skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 1, 2015 14:45:01 GMT -6
I'm starting to get the impression, based among other things on chainmail, and the bless spell, that combat was originally supposed to work quite differently.
As I gather, each turn was a turn, whether in or out of combat, indoors or out. In a combat turn, as you would expect, actions were declared, initiative rolled, then in initiative order ranged fire and spells happened, then movement happened. After movement, there was melee, if appropriate due to proximity, and that's where things get weird.
Within the melee portion of the turn, there are different rounds of combat, which are what we think of as a round from later editions. That is, every participant gets their one attack (or whatever), damage is resolved, and the next round starts. In this combat round, initiative as rolled at the beginning of the turn may not matter, order being adjudicated by weapon reach or just all simultaneously. Once the combat round is over, the next round of combat begins, melee attacks are made, etc. This continues until one side or the other decides to retreat or breaks through morale, at which point attacks against the fleeing side are made as the last round of combat.
All of the above, which is to say 1 spellcasting opportunity, 1 ranged attack opportunity, 1 movement opportunity, and then all of the combat rounds, are done, the turn is over. The referee then makes all of the normal end of turn actions: marking down the turn to track light usage, time needed to rest, roll for wandering monsters, etc. Questions of casting or shooting into melee, which really aren't covered by the books, are irrelevant because they occur earlier in the turn than melee.
Note that all of this took a full turn, the same as a turn of dungeon exploration, etc. You'll notice that spells frequently thought of as instantaneous, like fire ball, have a duration of 1 turn by the book, and the bless spell specifically distinguishes between in and out of combat, not in and out of melee. Movement is also reduced in combat as opposed to out of it, but it's not reduced by all that much compared to standard dungeon exploration. Looking at turns from the perspective of turns in a game, resources are consumed not on the basis of actual time elapsed, but of game turns, which are of an abstract duration. There's no distinction between a turn outdoors moving 1 or more hexes, a dungeon exploration turn with 2 movements, and a combat turn with spells/missles followed by rounds of melee, which keeps the burden of overhead for the referee simple as there are no conversions necessary. It also makes fighting-men and magic weapons and armour significantly more important even at later levels, because they get used multiple times per turn, while a spell, no matter how powerful the wizard, only happens once.
As for how I view the melee itself, I would see it as a boiling mass of men and monsters, all mixed up. There may be vague sides, but in the midst of the fracas an individual would not really be able to target any specific enemy among a group easily, and their physical position at any given time is relatively undetermined until the melee is resolved. Individuals may retreat from it early, possibly without reprecussions if there are enough allies involved, but a side that is heavily outnumbered might be assessed penalties for being flanked or otherwise surrounded.
There is also the question of how surprise works with this. The general consensus on surprise seems to be that the side that surprises the other can force melee before the suprised side can react. I would interpret it in this context as being able to perform all of the actions of the combat turn unopposed. That is, after checking to see if items are dropped, the casting, ranged fire, and movement portions of the turn only happen for one side, and in melee there is no opportunity for the surprised side to set to receive a charge before the dice begin to fall.
Unfortunately, I don't have by LBBs nearby to refer to for quotes, so I'm writing this mostly based on my memory of them, but what do you all think of it?
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Post by waysoftheearth on Oct 1, 2015 16:54:12 GMT -6
All of the above, which is to say 1 spellcasting opportunity, 1 ranged attack opportunity, 1 movement opportunity, and then all of the combat rounds, are done, the turn is over. The referee then makes all of the normal end of turn actions: marking down the turn to track light usage, time needed to rest, roll for wandering monsters, etc. Questions of casting or shooting into melee, which really aren't covered by the books, are irrelevant because they occur earlier in the turn than melee. I agree. Whether it was ever played this way is a different matter, but IMHO this is what the written rules say.
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Post by derv on Oct 1, 2015 17:49:03 GMT -6
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 1, 2015 18:33:21 GMT -6
I wish I had seen them earlier, a lot of the thinking behind them seems pretty similar.
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Post by derv on Oct 1, 2015 19:13:00 GMT -6
Some of your conclusions differ, but I'd say you and Ways are probably on the same page.
I personally use the two moves per turn at all levels of play- campaign, outdoor exploration, dungeon exploration, and combat.
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Post by bestialwarlust on Oct 1, 2015 19:22:55 GMT -6
I keep it abstract. The exact amount of time doesn't matter. A turn is the amount of time it takes a character to do what needs to be done in combat. Outside of combat I don't use the terminology.
