variable Round Length-How could it work?



Seerow
2012-07-11, 10:48 PM
This started derailing another thread, so I decided to start up a new thread for it.

It's standard fair in ttrpgs to be turn based. It's the easiest way to adjudicate things when you have a bunch of players, a bunch of NPCs, and they all want to do things at once. Most RPGs that I'm aware of have a standard round length, which typically doesn't change. In AD&D the round length was 1 minute. In 3e onward it was 6 seconds. In Shadowrun, it's 3 seconds (and you could get multiple turns in that round).

Basically, most RPGs are set up such that the combat is resolved in a very short amount of time, where you are tracking every movement and attack the combatant is making. This works well for rules heavy simulationist games, but I feel that having all combats be resolved so quickly is kind of disappointing. I can't speak for most people, but I would expect a climactic game ending encounter to last longer than the 18-30 seconds an average encounter lasts. There should be a lot of back and forth where the fight gets drawn out and the opponents really can't hurt each other, they are fighting to a stand still and gain an attack only once every so often. That time frame might be a minute. It might be 10 minutes. For a fight between demigods the timeframe might be days.

But on the other extreme, when these demigods who take days when fighting someone of their own power level fight some regular goblins, it makes sense that they cut through them easily in mere seconds. If anything, measuring the time it takes to cut them down in seconds may be considered insulting.


So obviously what's being discussed is some sort of variable round length. Presumably level is involved as the primary factor. Two level 1 characters go at it, you have a 6 second round. Two level 20 characters go at it, you have a 30 minute round. Have a level 20 character going at it against a level 1 character, you're probably looking at under a 1 second round. Basically as power level goes up, the ability to defend against a similar level of power, and in turn harm a similar level of power, gets harder and takes more time.

But this runs into a lot of problems.

-What happens with magic? A system like this straight up doesn't work in a vancian magic system where the caster can run himself out of juice in 5 minutes. If the caster is still casting only one spell per round, why is that? What is he doing for all of the rest of the time, since we know he can cast a spell in 6 seconds?

This is probably the biggest obstacle against just saying "Let the DM decide how long the round lasts". A magic system that supports something along these lines could have the rest potentially simplified to the DM picks a round length that's appropriate for the fight in question, since for most fights the length doesn't -actually- matter. The whole concept at play here is more about feel than mechanical necessity.

-What happens when you have multiple opponents of different levels? You might determine that a level 20 vs a level 18 fight has a round length of X. But what happens if you run into a level 18 with a bunch of level 16 minions? Do you still use the level 18 round length, or find the level 16 round length?

-How to avoid this being a lot of extra book keeping for nothing? The system really would need to be simple and easy, because as noted in the end round length doesn't matter much from a mechanics perspective, it's just one of those things that affects the feel of the world. But having a cumbersome mechanic to dictate that feel is counter productive. Yet having the timeframe scale as you become more powerful dictates having at least some sort of formula or table.


There's probably other problems with the concept I'm not thinking of offhand. But yeah, that's enough to start the thread. Any ideas on how to make it work? Other reasons why it shouldn't/couldn't be done?

Quellian-dyrae
2012-07-11, 11:27 PM
Let's say you have two new stats, Aggression and Guard. They scale...basically by level, but at an exponential rate, Guard faster than Aggression. Maybe class affects the starting total. So for example, just pulling numbers out of the air, say a fighter starts with 10 Aggression, 10 Guard. Guard roughly doubles (1->2->5->10 progression, to keep the numbers looking nice) every level, Aggression every two levels. So a 10th level fighter would have 10,000 Guard and 200 Aggression, using this example.

You attack as a standard action (using D&D terms for simplicity). If your Aggression is higher than the target's current Guard, you resolve the attack normally, and set the target's Guard to 0. Otherwise, you simply lower the target's Guard by your Aggression. If your Guard is at 0 (and only if it is at 0), you may reset it to full as a full-round action. There may be other ways to raise Guard, but let's ignore them for now.

