I recently acquired One-Hour Skirmish Wargames by John Lambshead on the recommendation of a friend. It's a very interesting book from a number of perspectives and I might later do a full review of it. For the moment, though, I want only to draw your attention to a couple of paragraphs from the general introduction of the book, because I think they have a certain applicability to RPG design.
There is a school of thought that persists to this day that because skirmish wargaming involves few models that each model must have concomitantly special rules. Often the player has been required to micromanage actions. For example a gunman model might not just shoot, but (i) locate the target, (ii) draw his pistol, (iii) cock his pistol, (iv) aim his pistol, (v) pull the trigger. The player might even be called upon to write out orders in advance detailing all these actions. This approach has meant that skirmish games have had a tendency to become complicated models of real life.
I well recall playing a game of Cold War fighter combat (air games are often a sub-branch of skirmish games) in the early 80s where a single pass by two Tornados at an element of MIG 25s that might have taken ten to thirty seconds of real time actually required all afternoon to play. If game-time is longer than real-time then we're doing something wrong. (Italics mine)
This was something that was always discussed when playing Car Wars. The games were always fun, and the action didn't drag or anything, but we'd play for an hour or so and then realize, "wow, all of that just simulated 30 seconds".
ReplyDeleteSame goes for Star Fleet Battles, and a fair few naval wargames I've played. Hours and hours to play out a few minutes of "real time" combat.
DeleteThis was one of the things I like about my beloved car wars. I remember me and my friends would use our wrist watches and count out the time the battle took (usually 20 seconds or so).
DeleteI could not agree more with that central thesis. Real life is boring, we do not sign up to make it MORE so....
ReplyDeleteWhen you are trying to emulate the OODA loop on pen and paper, it has to take longer than observation, recognition and muscle movement. That's not doing it wrong, that's limitations of the simulation technology. And why computer simulators are better at those games than pen and paper.
ReplyDeleteI fail to see how you'd design an even moderately realistic game where combat at the table is over and done with as fast as real-world fights with similar weapons are. Even a "long" small-unit action is over in minutes, and not very many of them either. One-on-one fights are often over in seconds, and rarely last more than a dozen exchanges in melee or shots in a firefight. You want real-time action with some degree of realistic lethality you play something on a console or PC, not a tabletop RPG rules set.
ReplyDeleteEven extremely simplistic combat rules (eg Into the Odd, 1st ed. On the Edge) that offer few tactical choices in a fight take longer to game out than killing someone in real life does.
Indeed.
DeleteIt is possible to compress the time scale to the point where you aren't having fun: GURPS, taken literally, sometimes does this ('you take 3 game turns to riffle through your backpack for your spare magazine') but in most cases it makes no more sense to insist on real time resolution of combat than it does to insist on real time resolution of travel.
Absolutely. Game designers have to try for a sweet spot between speed of play and the number of meaningful tactical choices each combatant has - and that spot is a moving target because what's a perfect combat for one person may be a tedious grind or a shallow experience for the next seat over.
DeleteAlso easy to fall into the trap of confusing detail for realism. They might be connected to one another but (say) tracking the effects of blood loss by the cubic mm during a fight isn't all that realistic in terms of what the combatants would know in the moment. RPGs can suffer from the same "omniscient view" problems wargames do. My pet peeve on that one is the infamous way D&D 5e lets players plan around their HP and healing so precisely that it's often better to deliberately let yourself drop to zero and heal from there than spend healing resources trying to stay on your feet in the first place. In character, your PCs have no idea what a hit point is, how many they've got left, how much more abuse they can take till they pass out, or whether they'll ever wake up again if they do. And yet there's all sorts of mechanical effects n game that revolve around that precise level of info.
That seems like a good rule of thumb for specific purposes, but I'd hesitate to make it a universal design principle. Playing out a slow thing quickly had merits in some cases, but then so does playing things out in slow-motion.
ReplyDeleteMost players see combat as a "big event"- sure they like exploration and wonder but plenty of players like the drama of battle. If one ends in 2 hits & a failed moral roll, 30 seconds later we are fine with that, but if it turns into a knock down drag out fight that takes 40 mins, that's fun too.
ReplyDeleteThe only RPG system I've played with fights that drag are 5e D&D & Palladium systems.