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Post by tetramorph on Oct 1, 2015 19:39:45 GMT -6
skydyr, waysoftheearth, derv: I like this and it makes a lot of sense. But wouldn't it start to get a little ridiculous if melee continued for many many rounds? Wouldn't it be possible for a MU to find some corner and cast out another spell? Wouldn't it make sense, at some point, to roll another initiative check? At what point does melee rounds as sheer abstraction stretch the limits of the "10 minute" (roughly / abstractly, of course) turn? And on another note: how do I convince the folks that play MUs that this is a good way to interpret the rules?! Because, frankly, I like it. I just can't see wizard types buying in too fast, unless somehow it turned out to be advantageous for them in some way as well. Thoughts?
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 1, 2015 21:35:22 GMT -6
skydyr, waysoftheearth, derv: I like this and it makes a lot of sense. But wouldn't it start to get a little ridiculous if melee continued for many many rounds? Wouldn't it be possible for a MU to find some corner and cast out another spell? Wouldn't it make sense, at some point, to roll another initiative check? At what point does melee rounds as sheer abstraction stretch the limits of the "10 minute" (roughly / abstractly, of course) turn? And on another note: how do I convince the folks that play MUs that this is a good way to interpret the rules?! Because, frankly, I like it. I just can't see wizard types buying in too fast, unless somehow it turned out to be advantageous for them in some way as well. Thoughts? I would expect most melees would be resolved fairly quickly - faster than 10 rounds, at least. Looking at this from a chainmail perspective, you could apply either the man-to-man or larger scale combat rules. To start off, the first question is who is in melee. The man to man rules state that any figures within 3" engage in melee. The general rules seem a little fuzzier, expect to say that units within 3" of a melee may be drawn in at the player's option. Lets say the party runs into a group of orcs. Spells and missiles go off, and then what? If you apply the larger scale combat rules, I think the entire player party would likely count as one figure for the purposes of entering melee and such, at least until someone has advanced to the level of Hero or the like. So, unless a player explicitly states that he's backing up or doesn't charge with the rest or something, or there are physical limitations like a hallway, everyone is assumed to be in melee including magic-users. In this case, 3 fighters across a hallway would fight 3 orcs, and if one fighter took out all three, so be it. Once the 3 orcs are down, have retreated, or whatever, other orcs that were in range of the melee (3") may jump into it if they so desire. Given that everyone is acting somewhat independently, though, maybe you use the man-to-man rules, which means that if you have 3 fighters against 5 orcs, you don't have 1 melee, you have 3 separate melees of one fighter vs. one or two orcs each, which are resolved completely separately. If there are 20 orcs, and you're in a 10 foot corridor, likely only 3 of them will be able to fight against the 3 fighters. So the parties meet, spells and arrows go off, and the fighters charge or something and are in melee. The 3 fighting men are all one on one against orcs, so as mentioned, this may actually be 3 separate melees. Fighter A kills orc A in one round, and that's that. Fighter two takes 5 rounds to wound his orc who then retreats successfully without being hit, and that's that again. Finally Fighter C goes 7 rounds of really bad rolls on all sides before taking a 6 point hit and dying. Even though fighters A and B were done in fewer rounds of melee, I'm not clear if they can jump in to help fighter C, or if they are done when their individual melees are done, though I suspect the latter. If there were more orcs behind the orcs that were fighting at first, I'm not certain if they would be drawn into melee immediately (being within 3") or if it would wait until the next round. In the interest of expediency you might want to just have them drawn in directly until someone starts running, but I don't know. As for "wizard types buying in too fast", the big complaint that I usually hear is that fighting-men become really wimpy compared to magic-users at higher levels, using the standard 1 attack per spellcasting opportunity. At 5th level, a magic-user can cast a fireball against a party of 2HD gnolls, arguably doing 5d6 damage to all of them that get hit, while the fighter can only hit one of them for a chance at 1d6 damage plus a few possible bonus points, and when the fighter hits the next one next round, the magic-user casts sleep and knocks out 4 more. Even at first level, a magic user has the same attack roll and damage as a fighter while having only an average of 1 hp less. It may also be argued that given enough fighting-men, it keeps the M-U in the back from having to engage in melee at all. More to the point, if you're running a game, you make the rules If nothing else, you can try it and see how people like it. If they don't know which they'd prefer, they can always play elves.