So, in general, you're not going to play out every round. You start attacking, or develop a pattern of attack, figure out how long it will take for a target's Guard to wear down, and resolve actual attacks every X rounds. So for two 10th level fighters, every 50 rounds (or five minutes), they make an actual, resolvable attack on each other. Two 20th level fighters would attack every 2,000 rounds, or every three-or-so hours, with these numbers.

If you have a 20th level fighter (Guard 2,000,000, Aggression 1,000) dividing its attacks up among an 18th level fighter (Guard 500,000, Aggression 500) and its four 14th level minions (Guard 20,000 ea, Aggression 100 ea), the 20th could attack a minion every two minutes or the leader every fifty (or just attack all of them roughly once an hour), whereas, the five would be able to all attack at once, but only once every 3.7 hours.

If your Aggression is a multiple of the target's maximum Guard, you attack once per multiple. So a 20th level fighter could attack (and presumably kill off) something like 1,000 1st level fighters each rounds.

Probably the best way to involve magic, powers, and other special actions would be to work them into the system in such a way that they can be maintained over time, but to incorporate a D&D style system, using spells or special actions just sets your current Guard to 0, so everyone currently attacking you can resolve a real attack on their turn, but the special action gets resolved normally, ignoring enemy Guard. You'd probably want battle mages and the like to have a more spammable offense that can operate within the Guard/Aggression system (so a combat mage would be hurling energy bolts and defending with arcane barriers, rather than swinging a sword and dodging/parrying, but if the mage wants it can cut loose with an actual spell, by dropping its guard).

It's a rough system, it'd need some expanding for other actions and you'd probably want level to have less of an impact on the actual resolution of the actions, etc, but it would probably work decently. Would require somewhat annoying math, with all the big numbers and such, but not too awful.

dps
2012-07-11, 11:40 PM
I feel that having all combats be resolved so quickly is kind of disappointing. I can't speak for most people, but I would expect a climactic game ending encounter to last longer than the 18-30 seconds an average encounter lasts. There should be a lot of back and forth where the fight gets drawn out and the opponents really can't hurt each other, they are fighting to a stand still and gain an attack only once every so often. That time frame might be a minute. It might be 10 minutes. For a fight between demigods the timeframe might be days.


What you're describing is a combat system which reflects cinematic conventions, rather than real-world combat. Real-life fights tend to be over quickly (if involving 1-on-1 combat or brawls among small groups; obviously battles involving large armies are a different matter).

Now there's nothing wrong with wanting a combat system that reflects what happens in fiction, rather than if fact (after all, most game settings are fictional), but just keep in mind that doing so will have impact on other things. For example, you really can't have both long, drawn out fights and realistic battle wounds; and if wounds aren't realistic, realistic healing becomes problematic.

LibraryOgre
2012-07-11, 11:50 PM
FWIW, Hackmaster dispenses with rounds entirely, going on seconds. Base initiative is d12 (seconds), modified by degree of surprise and personal reactions. Spells last in seconds (or longer, but combat spells are usually X seconds long). You get to act every X seconds, depending on your skill with your weapon or the spell you just cast.

If you're a 20th level character facing basic goblins, and are willing to drop the spell points on a high-level spell, you can blow through them in seconds, before they're even aware you're there.

Karoht
2012-07-11, 11:58 PM
@6 second rounds
In terms of Melee, I never considered each and every attack roll to be the only moves anyone makes in a combat.
Guy A
Swing 1, Swing 2, Swing 3, Swing 4, Swing 5, Swing 6 (haste)
Guy B
See Guy A.

So I basically considered the actuall attack roll to be an abstraction of when your character spots an opening and goes for it. The higher level you are, the higher that base attack bonus is, the more often you spot and can take advantage of such openings.

But really, that was just how my imagination saw it. It doesn't translate to game terms very well. Works better if a round is 15 seconds and not 6, because realistically two opponents could each take 5 stabs at one another in 15 seconds, but that's just my two cents.

