A Discussion on Time

[John]

So I'm thinking that we do need to have some sort of scale for this, especially as it applies in battle and searching an area.

Now for the battle part, it's not so much the rounds, which are already worked out for us, I'm referring to more the length of time it would take someone to cross a particualr battlefield, move to another position, or pick up a weapon.

So what I'm thinking for this, if you drop a weapon, picking it up would be your action for that round and consume your initiative roll.

As for the moving, this was usually worked out be either using miniatures, or with a piece of graph paper with little dots representing the monsters and players. Now as a rule, someone using missile weapons would stay farther back, and on a piece of graph paper, the exact time it would take to get there was determined using movement rate and the distance to the attacker.

So I'm thinking, if a character is going to move across a battle field to engage an enemy in the back, it will take one full round. So say you have an init of 3 and decided to move to attack someone a fair distance away from you, this would make your init 3 in the next round. Thus taking one full round to get to the attacker.

Now, searching something. Generally there are 2 kinds of searching, casual and extensive(careful examination looking for secret doors/compartments and traps). A casual search may only take a few seconds to a couple of minutes. An extensive search however, will take considerably longer. I'm thinking, that an area that is 5 feet by 5 feet will take at least 10 minutes to search, which is something that is gaugeable in game time depending on the post progression i would think.

But, I want to hear what you all think.

[Meinolf]

Just off the top of my head, here is how I picture this working:

Outdoors combat where there is a bit of distance between the opposing forces ...
• Stationary long-ranged characters (missile weapons essentially, such as bows, xbows and slings) get a preliminary round to lob off missiles before the melee clash.
• Moving ranged characters, or just those with shorter range weapons (thrown daggers, thrown axes, etc.) get to make half their normal number of attacks during this preliminary round.
• Melee get no attack during the preliminary round as they are moving toward the enemy, and trying not to get slaughtered by enemy ranged units, or plucked off the ground by aerial combatants.
• Finally, after the preliminary round, we get to the first round where melee can fight. From here, it pretty much goes back to normal as far as everyone has been experiencing in the Arena practice fights.

Indoors combat, such as in dungeons, where there are tight confined spaces ...
• Everything goes as it has in the Arena practice fights. There is no great distances for melee to move, so there is no need for a preliminary round. However, those fighters that are specialized in a ranged missile weapon still get a preliminary round, as long as they already have a missile at the ready for firing.

So, mostly this ruling would help dictate long-ranged fighting, such as over plains or within forests, or when the characters are inside a giant cavern, etc. Otherwise, everyone is so close together that judging distance isn't that big of an issue.

[Enigma]

As long as we know where everyone's characters are, we should be ok. All of it sounds good to me.

[Tune]

Question: If a monster/player is attacking another player by rushing forward, would that take up a full turn by the player/monster? Mainly I am wondering about the monster.

If a monster/player, and player are both rushing to attack each other (melee), would their attack turns be cut in half, or would it take up a turn for both of them?

Honestly, the only time that I imagine distance being a problem would be the first move by player/monster, or if someone is in a defensive stance. I don't really mean problem, I mean a person's movements resulting in a turn fully devoted to that action. Half of the next action for a melee person would be closing off the short gap of space, and attacking. All this depends on the space involved.

Calculating distance in an attack would be confusing for me. I understand the opening attack for melee characters being taken up by moving forward before an opponent. I'm wondering if a monster would be effected by distance or would it just be the player? The time in which it takes to do a battle would be much longer, which would help for people who are busy with other things or in a different time zone than the majority of the group.