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Post by sepulchre on Oct 2, 2015 9:16:19 GMT -6
I think skydyr has it. If your rounds in list combat are derived from Chainmail (returning to Waysoftheearth's post in OD&D Study), I think you would have to arbitrate the ruling for dweomercraft and missile attack. As long as neither combatants are engaged individually in the melee, I have house-ruled spell casters may cast a new spell when the casting time has concluded, and missile attacks, like melee, default to rounds instead of turns(which is pretty close to simulation, though not btb).
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Post by tetramorph on Oct 2, 2015 9:27:43 GMT -6
skydyr and sepulchre, okay thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I've had another think on this one: Movement is part of the combat turn, not the melee round. So it seems to me that melee concludes when any additional melee would require significant (with the referee judging what this might mean, especially in the dungeon and especially in situations of great abstraction) movement. So, with the orc example above, another file of orcs filling in for the currently downed three would not (in my opinion as a ref) constitute a significant movement and could therefore be folded into the on-going melee rounds. However, we've been doing a lot of out door battles with mass combat b/c of we are on a wilderness exploration adventure. We've been using counters with a one inch hex grid (10 yards across). In this case I could imagine a scenario where Side A wins initiative over side B Side A fires off spells, but side B still has enough to fire off theirs Side A range fires, but side B still has enough range-firerers to engage as well Side A closes for melee and side B rearranges its formation to meet them Side A inaugurates melee and side B rejoins several times, however Once all possible melees have been resolved based upon adjacent HX proximity As ref I would call "turn" and we would Roll initiative and start sequence over again allowing for Another turn of spells, range-fire, movement and then Melee again Does that make sense? Would that work well? Thanks for helping me think this through1
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 2, 2015 10:37:42 GMT -6
Honestly, it's hard to say even that much. There's so little language in the books about combat, and I took a look last night to find it. In men and magic, apart from a few tables it tells you that you may use these alternative tables instead of chainmail's 2d6 tables, that a hit does 1d6 damage, and that the "fighting capability" in earlier tables refer to the number of men they are equivalent to in chainmail. There isn't a word about combat in monsters and treasure, apart from subdual damage to dragons that I can see, and whether they breathe or attack normally in a round. In U&W, there's just a few cryptic sentences. The first is that melee is fast and furious so there are ten rounds of combat per turn. Later, in the section on surprise, it says that the party that is not surprised can do one of four things: cast spells, shoot missles, move, or "engage in combat" if close enough. This makes me think that when the books talk about combat, and combat rounds, the only thing that happens in melee, because it differentiates between ranged attacks, spells, on movement on the one hand, and combat on the other. There are a few other places that talk about melee, but they're kind of odd: the first is in the section on aerial combat, where it say that figures within 3" engage in melee, and if only one can attack due to the circumstances of the position, only one sides rolls an attack. This does seem to imply that there is a single round of melee before figure move again. The other is in the section on naval combat, where it talks about figures needing to be a certain distance from the leaders to act, and the difficulty in having commands obeyed. The command rules there seem to say that you can give a command to disengage in 4 rounds, and each round there is a 1 in 4 chance that any given man will hear it to obey at the 4 round mark. That's about it. There is nothing else said about combat that I've found in any of the three books, apart from the briefest statements on morale. There is nothing on initiative at all apart from surprise, nothing on how long it takes to cast a spell or what order you should cast/shoot/move/whatever in. As I understand it, what's being implied here is that these rules (D&D) are about everything that happens outside of combat. You know how to play a wargame, so here's how you determine chases, how you adjudicate traps, how to set up the terrain, how you track time between different turn scales, how you determine movement distances on a turn, how to determine if you can successfully parley etc. In sum, this is a game about what happens in between combats. Once those situations conspire to get you into combat, you, inveterate wargamer that you are, know what to do and we don't really care for the purposes of this game. Use chainmail or your favourite rules or whatever. Also, here's a few ideas if you want to adapt a standard wargame to aerial combat with pegasus mounted troops or something, and if you want to have naval battles where you board each other and try to carry a ship as a prize. To look at the order above, I think we're on the same page tetramorph. I'd run it much like Chainmail, either man-to-man in the dungeon or with a ratio for wilderness battles: 1) Roll for initiative 2) Winning side picks move or countermove (or ignore steps 1 and 2 and you write orders) 3) Spells/missles/movement happen. This means you can shoot a charging enemy, or cast spells at them, or whatever. If you're using move/countermove the side that won initiative can disrupt spells by hitting them with ranged attacks or engaging in melee. Anyone can also disrupt missile troops' second shots by getting into melee range. 