Geostationary
2012-07-12, 12:12 AM
If you want something that's really different, Nobilis has rounds of variable length. When you perform an action, everything operates on a timescale appropriate to the action- If you're playing a game of chess, you can measure a round in games played or turn-by-turn, depending on what's happening. If you're doing something over a period of time such as playing basketball and something happens to interrupt your game, you can switch to a faster timescale to counter the threat. Players either take turns or engage in flurries with everyone acting simultaneously.

Combat runs as fast as you need it to go- it can range from a flurry of blows delivered over the length of a light-second, or it can be a week-long engagement where you punch your foe's fists from the air, Asura's Wrath-style. This is facilitated by everyone playing what are essentially gods, and the rules allow you to always act to stop something if you want to and can conceivably do so, so it requires a certain amount of power and flexability to run as advertised. It's also a diceless system with no initiative other than being the person who acts "first", unless everyone is, so there is that to consider.

Hopefully that made sense.

TuggyNE
2012-07-12, 12:37 AM
I spent a few minutes hacking out a rough idea: each combatant's round length is determined by their relative level (probably opponent level squared divided by level, but other possibilities are out there). Unfortunately, this requires a bit of extra bookkeeping. On the other hand, it might be enough to settle many weapon-based differences all by itself: a level 16 PC being attacked by a pesky swarm of 8 level 4 enemies might have a round length of 1 second, vs their round length of 64 seconds — not a fair fight. (Or for a more plausible example, a trio of level 14 enemies against the same PC: PC round length is ~12 seconds, enemy round length is ~18 seconds; PC gets three attacks for every two.)

Unfortunately, this doesn't handle magic too well, at least not the sort of per-day limited magic that e.g. D&D is used to.

valadil
2012-07-12, 08:23 AM
So I misinterpreted what you were looking for based on the title, but I think my idea might alleviate some of your concerns.

Basically what I was thinking of was a combat where the duration of rounds varied on a round by round basis. This seemed silly at first, except that you kind of already have that in 3.5's surprise round (which IIRC correctly is a standard action instead of a full round, but it's been a while so I may not RC). What if instead of that fraction of a round, your surprise round varied?

The first thing that came to mind was a leadership ability. Or an ambush ability. It doesn't really matter. At any rate, the group's ability to coordinate themselves in this odd circumstance would determine how many actions they could pull off while surprising a foe. Maybe they're new to this and only get a move action. Maybe they've been around the block a few times and get three standards.

But why limit that to surprise round? Still going with the leadership stat paradigm, maybe a well led party should be able to use more actions than a poorly led one every single round.

Anyway, that's just what popped into my head while the page was loading. I dismissed it while reading, but then got to this bit:



-What happens when you have multiple opponents of different levels? You might determine that a level 20 vs a level 18 fight has a round length of X. But what happens if you run into a level 18 with a bunch of level 16 minions? Do you still use the level 18 round length, or find the level 16 round length?


(Which incidentally is exactly where I get stuck when I write combat heavy systems. I always come up with ideas that work great for duels, but poorly in group fights (unless the group fight is a series of duels).)

Anyway, I think the group leadership stat to determine actions per round kind of solves this. Team A and Team B get different amounts of actions every round. How many actions that is is going to be determined by each party, independent of the other party (unless there are interactive debuffs or something).

To get back to the original question, I'd explain it as a round being a set of actions, and actions have a fixed amount of time. For the sake of easy math lets call an action 5 seconds. If one side gets 11 actions per round and the other gets just 1 (which is an extreme example just for math's sake), the round lasts a minute. The side with the advantage has 11 chances to do something during that minute. The other side only has 1 chance. It can safely be assumed that other things around going on (see D&D 3.5's explanation of how melee characters swing their weapons constantly but at level 1-5 only have 1 chance to hit per round no matter how much they swing) but this is how much effect they can have on the battle.

I don't think you'd ever actually see a fight with big of an action disparity (although it could work for a large scale battle - 5 PCs with 10 actions each vs 50 minions with 1 action each might be interesting), it was just to show how the round/action timing would work.

