D&D 5E There should be an option for 1 minute rounds.

Lanefan · Oct 7, 2012

hamstertamer said:
An NPC can mount a horse ride 200 yards away, get behind a gate, close that gate, then lite up a pipe of tobacco. Then I turn to the player on their initiative and say "okay your turn." That's absurd.

That's because you're stuck in turn-based thinking.

Actions happen simultaneously in real life, why not in the game? All the participants in a scene are doing stuff, it's down to you as DM (along with the dice) to adjudicate what happens and what doesn't, given peoples' stated actions.

In other words, I as Lanefan's player tell you what he's doing (running to block the gate), and you as DM determine how that interacts with what everyone else is doing at about the same time (because she's on a horse, the NPC gets there first and slams the gate in your face, but she's having trouble controlling her horse because two other PCs just shot it with arrows; etc., etc.).

As for variable spell-casting time, it's easy enough to make casting times malleable provided they are expressed as fractions of a round rather than "hard" time. Example: instead of saying a spell takes 6 seconds to cast, it instead takes 1/5 of a round (if your usual round length is 30 seconds it's the same thing). Then, no matter how long the round is determined to be in a given situation spell casting times always interact the same way with those rounds.

Without realizing it 1e did just this: spell cast times were always expressed in segments (i.e. fractions of a round) rather than seconds. That said, the fact that casting times used 10-segment rounds in 1e where everything else used 6-segment rounds is another headache entirely...

Lanefan

Crazy Jerome · Oct 7, 2012

Jeff Carlsen said:
Combat During Segments

When combat happens, players roll initiative and you start tracking rounds. When combat is finished, you return to tracking in segments. For tracking purposes while using one minute segments, it's usually best to assume that a short combat takes one full segment.

Sometimes, you may not need to roll initiative for combat, though. A fighter holding a barricade, or a wizard casting a spell at a group of goblins that are out of melee range might best be handled using segments. These are cases that are more story driven than tactical in nature. Use your best judgement. If a situation becomes more complicated, you can always roll initiative.

With something like this, segments are more of a tool than a mechanic, while still giving you something to hook mechanics onto. For example, random encounters or events might be rolled for each segment. Nothing here is new, but it does provide a name for a unifying concept.

Perhaps. The intention of my post was that "segments" would get used for combat more often, and thus have their own dedicated mechanics. In particular, some powerful spells would generally require a segment to cast (and thus would rarely be tried in the shorter rounds).

But don't stop there! You can do some very nice things with ranged combat with these kind of assumptions. When characters are skulking around in rounds, archers might only get a couple of shots, while crossbows get one, as do most thrown weapons. (By the time you get close enough to throw something, after that first throw, opponents can close to melee.) This makes crossbows and bows appropriately powerful. But then when you go into rounds, charge actions for reloading/cocking. Suddenly the knife thrower has an advantage.

My concerns are primarily narrative pacing of the combat, with any simulation as a distinct secondary concern. But for emulation of most fantasy fiction, it happens that such a dual time scale can work very well. That is, some of the things that 1-minute rounds were trying to model are valuable, and switching to 6 second rounds, while it has its own value, also threw away some of the original.

hamstertamer · Oct 8, 2012

Lanefan said:
That's because you're stuck in turn-based thinking.

Yeah I'm stuck in the way table-top D&D combat is resolved. Your also stuck in it.

Actions happen simultaneously in real life, why not in the game? All the participants in a scene are doing stuff, it's down to you as DM (along with the dice) to adjudicate what happens and what doesn't, given peoples' stated actions.

Games can't be resolved that way unless you break down the actions into smaller actions thus the logic of using rounds/turns based on small amounts of time.

In other words, I as Lanefan's player tell you what he's doing (running to block the gate), and you as DM determine how that interacts with what everyone else is doing at about the same time (because she's on a horse, the NPC gets there first and slams the gate in your face, but she's having trouble controlling her horse because two other PCs just shot it with arrows; etc., etc.).

So basically you break down the game into smaller chucks within a minute and imagine smaller rounds in your head but you won't admit it because you want to have rounds be longer such as minute . It's sane practice just to admit shorter rounds. I did.

As for variable spell-casting time, it's easy enough to make casting times malleable provided they are expressed as fractions of a round rather than "hard" time. Example: instead of saying a spell takes 6 seconds to cast, it instead takes 1/5 of a round (if your usual round length is 30 seconds it's the same thing). Then, no matter how long the round is determined to be in a given situation spell casting times always interact the same way with those rounds.

Much easier and logical to break down turns taken by players, NPCs, and creatures into shorter rounds. If you going to have to negotiate it all in your head, then just do in the game. In other words people who claim they are playing 1 minute rounds are actually not. Your playing, based on what you are saying, a large meta-round with a whole bunch of true rounds within that meta-round.

Mattachine · Oct 8, 2012

We have a turn-based game. Unless DDN is going to make a radical change, it will remain that way.

For a turn-based game, there needs to be reasonable break-points, based on the ability of combatants to act and react.

A minute is fine if everyone is engaged in melee, but not if some fight, some run, some use arrows, some cast spells, and so on. It was a terrible disconnect for my group back in AD&D.

The long combat round also makes even more abstract concepts like "hit", "attack", and "miss".

Crazy Jerome · Oct 8, 2012

Cyclic initiative, where every participant completes a set of discrete actions before the next participant acts, is not the only way to handle a turn-based game. It is a way that happens to work fairly well with 6-second (or shorter) rounds and the rest of the 3E/4E assumptions, but far from the only effective way.