4) As many rounds of combat as appropriate. In chainmail, your morale drops by one every 3 rounds of combat to represent fatigue, so this puts a limit on how long it can last in practice. There are also checks based on how many men (treat as HP?) you've lost as a percentage. 5) One or both sides withdraw, because you fail morale before you're entirely wiped out unless it's an absolute slaughter. 6) Move on to next turn starting at 1) If you're worried about the wizard staying behind not doing anything while the mooks fight, think of it as cinematic. The intrepid heroes have penetrated the evil wizards inner sanctum. He casts a spell, stands back and sends his skeletons forth to take care of the riff-raff (pre-combat). The heroes, being heroic, bash them all to pieces (combat). Then there's dramatic dialogue, and the wizard shoots lightning Emperor Palpatine style (turn 2 pre-combat). Next, the heroes close in and there's the cinematic fight with lots of flurries of attacks and parries and dancing around and other heroic-looking junk (turn 2 combat). The heroes bring the evil wizard to his knees and he surrenders. The heroes celebrate, and the wizard performs some dastardly backstabbing deed (turn 3 pre-combat). Then, the heroes are reluctantly forced to kill him deader than dead (maybe combat, maybe not).
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 2, 2015 10:52:50 GMT -6
Your initial assumption—and the assumption of many on this forum—is that D&D expects you to play Chainmail to resolve your battles. It does not. The original boxed set leaves the details of combat up to the judge, who is expected to be familiar with Chainmail, but who is not expected to follow detailed rules from it. He might use the Chainmail combat tables, or make judgments of who strikes first based on weapon classes, or even decide initiative in the way Chainmail describes, but Chainmail is in no way a subset of the D&D rules. He might, on the other hand, use the combat tables in Men & Magic, and decide who goes first based solely on his own appraisal of the situation. Maybe he looks at Dexterity to decide. Maybe he declares all combat simultaneous. Maybe he reads tea leaves.
There are two kinds of turns in dungeons: 10-minute turns and 1-minute combat turns. Combat turns are sometimes called rounds; they're the same thing. D&D does not call for an indefinite number of melee-only rounds in a 1-minute combat turn until the engagement is broken. Can you play it that way? Sure. But it's not part of the rules.
See, that's the free kriegsspiel principal that Gronan keeps bringing up. In free kriegsspiel, all results come out of the head of the umpire based on his expert knowledge of combat. There are no dice, no tables to follow. D&D gives you a few tables and rules of thumb to base your decisions on, and to give you a context in which to read the rules (like telling you how long a spell will last), but it expects you to make up the answers yourself. A D&D judge is a mere interpreter, he is the decider. He can offload some decisions to dice or tables if he wants, but this is not required.
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 2, 2015 10:56:28 GMT -6
As I understand it, what's being implied here is that these rules (D&D) are about everything that happens outside of combat. You know how to play a wargame, so here's how you determine chases, how you adjudicate traps, how to set up the terrain, how you track time between different turn scales, how you determine movement distances on a turn, how to determine if you can successfully parley etc. In sum, this is a game about what happens in between combats. Once those situations conspire to get you into combat, you, inveterate wargamer that you are, know what to do and we don't really care for the purposes of this game. Use chainmail or your favourite rules or whatever. Also, here's a few ideas if you want to adapt a standard wargame to aerial combat with pegasus mounted troops or something, and if you want to have naval battles where you board each other and try to carry a ship as a prize. Yes! Yes yes yes yes! This is exactly how the original rules were written.
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 2, 2015 10:59:34 GMT -6
This makes me think that when the books talk about combat, and combat rounds, the only thing that happens in melee, because it differentiates between ranged attacks, spells, on movement on the one hand, and combat on the other. It's just the author being careless with his terminology. Sometimes combat means fighting in general; sometimes it means melee in particular. Don't hang too much meaning on the word.
