Is a round roughly six seconds or ten seconds?

[Mengu]

My rounds are as long as I feel like I want them to be. If a villain needs to fit a 20 second speech in his 6 second round, I'm not going to fret it.

I ran a ship combat/skill challenge, where people had to run all around the ship to do stuff. My rounds were approximately 20-40 seconds in that case, because I didn't want people having to spend multiple rounds moving. I just said a move action takes you from where ever you are on the ship to where ever you are trying to go. It was important to have everyone doing a standard action every round to beat a clock. If I asked for multiple move actions to get to places, the situation would suddenly become too static, where no one would want to move.

I'm a fan of the flexible round length. So a round is however much screen time is appropriate and needed for a character.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Along the same lines, "one square" is however big it needs to be for the combat to be cool.

If I want the evil temple to require a lot of movement to cover ground, then one square is maybe 2-3 feet, so I can draw a 20-square long map.

If I want people to be able to get from one side to another quickly and for the combat to feel cramped, then one square is maybe 10-12 feet, and the map is only 8 squares long.

This doesn't change anyone's reach or anything. It's simply how I justify things to myself, and how I explain to the players why the dungeon tiles don't exactly match my verbal description of the scene. e.g., "But you said it was a huge temple, easily 100 feet long. Why is the map only 8 squares instead of 20?"

 

[TerraDave]

Initiative and round duration has become contentious in my group since one of the players became a cop. He knows it's a game, but he doesn't see why he has to let a screaming orc charge him from 60 ft. away while he stands there with his crossbow/longbow/pistol, unable to shoot the chump.

Years ago, gamers spent much time contemplating situations like this. Then they moved on.

The short answer to him is: because his charecter is doing something else.

Did he do something on his turn? Then he is busy doing that. He is not standing there, unless he decided not to take his turn. If he really wants to "shoot the next guy that charges me" he can ready an action to do so.

You can actually start at the begining of the combat and work forward...he was surprised...he lost initiative and couldn't react quickly enough...he decided to shoot something else. And got charged in the process.

 

[Cerebral Paladin]

Re: "how can an orc charge 60 feet before I can fire an arrow": I always figure that that's the nod to nerves/small amounts of surprise/distraction. Years ago, as an intern, I worked on some revisions to the federal law enforcement use of force requirements. One of the points that the Criminal Division people made was how quickly things can happen in a dangerous situation--if a cop doesn't shoot that guy 20 or 30 feet away with a knife now, the cop might be stabbed before getting a second chance. The flipside, of course, is that many people are killed in "bad shoots" when a cop thinks there is danger but it's actually somebody taking their keys out of their pockets. My point is: sure, sometimes initiative is stilted or exaggerated or whatever. But if you're looking for realism, the way that PCs (and most combat NPCs) behave like action heroes who never hesitate, never freeze in combat (except when faced with supernatural stunning effects), and never get confused and shoot their own allies (again, except when faced with illusions or mind-control) is far more unrealistic than just "standing there" while something happens. The game has some mechanics for reactivity (readied actions, opportunity attacks, interrupts). I don't have any problem saying that having lined up and taken a shot with your bow last round, or having been caught flat-footed at the beginning of a fight, it takes you long enough to reload/bring your bow to bear to allow a screaming, frightening, intimidating orc to swing at you. Want a character who reacts faster? Take Improved Initiative.