How the game models interrupts and the flow of action is necessarily going to change somewhat with different round lengths.

billd91 · Oct 8, 2012

GX.Sigma said:
As a 20 year old dude who started with 4e and has not yet played 1e, I always thought the 6 second rounds were dopey. When I read the 1e DMG for the first time a few weeks ago, this quote from Gary rang true (DMG p.61):

"It would be no great task to devise an elaborate set of rules for highly complex individual combats with rounds of but a few seconds' length. It is not in the best interests of an adventure game, however, to delve too deeply into cut and thrust, parry and riposte...
"The system of AD&D combat maximizes the sense of hand-to-hand combat and the life-or-death character of melee without undue complication. Because of this, you, the DM, are enabled to conduct such portions of the game without endless resort to charts, tables, procedure clarifications, and over-lengthy time requirements. Players, on the other hand, will not become bored with endless dice rolling and rules consulting, but at the same time will have a reasonable chance to seek escape for their characters should the affair go badly."

More and more I find that the problems of modern D&D already had solutions in old-school D&D. I was born 30 years too late, dammit.

Can't XP you, but that man had a good point.
Unfortunately, I think too many people prefer the one swing-one roll, lots of nitty-gritty to the attacks style of play to go back to a much simpler method.

billd91 · Oct 8, 2012

Mattachine said:
The long combat round also makes even more abstract concepts like "hit", "attack", and "miss".

This is not, in itself, a bad thing considering the abstractness of things like armor class and hit points.

hamstertamer · Oct 8, 2012

billd91 said:
Can't XP you, but that man had a good point.
Unfortunately, I think too many people prefer the one swing-one roll, lots of nitty-gritty to the attacks style of play to go back to a much simpler method.

It's not about "one swing-one roll" or "lots of nitty-gritty" is about being logical, fair and being simple all at the same time.

No one I have ever played with in the real world has ever adhered to the one minute = 1 combat round even when they claim to be be playing one minute to minute. I've seen old school players say they play that way, but their actions in the combat sequence did not simulate that all, they were just resolving one simple action for every participant in an initiative order per round. They might as well claimed that the combat round was 10 minutes long or an hour long. If each participant is just doing one basic action or a couple of quick actions per round then claiming it's "one-minute rounds" is disingenuous. If someone wanted to play one-minute combat rounds truly then each participant should be allowed to declare and resolve one-minute worth of actions. It be would impossible to resolve actions fairly and logical without having to break down the one-minute combat round into smaller rounds. The other option is to just dismiss all actions except one significant action that the player chooses for his/her character then fictionalize all other actions away so they have no effect whatsoever, and if you are going to do that then there is not point to one-minute combat rounds at all.

Mattachine · Oct 8, 2012

Again, I'm not worried about the length of a round and the level of abstraction when everyone is engaged in melee.

I'm worried about how a system deals with people doing different things--movement, non-combat actions, pursuit, and so on. A system could be made with interrupts and such that deal with this . . . but then we would be headed more towards the 4e system. When lots of interrupt and react actions are available, combat can get bogged down quickly.

Lanefan · Oct 8, 2012

hamstertamer said:
Yeah I'm stuck in the way table-top D&D combat is resolved. Your also stuck in it.

Only as stuck as I allow myself to become.

Games can't be resolved that way unless you break down the actions into smaller actions thus the logic of using rounds/turns based on small amounts of time.

Let's go back to your example of someone riding a horse through a gate and lighting a pipe before anyone else could do anything, which you (quite rightly) said was absurd; and compare it to another example which I actually saw in a 3e game and to me is equally absurd:

Two PCs, one has had silence cast on himself, restricted visibility due to fog, two different but interacting battles going on (half the party involved in one, half in the other, about 100' apart), both PCs want to move quickly under cover of that silence from one battle to the other and catch the enemy there off guard. (both are in heavy armour, thus the need for the silence spell)

We're in a combat, thus in turn-based mode. Character with silence's init. comes up, he holds until other character's init. so they can move together. So both init's come up...but turn rules say one character has to move at a time; simultaneous actions cannot occur. End result: the second character could not remain in the silence while moving - either it ran away from him (silenced PC acted first), or he ran away from it (non-silenced PC acted first). Absurd.

Now it's easy to say the DM here should have just let them move together...but the bigger issue remains: hard-wired turn-based thinking does not allow for simultaneous actions regardless how long the round is, leading to some rather ridiculous situations like this.

Sadly, it also does not allow in any way for two (or more) foes to kill each other at the same time.

So basically you break down the game into smaller chucks within a minute and imagine smaller rounds in your head but you won't admit it because you want to have rounds be longer such as minute . It's sane practice just to admit shorter rounds. I did.

I'm willing to abstract it a bit more, perhaps. I'm not trying to track every swing of every weapon; the to-hit roll is more an indicator of how well you're doing over the length of that round, however long it may be. That said, many things - usually involving spellcasting and attempts to interrupt such - do get broken down into fractions of rounds; that's what segments are for.

Much easier and logical to break down turns taken by players, NPCs, and creatures into shorter rounds. If you going to have to negotiate it all in your head, then just do in the game. In other words people who claim they are playing 1 minute rounds are actually not. Your playing, based on what you are saying, a large meta-round with a whole bunch of true rounds within that meta-round.

A whole bunch of segments within each round, perhaps...but nowhere near as combersome to play through.

And to clarify: we re-roll initiative each round, again because robotic I swing-you swing-she casts-monster bites-I swing-you swing (repeat) is utterly unrealistic; re-rolling makes it at least a bit less so. Combat is chaotic, and you never know when you'll get your best opportunity to do whatever it is you're trying to do. We use an unmodified* d6 for init., which means of course lots of things will inevitably be simultaneous. This is fine, if you get killed on a '5' and your initiative was a '5' you'll still get your swing in and may kill your assailant at the same time. Etc.

* - very rare items or effects exist that may trump this.

Lan-"always watch out for that last dying strike"-efan