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 2, 2015 11:35:49 GMT -6
There are two kinds of turns in dungeons: 10-minute turns and 1-minute combat turns. Combat turns are sometimes called rounds; they're the same thing. D&D does not call for an indefinite number of melee-only rounds in a 1-minute combat turn until the engagement is broken. Can you play it that way? Sure. But it's not part of the rules. This is the only part of your analysis that I disagree with. The only time that the 10 rounds in a turn thing is brought up is in a section on moving through the dungeon, and it's quite literally a one-line throw away with nothing else about fighting nearby in the text. It's not in the book that talks about combat abilities (M&M), but in the one on exploration and how that can lead to combat (U&W). From the perspective of a game as opposed to a simulation of life, there's no reason you need to know how long a fight takes regardless of whether you have spells going off one time or every round. It's not telling you about the combat itself, which as we agree the books imply that you already know how to run, it's saying how long it takes other things to happen while the fight happens. Imagine that you're in a dungeon and you run into a lair of 100-200 goblins, which is not unreasonable by the book, and a fight breaks out. You're not going to be fighting all of them at once in the recommended 10' wide hallways. There will be a group in combat, and there might be other groups running around the dungeon trying to summon help, flank you, set traps, and so forth. The sentence is saying that, because melee is fast and furious, they only get one turn of movement running around the dungeon to trap you for every 10 rounds that you're engaged in the local fracas. If half the party is running away and the other half is making a last heroic stand to save them, it says how far they can run given a number of rounds of the holding action. It may also mean that every 10th round, you roll for a wandering monster to see who heard the battle and got interested, but nothing more.
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 2, 2015 12:09:03 GMT -6
I'm not sure how that disagrees with what I said. Anyone engaged in combat (not just melee) is operating in rounds; this includes movement in combat, missile-fire, and spells. The one-liner is, as you say, a reference to how long a combat will take compared to other things happening in the dungeon.
However, if monsters are not actually fighting you but could conceivably affect you within those ten rounds, the referee will surely include them in combat time. A party of goblins that runs around the dungeon to outflank you, and who can do so within five minutes, will be kept in combat time.
What my previous statement denies is that there are one-minute "combat turns," within each of which are an indefinite number of "melee rounds" that continue until melee is broken off. This is how Chainmail works, but not D&D.
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 2, 2015 12:45:06 GMT -6
Ah, I think I understand what you're saying more clearly. The way I interpret it, the combat starts and proceeds in rounds. The length of the combat itself is indefinite and lasts until it's broken off, but every 10 rounds, a new turn happens for everyone not in combat to do all the background stuff. The reason for the statement is to say that if you're in combat, people not in the fight don't get to move their full distance for every time you go through a cycle of your combat resolution system, but only every 10th cycle.
So that party of goblins that's running around to outflank you, if they're going at a rate of 12", every 10 cycles of the fight they make their 2 12" moves. If they're 36" away, then on the first turn when you start fighting they move 24", and on the second turn they move 12" to flank you and engage in the fight. So, on cycle 11 the players begin to receive whatever penalties are assessed for being flanked, maybe being in disorder, and for fighting against more opponents in general. Because the players were in combat the whole time, they didn't have the option to do anything not related to combat or withdrawal. Now, I am taking "combat" to mean hand-to-hand fighting specifically, and you may take it to mean hand-to-hand fighting and ranged weapons and spells, but that doesn't matter for this purpose.
Combat time, as it is, only happens for the combat itself, and not for flanking groups and such which are governed by the 10-1 ratio. Their movement doesn't get split into 2.4" per combat cycle by these rules as written, even though later editions like AD&D declare this.
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Post by derv on Oct 2, 2015 22:04:07 GMT -6
skydyr, waysoftheearth, derv: I like this and it makes a lot of sense. But wouldn't it start to get a little ridiculous if melee continued for many many rounds? U&WA puts a limit of 10 rounds to the combat turn. All things are governed by the turn. As skydr noted, such things as spell durations are listed in turns in the LBB's. I would add a fine distinction about combat, as I understand it. It is specifically melee (hand to hand combat) that uses rounds to represent an exchange of blows. Missile fire and spells occur prior to melee (a second volley of missiles is possible after melees are resolved) and cannot occur once one is in melee. Melee is determined by distance (3") and by reactions and/or declarations. In the case of the magic user that wants to find a safe corner to work his magic, he has two moves to the turn to do so. But, in my games he cannot be moving or attacked while attempting to cast a spell.