Madeiner
2012-07-12, 10:35 AM
I have thought about this a few times. I too don't like epic combats being over in 20 seconds or less.

I found a few problems and balance quirks trying to even switch a standard round to a 1-minute duration.

1) Spells and effects duration. If your combat last 10+ minutes, then even mid-terms (1m/level) buffs are gonna expire during combat, changing balance. One possible solution: having spell effects being counted in rounds rather then time. Still requires a balance overhaul

2) Changing battlefield, external events: If your bar brawl lasts 30 seconds, then guards will not show up in time to intervene. If it lasts 15 minutes, then it's a whole different story. You are gonna have to change the timescale during combat if using a variable turn scale.
What if new combatants are added mid-combat?

The variable turn duration i think it's something that can not be implemented. You can't have a 10 minutes-round duration in 20th level combat (lets not even talk about hours), because things can happen in 10 minutes and you cannot react to it.
What if one combatants takes a civilian passerby hostage? Your decision is resolved way before 10 minutes. What if a mob of people gets in your way? Your 10-minutes round does not allow to resolve the situation in a credible way, if you get ONE full round action in 10 minutes.


I wanted to try a simple version of this at my game, but i haven't had the chance or need for now:

1) All buff spell durations in min/level are changed to do "for the next combat duration". If you cast magic weapon, the weapon will remain magic for 1 hour, or until the end of the next combat

2) Turn duration is decided by the DM for each fight. Planning an epic fight between demigod colossi? That fight has a turn as 5 minutes. . You are doing a cover-shootout in a western adventure? Turn duration for that fight is 3 seconds. And so on.

In practice however, most of the time is just the "feel" that combat is too fast. Can you alter that feel by just saying "ok, now you have fought for 1 hour instead of 1 minute"?

Ziegander
2012-07-12, 12:01 PM
1) There is no such thing as turns or rounds.

2) Players act in order based on Initiative.

4) This is the important part. Characters have a pool of Action Points with which they fuel their actions. The difficulty of an action determines how many AP must be spent on it and the amount of time it takes for that action to resolve. More AP may be spent on actions to lower the amount of time needed to resolve those actions.

5) Actions resolve in chronological order. When two characters' actions resolve at the same time, the character with the higher Initiative is said to resolve his or her action just before the other character. Characters that have resolved all of their actions may immediately act again.

6) As characters gain levels, tasks from previous levels become easier, requiring fewer AP and less time to resolve.

Slipperychicken
2012-07-12, 05:20 PM
I trained martial arts a few years, and fights usually don't go on for multiple minutes, especially when you're using lethal weapons that could take someone's arm off. I wasn't the best fighter ever, but 30 seconds of striking/dodging/wrestling feels like an hour. Besides, we're talking about professional, cold-blooded killers who could slaughter a family, then sleep like a baby -if they can't kill someone in 18 seconds of continuous shooting/slashing, they're doing it wrong.

Take the multi-paragraph monologue your villain allegedly delivered as a free action, and time it. That is the new length of a round.

Edit: Why would a more skilled fight take longer? If anything, it should be faster, due to faster combatants, better weapons, and more efficient tactics. Gods aren't turtles, they're Gods -bigger, better, faster, stronger. If a battle takes 30+ minutes, it's not a battle, its an episode of DBZ.

Raum
2012-07-12, 05:47 PM
Any ideas on how to make it work? Other reasons why it shouldn't/couldn't be done?Have you looked at the systems already using variable length rounds for comparison? FATE comes to mind as an obvious example. Nobilis has been mentioned. For that matter, older versions of D&D had variable times for different actions...not quite the same a variable round durations but still worth a look.

Zerter
2012-07-13, 12:44 AM
Or you know, you could design the boss battle so that it lasts.

TuggyNE
2012-07-13, 02:05 AM
Or you know, you could design the boss battle so that it lasts.

You mean, so that it takes more rounds to finish? I think you're missing the point here; it's not about increasing OOC time to run, but about increasing the IC time to fight for dramatic reasons.