From: laird@think.com (Laird Popkin)
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.advocacy
Subject: Re: Time and judgement
Date: 11 Sep 1992 17:22:08 GMT
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
NNTP-Posting-Host: django.think.com

In article <1992Sep10.232316.58800@cc.usu.edu> sl9b4@cc.usu.edu (Deep Six) writes:
>In article <1992Sep10.221822.6127@news.columbia.edu>, 
>jhk6@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (John H Kim) writes:
>> millerl@wharton.upenn.edu writes:
>
>>>I don't really agree, but if folx are bothered by combats taking too
>>>little game time then why not change perceptions instead of adding
>>>rules? When asked how long a X-round fight took, roll Xd6 for the
>>>answer.
>
>> 	Is it just me, or is this for all practical purposes the same 
>> thing as saying that a round is around 3 or 4 seconds? 
>
>No, it's not the same, because a 3-4 second round will change other 
>rules. For example -- RoFs for firearms, Move score and HT rolls just to
>name a few. Some effects would have to be discovered while playing. Are 
>you going to triple/quadruple Move? How about RoFs? Would some stats be
>tripled and some not? The guy who brought this up was looking for a nice
>simple rule to tack on. The 3 - 4 second round would be a MAJOR change, 
>and probably wouldn't solve the problem.

Here's a solution that (I believe) was suggested on the Illuminatti BBS,
filtered by my memory...

For every second of "intense" action, each character gets a cumulative -1
penalty on all actions.  Each second of "resting" recovers one point of the
penalty.

To lessen the severity of this, each character could avoid the accumulation
of penalty by making a Will roll.  That would mean that at the beginning of
each player's turn, they would make a Will roll to avoid getting an
additional -1.  I don't generally like rolling dice, but it would keep the
penalties down a bit, and also reward characters with "nerves of steel" so
it might be worth doing.

Off the top of my head, I'd say that there are some advantages and
disadvantages which could modify this.  For example, Strong Will ought to
help, perhaps by giving a bonus to offset the penalty, or to the Will roll
if you used that.

I haven't tried this in my campaign, since it's an added element of
complexity and combat just isn't that important in my campaign, but it
doesn't seem to add too much complexity and would tend to give combats a
more natural "flow", with people closing and fighting, then breaking and
resting.

The penalty could represent both getting fatigued and also the accumulating
confusion caused by the "fog of war".  The "resting" could be interpreted
as both physically resting and looking around and figuring out what is
going on.

I like this a lot better than lengthening the "round", since (for example)
I really can run that far in one second, or fire that many shots with a
gun.  The actions that can be performed in a second in GURPS are, IMHO,
realistic -- the "problem" is that the system assumes that characters are
always at peak performance, so the solution should be to have the system
handle people not being at peak performance, not to make everyone
arbitrarily less effective than they realistically can be.

>> 	Saying after the fact that a fight took longer than it did 
>> leads to alot of inconsistancies. Like being unable to communicate 
>> during combat because saying anything meaningful takes to long, then 
>> finding out later that you actually had plenty of time to say that. Etc. 
>
>Well, the idea was to change the perception of how long combat takes. You
>know, the fight was over before you knew it, but you find out it actually
>took longer. The problem is that GURPS allows PCs to use every single round
>to its fullest, and that combat should take longer to compensate for the
>seconds the PCs lose track of. What you are suggesting is that combat should
>take longer, but the PCs should still be able to use every second to its 
>fullest (i.e. since the combats take longer, the PCs will be able to talk
>more). That misses the problem -- we wanted to simulate the dizzying flurry
>of combat. Combatants lose a second here and there in the heat of the fight.
>If you insert those ``lost'' seconds during the combat, it might give one 
>side an unfair advantage. If you insert the seconds retroactively, both 
>sides have lost the time and no one is given an edge.

Aside from that, these "lost seconds" are completely meaningless in terms
of the combat -- all they do is make the total combat take longer, with no
effect on the combat at all.

>> 	Why exactly is a 1 second conceptual turn desirable? Some say 
>> that it is neccessary for realism. However, I don't see this. What makes 
>> a combat feel 'real' to me is the fear, confusion, hesitation, shock, and 
>> pain of the combatants. Playing at the one second level, you generally lose 
>> all this, because you have at least 30 to 60 seconds to decide on what your 
>> character can barely register. 
>
>So, now you give the players 30 to 60 seconds to decide on 3-second actions.
>The players are still going to get at least ten times as long as they should
>to make one round-decisions, it's an unavoidable problem, unless you give 
>the players exactly as much time as their players get. If the players did
>actually did experience as much pressure/fear/excitement as their characters,
>they probably wouldn't want to play. Fighting is extremely distressing, 
>especially when you are fighting to live. Why try to change rules and screw
>everything up when: 1) You can't achieve that level of realism without 
>playing in real time; and 3) that level of realism wouldn't be all that fun
>anyway. What you have to do is put the players under a pale semblance of the 
>pressure the characters are experiencing. Enough to be exciting, but not so
>much as to be distressing or really frustrating.

What I do to address *this* is to put pressure on the *players*.  If the
situation is tense, and every second counts, I give each player 10 seconds
to determine what the character is doing, or else the character does
nothing.  (One player objected, saying that this penalized the character
for the player's inability to think quickly, but the player was a
"munchkin" anyway, and stopped playing in my campaign soon after that.)
Ofrcing players to "think on their toes" results in mych more exciting and
memorable combats.  They're more memorable, because the *player* is
excited, and because the rapid actions keep combat flowing.  They're more
memorable because the characters end up (due to players' panic) doing much
more interesting things.

-- 
- Laird Popkin, Thinking Machines

Connection Machine: Massively parallel supercomputer.  Also a cool black
cube with more blinking lights than you can shake a stick at.