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Post by derv on Oct 3, 2015 6:40:36 GMT -6
There is also the question of how surprise works with this. The general consensus on surprise seems to be that the side that surprises the other can force melee before the suprised side can react. I would interpret it in this context as being able to perform all of the actions of the combat turn unopposed. That is, after checking to see if items are dropped, the casting, ranged fire, and movement portions of the turn only happen for one side, and in melee there is no opportunity for the surprised side to set to receive a charge before the dice begin to fall. "A condition of surprise can only exist when one or both parties are unaware of the presence of the other....A roll of 1 or 2 indicates the party is surprised. Distance is then 10-30 feet." "Surprise gives the advantage of a free move segment, whether to flee, cast a spell or engage in combat." (U&WA p.9) The way I use surprise ( I think Gary wrote about this somewhere? can't recall), a roll of 1 gives one free move segment and a roll of 2 gives two free move segments. Characters would use the move segments to either close the distance for melee, fire missiles or spells if prepared, or to flee. If monsters surprise the party, their intelligence, disposition, reaction rolls, or GM choice will determine what they do with the free move segment. The order of a combat turn that I use is: Movement, Missiles, Spells, Melee. If no melee contact is made in the first move, then Movement, Missiles, Spells, Melee again. End of turn. So, in the case of Magic Users, if they already have a spell prepared, they can fire it immediately and still move during the second move segment. Otherwise, they must remain stationary while preparing a spell to fire during the second move segment. Missiles cannot be fired into melee. All other decisions about timing should be adjudicated by the GM. I generally consider spells to take immediate effect once fired.
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 3, 2015 9:21:38 GMT -6
U&WA puts a limit of 10 rounds to the combat turn. You're still assuming that D&D combat equals Chainmail combat. It does not; they are different games. U&WA puts a limit of 10 rounds to the turn, not the "combat turn," in a section that just finished telling you that a turn in the dungeon is 10 minutes. This is simply a case of the authors not being careful with their terminology. At this point in the development of the game, turn meant simply what you were able to do when it was your "turn" to go. It scaled depending on context: when exploring the dungeon a turn is 10 minutes; when fighting a turn is 1 minute; when traveling a turn is 1 day. Later, when confusion such as in this forum arose among players who weren't familiar with this sort of scaling, TSR was more careful to distinguish between exploration turns and combat rounds . But at this time, the difference was just assumed to be understood, and was variously called a "turn," a "round," and even a "move," and the difference between "combat" and "melee" also wasn't stated very carefully.
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Post by derv on Oct 3, 2015 11:40:20 GMT -6
You're still assuming that D&D combat equals Chainmail combat. It does not; they are different games. U&WA puts a limit of 10 rounds to the turn, not the "combat turn," in a section that just finished telling you that a turn in the dungeon is 10 minutes. The actual quote says, "Melee is fast and furious. There are ten rounds of combat per turn." A careful reading of the prior paragraph dealing with the Dungeon Exploration turn expresses all actions occurring as full or fractions of a turn, yet oddly does not use the term "rounds". If you prefer to remain entrenched in your reading of the text as through AD&D, so be it. You should play the game as you like. But, no where are rounds mentioned outside of combat in the LBB's. It should also be said that combat occurs during Wilderness Exploration turns too. Should we then conflate combat into day periods? Are there one hour rounds in the outdoors? No, that would obviously be foolish. Therefore, we should not do the same thing with the Dungeon Exploration turn.
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 3, 2015 12:27:09 GMT -6
"Surprise gives the advantage of a free move segment, whether to flee, cast a spell or engage in combat." (U&WA p.9) The way I use surprise ( I think Gary wrote about this somewhere? can't recall), a roll of 1 gives one free move segment and a roll of 2 gives two free move segments. Characters would use the move segments to either close the distance for melee, fire missiles or spells if prepared, or to flee. If monsters surprise the party, their intelligence, disposition, reaction rolls, or GM choice will determine what they do with the free move segment. In AD&D, which this is not, you still see some semblance of this as if you're suprised by 2 segments, you can be attacked twice, once per segment, if the surprising party was in melee range. Perhaps that's where your reading is coming from? I see this as an extrapolation from the surprise rules here creating 2 levels of surprise (1 segment and 2 segment) where these rules only mentioned one.
