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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5170135" data-attributes="member: 4937">First, I don't know how to say this nicely, so I'll just say it, but you clearly don't have a good idea what the word 'tactics' means.  You seem to be using it as a synonym for mechanical options, which it isn't.  Tactics are techniques for using personel, weapons and terrain in combination to achieve a military advantage.  Secondly, the relationship between tactical options and speed of turns is almost nonexistant.  To give an example, chess offers dozens of options on each turn but it plays only as slowly as desired.  You can play chess as a frantic game of blazing fast action or as a slow deliberate game, but the amount of choices available to you at each step are exactly the same regardless of how much of the clock you consume and the actual mechanical resolution occurs just as fast in either case.Thirdly, in many ways 1e was the most open edition tactically because you weren't under mechanical constraints.  The game was written by wargamers and for wargamers and was designed to encourage good squad level tactics.  If you went into a skilled DM's game on the assumption that it was just roll the dice and pass your turn, you were going to die.  Hopefully, you out grew that sort of thing by the time you were in high school.  I got shocked out of that viewpoint by the DM who tutored me into the craft when he ran me in an encounter with some gnoll archers who ambushed us in a wooded setting.  Each archer acted as an individual skirmisher.  Moving away when attacked, taking cover behind the boles of trees, fleeing and trying to evade when chased, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.  You chase down one group and take them down, that just let the ones behind you set up a skirmish line you had to advance back toward.  An encounter that would have been relatively trivial in a stand up fight, turned into vicious memorable (and to a young player not used to playing the game tactically) both frustrating and very educational experience.  To be skilled at 1e, you had to manipulate the terrain.  Cover was very important, as was denying the foe the chance to surround you or attack your unshielded side.  You needed to lure attackers into chokepoints to keep from being overwhelmed.  If you didn't have a chokepoint, you needed to create one - like dropping flaming oil or casting a spell.  You had to protect the casters, because there was no defensive casting or 5' steps, and the casting time of spells tended to create significant vunerable intervals.  You needed to concentrate force, outflank foes, and so forth.  Plus, there was support for grappling and the like if you wanted (and many widely used alternatives to the DMG system), and in many cases you had to make choices between something like a longsword (good for dodgy foes) and a military pick (good for armored foes).  There were plenty of tactics and plenty of choices.  And that's not even getting into the question of the DM inspired by S2.Any edition where you have a fairly straight forward melee can play that fast.  You just don't dither.  Combats might only last 2-3 rounds, and in that case you've got about a minute per player turn.  I expect to get a proposition in the first 6-10 seconds of a players turn.  In 1e I built individual attack tables for each of my PC's vs. AC, so they just reported a number and I crossreferenced it vs. target AC.  That took another what, 10-15 seconds counting rolling damage and maybe 5-10 seconds for a quick, "The orcs screams in pain/drops to the floor/blocks your attack with his shield/snarls at you and presses the attack."  Seriously, average 1e modules had like 40-50 combats built into them.  If you were spending 15 minutes on each round, getting through one would have probably taken you like 9-10 sessions.  Sure, there were longer much more complicated fights that took longer, mostly because of the poor DM trying to run 24 trolls or something like that (or the uberfight that develops in WG4!), but even then you weren't waiting long for your turn because of the other players but because you were fighting such an enormous number of foes.  Fights versus 30 or more foes weren't uncommon, and often individual fights would turn into running battles as allied foes (combat encounters) started linking up to help each other.</blockquote>

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