Much as I like it, Runequest can be a bit slow too *if* there's really good armor, ample healing, and moderate-to-low skill levels involved.
DeleteAt high skill levels fights often becomes a duel of who can roll more specials and crits on attacks and parries and armor gets a bit less valuable, and at the "fresh out of character gen" stage there may be a lot of whiffed attacks but you fail parries a lot too and armor is generally poor, so things don't feel draggy so much as dicey in either case.
Still less of an issue that I've seen in most editions of D&D or the Palladium FRPG, though.
I think the example is probably exaggerated, possibly from an outlier or an old rules set: while modern skirmish wargames often assign individual abilities to personalize characters, most of the contemporary designs from 2010 onward have emphasid very fast play mechanics; the example quoted sounds like a set of gunfight rules from c. 1980 or so.
ReplyDeleteI think what ultimately matters is whether the PCs are having fun and engaged. If the game system takes about 30 seconds to resolve each action, it doesn't really matter whether the rules say a turn is 3 seconds or 3 minutes, as long as the players can do something meaningful without boring themselves or other players waiting for resolution.
And RPGs, even more than skirmish games, are designed for flexible time; a fight might take a half hour to play out 30 seconds - but if those 30 seconds are the key element of the adventure, the climax, why not? If I wanted to mash buttons super fast with no time to think and rely on save points and redos when I made a mistake, I'd play a computer game! A tabletop rpg or miniature game can involve a more a sedate pace when the action is important... just like an RPG will compress "we spend 12 weeks engaged in spell research" or "we sail for 2 months across the open, empty sea" into a single sentence and a moment of time.
Sorry David, but that reads like a straight example from GURPS. First action locate target, Concentrate Maneuver (if necessary)[1]; second action Draw pistol, Ready Maneuver; third action cock pistol (if it's an older pistol that requires this), Ready Maneuver; fourth action aim at target, Aim Maneuver; fifth action fire, Attack Maneuver.
Delete1 - Of course most Players will do this while drawing and readying the weapon, but if the GM 'requires' a full second of Concentrating on find the target (usually by penalizing the 'passive' Perception rolls made while doing other things) then I can easily see this happening. And if you have a whole group all doing things, some which take longer to explain or make rolls for, than this whole sequence of 5 seconds game time can take over 30 minutes. Which is fine my me.
Armed with knowledge and some good cheat sheets, AD&D combat isn't bad at modeling 1 minute rounds in something pretty close to "real time."
ReplyDeleteI love quick simple systems, and it is one of the reasons Old School D&D is still one of my top choices, but I disagree that therelationship between game time and real time always has the same results.
ReplyDeleteI didn't enjoy Starfleet Battles very much, but I totally loved Avalon Hill's Gunslinger or GDW's Air Superiority (though I would have a pretty hard time playing any of these games now).
So I guess there has to be something more to the mix.
I think the trade off is you have to make time slow down in combat — which IMHO is actually VERY much like a comic or anime where characters are thinking out complicated strategic decisions in ‘bullet time’!! ;) — but you get to speed up time for, say, the weeks-long wilderness journey, or (hopefully) every detail of talking to the innkeeper and haggling with a merchant.
ReplyDeleteEven when I’m DMing 5e combat I’ll sometimes tell the players “of course, this is all happening in an instant”
ReplyDeleteVillains and Vigilantes took us hours to play out a single fight between our superhero team and that night's team of supervillains.
ReplyDeleteBut we had a blast doing it.
And V&V is one of the faster-playings supers RPGs IME, especially compared to Champions or GURPS Supers. Slow-ish combat seems to be common to the genre, but if everyone's having good time that's a feature, not a bug.
DeleteI think Mr. Lambshead is approaching things from a large scale miniatures perspective where a turn of the game represents an hour of in-game time. From that perspective, if the battle takes more time in real life than it does in the game, you are taking too long. Extrapolating, skirmish game turns might represent a minute of time (as combat rounds did in original D&D) and if it takes you more than a minute to work out if you hit and do damage, he feels you are taking too long, which is not an unfair position.
ReplyDeleteOnce turns represent less than a minute of in-game time, however, there is no way to make the combat faster than the time modeled, especially if you have more options than "I attack".