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Post by derv on Oct 3, 2015 14:22:40 GMT -6
In AD&D, which this is not, you still see some semblance of this as if you're suprised by 2 segments, you can be attacked twice, once per segment, if the surprising party was in melee range. Perhaps that's where your reading is coming from? I see this as an extrapolation from the surprise rules here creating 2 levels of surprise (1 segment and 2 segment) where these rules only mentioned one. Yes, U&WA only mention one segment for surprise btb. That's why I was careful to say it is how I use it. I looked around for where I may have picked this idea up from because I thought it unlikely that I used it in AD&D, which I havn't played in 30+ years. Though, it would be entirely possible that I read something from AD&D and adopted it. A similiar rule exists in Eldritch Wizardry to what you are describing. It is a system that further breaks down the combat rounds in a turn of combat. I don't use this system, so I didn't think that was where I got it either. I most likely picked it up from Gary's Q&A forum on Dragonfoot, here. He concludes that is how he's been DMing for the past 33 years on these matters. The post was back in 2005.
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skydyr
Level 1 Medium
Posts: 17
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Post by skydyr on Oct 3, 2015 15:39:06 GMT -6
I most likely picked it up from Gary's Q&A forum on Dragonfoot, here. He concludes that is how he's been DMing for the past 33 years on these matters. The post was back in 2005. That makes a lot of sense too. I have gotten the impression that AD&D was basically a set of rulings by Gary over the course of the 70s compiled into a set of 3 books. I seem to recall a thread somewhere where one of the Greyhawk players described a lot of the tone of AD&D as Gary being frustrated that Rob and Ernie were running around trashing his dungeons with few problems and writing from the perspective of stopping them from being able to do that. Perhaps in his mind they were all the same game with house-rules made official by his publishing added on at various fuzzily remembered points in time.
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Post by tetramorph on Oct 3, 2015 19:06:35 GMT -6
skydyr and folks, I really want to thank you for bringing this to my attention. I've been running a wilderness adventure in austinjimm's Planet Eris campaign setting using the OS board. I have been deliberately throwing the biggest creatures with the biggest armies and maxed out numbers at these high level PCs! So we have been doing a lot of mass combat. Using the turn order suggested by this discussion made today's session run the smoothest yet. It was crazy fun. Here is what I worked out: A. Preliminaries 1. Surprise 2. Distance 3. Position 4. Reaction B. Combat Turn 1. Declarations and initiative 2. Combat phases a. Engine, spells, magic b. Range-fire c. Move d. Melee (in rounds until resolved) 3. Check morale each melee round 4. Check fatigue each combat turn. It worked like a real charm. The MUs complained about the melee at first. Then when they realized that it allowed their own FM to take out high level MUs and CLs they were like "oh, carry on." I decided to allow the following things to indicate the resolution of melee: rally, removal, retreat and surrender. That allowed them to call it off and regroup if they wanted to get another round of spells and range in, etc. I am slowly becoming a wargamer rather than a role-player. Morale is so important. Morale ends most combat at this army level of scale. They learned that and started heading straight for the leaders. Very cool. Thanks all
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Post by waysoftheearth on Oct 3, 2015 20:29:21 GMT -6
the big complaint that I usually hear is that fighting-men become really wimpy compared to magic-users at higher levels, using the standard 1 attack per spellcasting opportunity. At 5th level, a magic-user can cast a fireball against a party of 2HD gnolls, arguably doing 5d6 damage to all of them that get hit, while the fighter can only hit one of them for a chance at 1d6 damage plus a few possible bonus points, and when the fighter hits the next one next round, the magic-user casts sleep and knocks out 4 more. Even at first level, a magic user has the same attack roll and damage as a fighter while having only an average of 1 hp less. A few observations could be made about this argument: . I believe the "standard 1 attack per spellcasting opportunity" is a misnomer. -- To start, the 5th level fighter has at least five attacks (as a normal man) in a "combat period" versus normal types. (There are good reasons to believe Gnolls qualify as normal types--but that's a whole different discussion). -- Depending on which combat rules you employ, a combatant may strike multiple blows per round. The Man-to-Man rules allow 1-3 blows per round, depending on difference in weapon types. Holmes simplifies it down to 2 blows per round with non-heavy weapons. -- And then there is the topic of this (and many other) discussions on these boards: how many rounds of combat that should be fought per turn, and when should spell casting occur in the order of battle. . OD&D forbids casting spells during melee. So whether the M-U could actually cast a Fireball spell followed by a Sleep spell would be circumstantial. The M-U would need to remain out of combat, which is why he needs a line of fighting-men to protect him. How many times could he repeat this strategy during an adventure? . At 1st level the F-M and M-U both have one attack as a man (THAC2 17). Only the F-M adds one to his die against normal-types (arguably the majority of foe they are likely to encounter) because he has 1+1 HD (or because he has FC of 1 Man +1, take your pick). . Yes, the M-U has 3.5 hp and the F-M has 4.5 hp. But the M-U is AC 9 and the F-M is AC 2. This makes the F-M about 3.4 times as resilient to normal attacks as the M-U. (The M-U is 55% likely, and the F-M 20% likely, to be hit by a normal blow. 1/.55*3.5 = 6.63. 1/.2*4.5= 22.5. 22.5/6.6 = 3.4).
