Turns and Rounds - relooking at exploration

[Blackwarder]

Hi all!
In earlier editions of the game there were two main time definitions, Turn and Rounds.
Rounds usually represented combat rounds but weren't exclusively so and before 3e they were one minute long, turns were ten rounds long and usually were used to track exploration phases.

My question is, what do you think about a having rules and definitions for the exploration phase? Personally, I find that I miss having defined guidelines for exploration turns, being able to track the pass of time through the players actions or knowing how much ground a character can cross in ten minute in a dungeon.

Or in an outdoor setting, being able to move the character on a map grid with some sort of order would be nice, that way instead of hand waving travel time it will be a little more precise while retaining enough wiggle room for the DM to do what ever he wants.

Warder

 

[Mercule]

Coincidentally, I was pondering just this topic, a few days back. I would certainly be up for resurrecting turns. As tedious as it can be, tracking time is a good thing.

 

[Sunseeker]

Time-tracking while adventuring/exploring to me feels more like a game-specific issue. As games I've played in and run have done, when these types of things happen, time moves "at the speed of plot". Do you want your players pressed for time? Do they have lots of time? What are they doing and how long should something like that reasonably take? Searching a footlocker is an example, could take a few minutes, could take a few seconds depending on what's in there. Could take hours if you're trying to find the special red lego in the footlocker filled with various red legos.

Are players under pressure? What are they attempting to do, these are all considerations for how long non-combat turns take. And I think they're best left up to the table. Saying each players non-combat turn is 5-minutes long will lead to annoying rules lawyering arguments between people who think they can do something in 5 minutes and people who think they can't.

 

[Stormonu]

It'd be kinda nice to define a Turn as 20 rounds. Would work well for "take 20" actions.

However, I have feeling that Turns has likely died the same death as Segments.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Turns and keeping careful track of time are important to strategic play. If the game isn't going to handle strategic play then then tracking them is pointless.

As long as food/water, ammunition, and other supplies are handwaived and everburning torches and magical flashlights are commonplace (thus nullifying the effect of torch and oil consumption) then time spent away from civilization just isn't as big a deal.

Spells such as purify and create food/water also become of lesser importance.

The first question should be strategic play, yea or nay?

 

[GnomeWorks]

As games I've played in and run have done, when these types of things happen, time moves "at the speed of plot".

I have personal problems with the idea of "speed of plot", but I've been thinking about exploration in regards to 5e.

These "three pillars" that I keep seeing mentioned, they're supposed to be combat, exploration, and social, yes? Importance in a game system is generally expressed through mechanics - whatever is important enough to have rules in place for it is clearly supposed to be important in play.

Yet once again, so far as we've seen of 5e, all we have are... combat mechanics. No mention (thus far) of exploration or social mechanics. No exploration classes, no social classes - just combat classes. Themes may be able to fill that niche, but - in my mind - that kind of puts exploration and social stuff in the backseat, while combat gets to ride shotgun.

Speaking to the topic of the thread, as has been mentioned, it depends on the style of the game. If strategy and resource conservation is important, then some kind of timekeeping outside of rounds is going to be important, in order to track that resource conservation.

Personally I'm all about tracking time on multiple levels. It's analogous to how we track time in the real world (we pay attention to the hour, but also the day and the month - and these each typically for different things). It makes sense, then, to have mechanics for different types of time in-game.

 

[Savage Wombat]

Consider this:

D&D has always been a combat game with the potential for more. The better the rules, the better the "more" is supported.

It suggests to me that, from the point of view of game design, the combat rules are the basic genetic code of the game system. The exploration and social aspects are an emergent property of the game rather than a designed function.

So, at this stage, the combat rules are the ones being built, and the social/exploration stuff will (we hope) emerge from the underlying structure.

 

[Sunseeker]

I have personal problems with the idea of "speed of plot", but I've been thinking about exploration in regards to 5e.

Could you extrapolate? In this context, I am referring to time moving at a pace decided by what is going on, what needs to happen, what the players are trying to accomplish, and so on.

Yet once again, so far as we've seen of 5e, all we have are... combat mechanics. No mention (thus far) of exploration or social mechanics. No exploration classes, no social classes - just combat classes. Themes may be able to fill that niche, but - in my mind - that kind of puts exploration and social stuff in the backseat, while combat gets to ride shotgun.

Exploration and social classes are niche concepts. Most games are 50% combat, 25% exploration, 25% social. Most normal classes have exploration and social sides to them. I mean, we don't need a suite of magical powers for social and exploration stuff. We have nature, diplomacy, track, intimidate, ect... You're rarely going to have to roll a diplomacy check for every question you ask, though this too depends on the game. The rules for social and exploration are a lot "looser" because approaches to them are much more subjective. Some guys take the methodical 10' pole approach. Some guys just start picking up trinkets and seeing what they do. We have skill checks to match up appropriately to that, but I can't really see the need for rules beyond what we've got.

Speaking to the topic of the thread, as has been mentioned, it depends on the style of the game. If strategy and resource conservation is important, then some kind of timekeeping outside of rounds is going to be important, in order to track that resource conservation.

Personally I'm all about tracking time on multiple levels. It's analogous to how we track time in the real world (we pay attention to the hour, but also the day and the month - and these each typically for different things). It makes sense, then, to have mechanics for different types of time in-game.

Sure, but in-game mechanics for this stuff will be very hit and miss. What if the game says a day is an hour of IRL time? How do we reconcile that with combat rounds being 6 seconds in-game but your average combat taking 20min to an hour. I think time is simply one of those things that needs to be left up to the game in question. Days can come and go on a fixed schedule, as the plot decides, or based on in-game actions.

 

[ExploderWizard]

Consider this:

D&D has always been a combat game with the potential for more. The better the rules, the better the "more" is supported.

It suggests to me that, from the point of view of game design, the combat rules are the basic genetic code of the game system. The exploration and social aspects are an emergent property of the game rather than a designed function.

So, at this stage, the combat rules are the ones being built, and the social/exploration stuff will (we hope) emerge from the underlying structure.

This has only been true of the WOTC published editions.

OD&D, B/X, and AD&D are exploration/treasure hunting games as the primary focus. Engaging in lots of combat without house rules will lead to extremely short-lived characters.

So not always.

 

[Savage Wombat]

This has only been true of the WOTC published editions.

OD&D, B/X, and AD&D are exploration/treasure hunting games as the primary focus. Engaging in lots of combat without house rules will lead to extremely short-lived characters.

So not always.

Treasure hunting is the victory condition for the original game, yes. But the central rules system is based around combat ability. That's where the hard-coded rules are, as opposed to the "I don't know, make it a Dex check on d100" kind of rules.

I'm not talking about the "primary focus" as you described, simply the core rules engine.

The emergent properties of a system are almost always the most interesting part of the system.