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Action TimeJust One More Thing Before I Go... (Part II)0[This is the second of a short series of articles revolving around game design ideas and observations. These are the kind of things I might file away and eventually use as an inspiration for a product or part of a product. While that's still possible, it's far more unlikely now that I've decided to concentrate on novel-writing for a while. So I figured I'd just share them with you here.] Most of the time, my philosophy as a game designer was, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I think good game design has been hurt over the years by changes that game designers implemented to fix problems no one was complaining about. That said, I think D&D has a problem that no one really seems to complain about too much, but it bothers me personally. I've been trying to come up with solutions for it for the last six years or so and never really found any satisfying ones. The Problem of the Round The problem involves the six-second round. Now, it's probably not what you're thinking. It's not that too much gets done in a six-second period of time. In fact, one of my favorite memories of 3rd Edition design is of Jonathan, Skip, and I sitting in a meeting room at Wizards of the Coast talking about this very subject. To "test" the six-second round, Skip and I would yell out various common actions and Jonathan would act out performing that action while we timed him. No, I'm confident that you really can do most of the things that the game tells you that you can do in six seconds. My problem with the system is that you can't do what the game says you can do in sixty seconds. In other words, you can do a round's worth of actions in six seconds, but you can't do ten rounds of actions in a minute. You can't keep up that pace in the kinds of situations in which D&D characters find themselves. Think of pretty much any action movie you've seen. Even the greatest hero takes a break in the middle of the battle to glance around and assess the situation. Or recover from the blow he just took. Or hide behind some cover for a moment. Or just catch his breath. But that never happens in D&D, which creates a rapid succession of events and actions which are wholly unrealistic, even by action movie standards. And that's saying a lot. For me, it just doesn't feel like a real battle. And what really shakes my suspension of disbelief is when the whole big epic fight with the dragon is over and you look back and realize that the whole thing took only 42 seconds. Solutions, Maybe Unfortunately, while you can come up with plenty of solutions, none of them are very fun. You don't want to require everyone to make some kind of save every now and again or lose a round. Losing a round isn't fun, and feels like punishment, even if it is realistic. You could institute stun effects accompanying attacks over a certain damage threshold. This could work like death from massive damage, with a save after taking 10+character level points of damage in one blow (or something like that) or be stunned. Or, you could use the daze effect rather than stun. That's a lot of extra dice rolls, though, and it really only addresses a part of the issue. You could make everyone not take an action every three rounds, but then what's the point? It hardly feels more realistic to have every combatant freeze up every 18 seconds and then all start going again at the same time. However, you could institute a system where every three rounds (or five, or whatever feels right), characters can only take a single move action, free (non-attack) actions, and speak. This is still arbitrary and clunky, but you can use it to instill a feeling among the players that battles are confusing and chaotic by allowing them to speak only on those rounds -- they can't communicate on other rounds. It might be something fun to try once, just to see how it works. You might want to let these special rounds not count toward spell durations, particularly for one-round spells like daze person (it's lame to daze someone only to make him lose his move-and-speak round; on the other hand, sometimes that might be the right strategic move, so maybe it's okay). Perhaps the easiest solution is, after the fight's over, to abstractly extend the length of time that the combat took. If a fight lasted for five rounds, say that the whole thing took two minutes. The five rounds were the really important aspects of the fight, and there were moments of hesitation, observation and contemplation assumed into the encounter after the fact. The only thing this will affect is spell durations, but it's unlikely to really hamper them, and even then, only after the fact. In other words, in the five-round fight, a spell with a duration of six rounds still lasts the whole encounter, even if you retroactively say that the battle was two minutes long. This doesn't really affect balance, because in most fights, whether the spell's duration is six rounds or three minutes doesn't really matter -- the two options basically come down to the same thing: spells that last the duration of the encounter. However, this further abstracts D&D combat, almost likening it to previous editions, where every round was a minute. That's something I now almost kind of miss, or at least understand -- with the emphasis on almost. Lengthening the round has its own set of problems, simply because some things just don't take that long. Players who think about how they have to spend a full minute to run across the room or drink a potion aren't likely to take kindly to that solution. It does seem as though most players and DMs have made their peace with this problem, or haven't even really thought about it much. So instituting a change that makes the game more complex to solve a problem that most people don't mind is not a good idea. Which is why I've never put forth a solution in any of the game design I've done since 3rd Edition came out. Still, that's no reason to give up. I know for my own games, this question is something I'm going to continue to think about.
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