Duration of combat turns in EPT?

[waysoftheearth]

Page 31 of EPT says:

A normal "turn" is assumed to take ten minutes. In combat, however, there are ten "combat rounds" per turn of one minute each.

Alas, it's somewhat ambiguous as to precisely what is one minute in duration. Do any of the original/early EPT players remember whether this phrase was meant to mean:

A: There are ten, one-minute "combat-rounds" in each ten-minute dungeon-exploration turn,

OR

B: There are ten, six-second "combat-rounds" in each one-minute Chainmail-esque combat turn.

?

Many thanks

[cadriel]

The EPT manuscript says (p. 21, under "550. Further on Combat."):

Moves in battle are fast and furious: there are ten "combat rounds" to the normal "move."

With the two together, it's pretty clear that a 60-second combat round is implied. (We could argue about two "moves" per turn, but Gygax's emendation was making it clear that rounds are one minute and not 30 seconds.)

You have the EPT manuscript in PDF, right? It seems silly to discuss nuances in the rules without it.

[waysoftheearth]

Is the EPT manuscript in PDF the same as the booklet from the original boxed set?

[cadriel]

Jun 15, 2014 7:50:24 GMT -6 waysoftheearth said:

Is the EPT manuscript in PDF the same as the booklet from the original boxed set?

No, it's actually Barker's original typed manuscript that was submitted to TSR. The PDF contains both an exact scan of the MS, and a "clean" copy that is OCRed from it. There are substantial rewrites that were done to the original, but I'm not sure that anyone has yet done a side-by-side comparison of the two.

[waysoftheearth]

Does this imply that any differences between the original manuscript PDF and the published version of EPT are then TSR/EGG edits? If so, perhaps there may be some D&D rules clarifications to be found?

[cadriel]

Jun 15, 2014 17:38:24 GMT -6 waysoftheearth said:

Does this imply that any differences between the original manuscript PDF and the published version of EPT are then TSR/EGG edits? If so, perhaps there may be some D&D rules clarifications to be found?

I think it was a lot of changes in organization and wording rather than substantive rules. There was a difference in the damage rules, but I haven't looked too much into this. A side-by-side analysis might reveal some minor points of interest, but I doubt it would reveal much (if at all) about D&D as such.

[greentongue]

Jun 15, 2014 7:30:36 GMT -6 cadriel said:

The EPT manuscript says (p. 21, under "550. Further on Combat."):

My version has no 550 section. It jumps from
510: Description of Bonus Spells
to
600: Experience Levels and Experience
=

[cadriel]

Jun 16, 2014 8:19:56 GMT -6 greentongue said:

My version has no 550 section. It jumps from
510: Description of Bonus Spells
to
600: Experience Levels and Experience
=

That's the 1975 TSR version or one of its reprints – my own reference copy is a Different Worlds reprint. I am referring to the 1974 "green cover" rules, a typewritten and staple-bound manuscript that Barker circulated before TSR edited and officially printed it. In 2012 this version was made available as a PDF with both a scan of the manuscript and a "clean" copy of the text via optical character recognition (or possibly having been manually re-typed).

See here: rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/99646/Empire-of-the-Petal-Throne-Original-Manuscript