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

hamstertamer · Oct 9, 2012

Lanefan said:
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.

I'm not following you at all. Your issue, deciding if one participant's action was happening simultaneously with another participant's action would be much more difficult to judge and rationalize if combat rounds where one minute long. That is to say comparing one minute's worth of actions by a participant to another's. In fact that's why it's better to have shorter rounds, and that's one reason I use them.

slobo777 · Oct 9, 2012

ShadowRun had a nice vehicle-combat skirmish rule that might be adapted for long-running battles.

In essence, it had teams make opposing rolls to try to either increase or decrease number of rounds of combat that would be resolved in a particular time or distance.

So, for a "barricade the door" scenario, you might have opposed checks, starting at 3 combat rounds occurring in one minute, reduced by 1 for every success of the barricading team, and increased by 1 for every success of the attacking team.

You could probably set up similar situations for long-running skirmishes and other situations where you expect very short clashes separated with lots of maneuvering or delaying tactics.

That would be one way to have longer combats, allowing some sideline activity to occur, but without trying to adjudicate actions in parallel that might conflict. You may end up with 1 actual round of combat resolution inside one or two minutes game-world time.

Yora · Oct 9, 2012

Based on what Lanefan said and the Legolas example, I think a turn isn't really so much about how long any activity takes, but about how often everyone engaged in combat has an opportunity to evaluate the current situation and make a descision how to change his activities accordingly.

And I think 6 to 10 seconds is not a bad frame of reference there.
If I chose to take an attack action, my character keeps attacking his target and he gets one opportunity to roll to see if he is wearing his enemy down.
If another character shouts for help, I wait for my next turn and then I can decide if my character keeps attacking his enemy or turns around to aid his ally.
And if I keep fighting with my enemy but my ally is still in danger and nobody else came to his help either, I again can decide if I turn around or stay on my next turn.

And I would not want to have to wait for more than 10 seconds to get my next opportunity to react to changes in the battle.
If I think the enemy might be dead within the next 6 seconds and my ally can wait 6 more seconds, I would first kill the enemy before comming to the rescue.
But if I have to consider if I will have killed the enemy in the next minute and if my ally can hold out a full minute without help, making that descision would feel very strange to me.

How often I can decide to change my current activity also means for how long I commit to a single activity. And I never have been in a sword fight, but I don't think a fight to the death without rules between two armed people would ever last more than a minute or two. A minute is a really long amount of time.

If a rogue needs to minutes to open a lock while his allies are supposed to keep his back safe from a small army that comes down the corridor, then it's most probably not going to happen that he makes it in time. It's too long, it can't be done. Saying that everyone in the fight is just taking 10% of the normal damage to indulge the rogue seems to be completely the wrong solution. You can't just ask the monsters and NPCs "Would you mind going a bit less agressive if we do the same? We'd rather roll for damage only two times than twenty times."

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

hamstertamer

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slobo777

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Yora

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