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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6990856" data-attributes="member: 6787650">One of my favorite things about the way I've been running initiative for the past couple of years is that I feel the the combats have a realistic variety of lengths. Some fights, when it comes to blows, are over in seconds. Some are over in minutes. Some take hours.I think it makes sense for a fight to last only seconds when the fight is simple, with few decisions to make: I've got a lightsaber and you've got a lightsaber and we just hammer each other until one of us no longer has any limbs. We're mostly limited by our respective combat rates. Under those conditions, hyperkinetic GURPS combats are over in three or four seconds and it makes perfect sense. (The quickest fights in Captain America: The Winter Soldier are also over in ten or twenty seconds.)On the other hand, a battle involving a platoon of soldiers assaulting a fixed position has more moving parts and require more communication: could easily last minutes or tens of minutes, if there comes a point where someone needs to work their way up to fire down on the defenders behind their palisade. And a running battle with dozens of orcs on worgs harrying you through the night (assuming you were part of a force which was attacked, defeated, and scattered in order for some people to get to safety) could take hours or days to resolve.I don't think you can consider a combat system truly successful unless it nicely handles stories involving all of these timescales. I'm pretty pleased that I've seen them all over the past year. (Hours-long assaults are likely to involve infinitely-impatient undead in a Mexican standoff with PCs; I've even seen some PCs take a short rest in the middle of combat, long enough that PCs knocked unconscious can make all of their death saves and then, 2 hours later, recover back to 1 HP and re-enter combat, which incidentally was enough to break the Mexican standoff.)</blockquote>

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