Why I Hate Skills

[hawkeyefan]

I see.

In my case I was thinking more like "the patrols pass by every (varies, let's say 2 minutes); you have X amount of downtime for the week to allocate to working, studying, training, crafting, socialising, inventing, or researching, and thus only have so many hours to work with; you have enough savings to last three weeks; you have N days of rations and water for this expedition; you have X hours of daylight to work with while you're lost in the forest; and various faction plans are in motion and will complete by various dates if you don't intervene, uncovering what those timelines are isn't impossible but requires legwork; and the town's longterm food-stores are enough to last Y months, if guys don't procure more food to preserve, people will start starving in January.

Less abstracted, but still observable clocks and time to waste. My time is measured in rounds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months though, not abstract turns.

How long things take varies by the thing, but the time should usually matter, though sometimes you'll have some wiggle room.

I’d argue that a turn is a much more specific unit in play than hours or minutes tend to be since it is tied specifically to play and actions taken. We can say that it takes a turn to travel X distance or to search a room or to take a short rest or what have you, and it won’t cause any confusion. If we also know that the GM will check for a random encounter every turn or every other turn, then we as players are informed enough to make a meaningful decision. Is it worth the risk to search this room? Is it too risky to try and take a short rest here? And so on.

Hours and minutes, by comparison, exist in both the real world and in the game world, so there’s already some need to clarify when they are used. Not a major obstacle, I know, but one that can come up.

Anyway… I think using a unit tied specifically to play rather than to real time is preferable.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Yeah, IDK man, nothing I've described is anything like gambling and I think we're on the same page.

That's because you are obviously crazy, too.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I’d argue that a turn is a much more specific unit in play than hours or minutes tend to be since it is tied specifically to play and actions taken. We can say that it takes a turn to travel X distance or to search a room or to take a short rest or what have you, and it won’t cause any confusion. If we also know that the GM will check for a random encounter every turn or every other turn, then we as players are informed enough to make a meaningful decision. Is it worth the risk to search this room? Is it too risky to try and take a short rest here? And so on.

Hours and minutes, by comparison, exist in both the real world and in the game world, so there’s already some need to clarify when they are used. Not a major obstacle, I know, but one that can come up.

Anyway… I think using a unit tied specifically to play rather than to real time is preferable.

Hey, we agree on something!

(Hmmm...it's a sunny day, why did I just hear thunder...?)

Yeah, in Shadowdark a "crawling round" is the amount of time it takes to....do something. Search a room (or a desk or a bookshelf or whatever), pick a lock, set a trap, sharpen a weapon....whatever each player wants to do, really. You go around the table asking each player what their character is doing, and that's one round.

Then you kill them.

 

[VHawkwinter]

I’d argue that a turn is a much more specific unit in play than hours or minutes tend to be since it is tied specifically to play and actions taken. We can say that it takes a turn to travel X distance or to search a room or to take a short rest or what have you, and it won’t cause any confusion. If we also know that the GM will check for a random encounter every turn or every other turn, then we as players are informed enough to make a meaningful decision. Is it worth the risk to search this room? Is it too risky to try and take a short rest here? And so on.

Hmm. Seems a bit meta if a turn is not a shorthand for a fixed time unit. Even my combat rounds are still centred on "this represents 6 seconds of in-game time, 1/10 of a minute." But alright, what about in a game with ptobably no dungeon crawling unless you're raiding a fort or castle, normally centred around city and wilderness gameplay?

Hours and minutes, by comparison, exist in both the real world and in the game world, so there’s already some need to clarify when they are used. Not a major obstacle, I know, but one that can come up.
Anyway… I think using a unit tied specifically to play rather than to real time is preferable.

I may need to consider making gameified definitions of commonly used time units then, I suppose. I was definitely leaning towards "everything runs on real time units".

 

[Bill Zebub]

Hmm. Seems a bit meta if a turn is not a shorthand for a fixed time unit.

Why is that?

"Abstract" I could agree with, but why "meta"?

Oh...maybe you mean that the players are aware of the units, but the characters are not? I could agree with that; characters in my games don't think in terms of "crawling rounds". But all the mechanics tied to crawling rounds are also meta, so....

 

[VHawkwinter]

Why is that?

"Abstract" I could agree with, but why "meta"?

I think it's both. Certainly more abstract than just using time. But also the other.

Oh...maybe you mean that the players are aware of the units, but the characters are not? I could agree with that; characters in my games don't think in terms of "crawling rounds". But all the mechanics tied to crawling rounds are also meta, so....