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Post by Stormcrow on Oct 3, 2015 20:37:24 GMT -6
A careful reading of the prior paragraph dealing with the Dungeon Exploration turn expresses all actions occurring as full or fractions of a turn, yet oddly does not use the term "rounds". That's because it's not talking about combat. Why is this odd? Baloney. I'm not interpreting this through the lens of AD&D; I'm telling you what's on the printed page, and how it was played by the creators as reported by them. In a section about time and movement in the underworld, it gives you details of how long it takes to do various things while exploring the underworld. Fighting a combat is one of those things. Normal movement takes half a turn. Pursuit movement takes a quarter of a turn. Using ESP takes a quarter of a turn. Searching a 10' section of wall takes a full turn. A single round of combat takes a tenth of a turn. Other activities' periods are decided on by the referee. The "round" is not being defined here. Combat is not being explained here. All we're told is that a "round" of combat, whatever that is, takes a tenth of a turn in the underworld. No effort to equate or compare D&D with Chainmail is happening here. Why would they be? Are you sure you're understanding me? And lo! the description of melee being fast and furious belongs to the section on movement and time IN THE UNDERWORLD. Not in the wilderness. Nothing whatsoever is explained about combat while exploring the wilderness. The section on movement in the wilderness defines a turn as a day, allowing one move. Beyond this, absolutely no explanation of how long various activities take is given, because it's a freakin' day. There are as many "rounds" of combat, whatever those are, as you need. No explanations are given for how to run general combat because it was expected that the referee was familiar with wargames and could take some attack, defense, and weapon tables and structure them appropriately. And a "round" of combat simply means that structure in which every combatant gets to take his "turn."
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Post by waysoftheearth on Oct 3, 2015 20:55:12 GMT -6
I'm telling you what's on the printed page, and how it was played by the creators as reported by them. When it comes down to debating nuances of "the rules", what's on the printed page is distinct enough from the way the game was reportedly played to at least acknowledge each separately: I'm interested in the 1973 D&D draft and the D&D rules as they were printed in 1974, especially where the printed rules may differ from how EGG reportedly played. Stated that way it's quite an interesting question, and makes me wonder "why the hell didn't Gary write the game he was playing?" Or, perhaps, "what the hell happened?"
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Post by derv on Oct 3, 2015 21:11:05 GMT -6
Stormcrow I do not care for your apparent purposefully sloppy use of rhetoric. You should first read your own comments that I am responding to before running circles around your own arguments. Just for clarity- The number of rounds in a combat turn is not considered "indefinate", but they are "indeterminate".
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Post by waysoftheearth on Oct 4, 2015 0:06:29 GMT -6
To be clear at the outset, this post is about the printed word. I acknowledge that what took place at the game table differed (and continues to differ) from the printed word. There are two kinds of turns in dungeons: 10-minute turns and 1-minute combat turns. Combat turns are sometimes called rounds; they're the same thing. Okay, so we disagree on this point. Why..? The way I'm reading it this argument implies that an OD&D-combat-round must be a one minute period. That, for me, is the logical impasse. To accept that position we'd need to agree on : a) Why do TSR's contemporary games all employ sub-minute combat periods, but OD&D alone does not? b) Why, if OD&D does not use sub-minute combat periods, is nothing said about this innovation in the text? c) Why, in EW, does EGG explicitly detail the mechanics of sub-minute rounds without mentioning any change from OD&D's one-minute norm? d) Why, when editing Holmes, does EGG not alter sub-minute rounds? " There are ten rounds of combat per turn." (U&WA p8) This infamous quote creates all of the above difficulties if we assume it refers to a 10-minute dungeon exploration turn. All those problems vanish if we assume it refers to a one-minute combat turn. Moreover, examination of the 73-draft (e.g., see my post here) makes the latter interpretation seem all the more likely.
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