Combat rounds -- one minute

[Quasqueton]

Did you adjust spell durations to be in segments, too?

I don't remember making any adjustments to spell durations. But I also didn't adjust spell casting times either; fireball, with a 3 segment casting time took 3 segment/rounds to cast in my game. The side effect of this was that spell casting was kept rare (though it seemed that most every PC party had one spellcaster). My campaign world evolved quickly into a low-magic setting. And I liked it.

Quasqueton

 

[tetsujin28]

The 'one minute round' was one of the dumbest ideas, ever. It was a big reason we never got into AD&D as much as the original. Seeing as by '78 we had totally scrapped the D&D combat system in favour of one based on Melee, we ended up with rounds significantly shorter.

 

[Quasqueton]

Wondering: are there any other game systems that has more than a few seconds to a round/turn/action? I don't know of any, but I've only played less than a dozen other games.

Quasqueton

 

[Darrin Drader]

I houseruled that rounds were 10 seconds when I started DMing and never looked back. Third edition just confirmed what I had been doing all along.

 

[Charwoman Gene]

10 second rounds. One of the few things I REFUSED to get used to moving from Red Box BXCMID&D to AD&D2ed.

Of course, we also left it a little subjective... Kinda like, a round is a round.... not specific.

 

[Gez]

Other: Didn't play AD&D, and would have found the prospect utterly ridiculous.

 

[Psychic Warrior]

When we first starting playing way back when, we did go with the 1 minute rounds. But it didn't long for us to switch to 10 second rounds and this was long before Player's Option came out.

This is something that came up a while ago and I was surprised to find an expert archer who could loose up to 35 arrows (at least with some accuracy) in a minute. However, I should mention that the arrows were all in the ground by his feet and not in a quiver. So the 4 arrows/round is not as pure fantasy as it might first appear. What is out of line however are the effective ranges for missile weapons. Here's a slightly OT "did you know...?" If we take a 100lb pull longbow firing a typical war arrow, making a 400' shot would take 2 full seconds and the arrow will have lost 60% of it's energy by the time it got there. Firing an arrow 1000' would take an entire round (6 sec or thereabouts) just to reach it's target. Something to think about...

Cheers!

But a longbow only has a range of 600' in D&D (and that's with a -10 to hit). Could longbowmen really hit a target at 1000'?

 

[Gez]

I think that shots at these range were rather for parabolic fire -- several dozens of archers firing a rain of arrows.

But a single, isolated target, at such a distance? Seems impossible, outside, of course, of magic bows or arrows...

 

[Staffan]

But a longbow only has a range of 600' in D&D (and that's with a -10 to hit). Could longbowmen really hit a target at 1000'?

I find your math intriguing. A longbow has a range increment of 100', which means it can fire at a range of 1000' (10 range increments), with a -18 to hit (first increment is free - though you could make the argument that 1000' is where it flips to -20, but 995' is -18 anyway). Archers who are specially trained in long-range fire would likely have the Far Shot feat, which would increase that to 1,500'.

 

[BWP]

Does it matter? You get one (or more) attacks in a round. Does it really matter how much time a round represents, so long as spell durations are tracked appropriately?

Sure it matters, if you also have to track time for some other purpose.

A simple example might be "There's a bomb in the room that's set to detonate in 5 minutes. A squad of suicidal bad guys are determined to keep you in the room so that you'll die in the explosion. You have to fight them to escape."

One-minute combat rounds suddenly become extremely limiting in such situations.