I don't personally run any games that have "Crawling Rounds" as a concept.

I've played a bit of OSE and a little B/X and 2e, but I've not GMed any OSR systems.

My own game is a less abstract and less meta redesign of 3.x with a different gameplay loop and different setting. But yeah, both the amount of time in a "crawling round" may not make sense in the actions taken, and the characters wouldn't be aware they exist. But even with real world time units, the players (having scouted ahead) can how long between patrol passes, and when shift changes happen. My Wilderness random encounter rolls are currently done usually at the start of the day, 1 roll per 2h, with a chance of multiples (or nothing) in a 2h window, and then I roll and note down which 15 minute interval in that 2h they occur in. Obviously, if they're somewhere inaccessible (in town, for instance) when it comes up, they would skip that encounter. When I run 3e, it resembles my game in progress, because parts of it started out as my 3e houserules, but obviously it still has classes and X/day abilities because I wasn't doing a thorough rewrite. And then GURPS and SR4 and a few other games which tend to run more on real time.

But I thought we were just discussing time as a resource which matters in general and thus may be worth rolling or otherwise having a mechanic to determine how long the player takes, not specifically about OSR abstracted meta dungeon turns, starting with: "don't roll when there's no consequence for failure" "but often time wasted itself is a consequence of failure, even if you can try again".

 

[Bill Zebub]

I think it's both. Certainly more abstract than just using time. But also the other.


I don't personally run any games that have "Crawling Rounds" as a concept.

I've played a bit of OSE and a little B/X and 2e, but I've not GMed any OSR systems.

My own game is a less abstract and less meta redesign of 3.x with a different gameplay loop and different setting. But yeah, both the amount of time in a "crawling round" may not make sense in the actions taken, and the characters wouldn't be aware they exist. But even with real world time units, the players (having scouted ahead) can how long between patrol passes, and when shift changes happen. My Wilderness random encounter rolls are currently done usually at the start of the day, 1 roll per 2h, with a chance of multiples (or nothing) in a 2h window, and then I roll and note down which 15 minute interval in that 2h they occur in. Obviously, if they're somewhere inaccessible (in town, for instance) when it comes up, they would skip that encounter. When I run 3e, it resembles my game in progress, because parts of it started out as my 3e houserules, but obviously it still has classes and X/day abilities because I wasn't doing a thorough rewrite. And then GURPS and SR4 and a few other games which tend to run more on real time.

But I thought we were just discussing time as a resource which matters in general and thus may be worth rolling or otherwise having a mechanic to determine how long the player takes, not specifically about OSR abstracted meta dungeon turns, starting with: "don't roll when there's no consequence for failure" "but often time wasted itself is a consequence of failure, even if you can try again".

Huh.

Other than days, I very rarely use real units of time, and haven't really noticed it being a problem.

 

[VHawkwinter]

Huh.

Other than days, I very rarely use real units of time, and haven't really noticed it being a problem.

I've played with lots of GMs who don't pay much attention to tracking time throughout a day. I'm not sure I'd call it a problem so much as a different playstyle. Just like I had been playing specifically D&D for like 14 years before I ever heard of dungeon turns, yet people still ran dungeons.

 

[bsss]

I personally refuse to acknowledge a combat round is exactly 6 or however many seconds they say it is, on the subject. It's all abstract as far as I'm concerned.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Hmm. Seems a bit meta if a turn is not a shorthand for a fixed time unit. Even my combat rounds are still centred on "this represents 6 seconds of in-game time, 1/10 of a minute." But alright, what about in a game with ptobably no dungeon crawling unless you're raiding a fort or castle, normally centred around city and wilderness gameplay?

I may need to consider making gameified definitions of commonly used time units then, I suppose. I was definitely leaning towards "everything runs on real time units".

I mean, it's meta in that it's not part of the game world, but it's not meta in that it is a game element that is representative of something in the game world. The important element of this, whether for dungeon crawling or adapted in some way for other activities, is that it is a thing that can be understood and measured as a game element. A turn means these specific things... searching a room, a long rest, a random encounter check, etc.

Time is mutable in an RPG. Sometimes days or even years of in game time can pass in seconds of actual time. Other times, a 6-second round of combat can take 15 minutes of actual play time. Time's inconsistent for RPGs.

How much time does a turn or equivalent unit actually take for the characters? That's situational. We can decide that depending on the fictional circumstances. The important thing... the thing the players need to know, is how it will impact play.