D&D Archaeology: 10 second combat rounds

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LikelyArrow

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This post began with a curiosity: why are combat rounds in Basic D&D — Holmes through BECMI — 10 seconds long?

OD&D and AD&D — both editions — have 1 minute combat rounds. WOTC D&D editions have 6 second rounds, which while different is clearly derived from AD&D, which splits up rounds into ten 6 second segments. This makes Basic D&D’s 10 second rounds stand out as a bit of an anomaly.

I think I found the answer. Most of this is speculation, but I’ll try to back up my reasoning the best I can. If you know any evidence that supports or contradicts my theory, please let me know.

The basic hypothesis is this: AD&D was originally going to have 10 second combat rounds, but between the publication of Holmes and the publication of the 1e Player’s Handbook, Gygax changed his mind.

First, let’s pay attention to the timeline:

  • OD&D came out in 1974, and specified (Book 3, page 8) that combat rounds are one minute long.
  • The Holmes Basic set was published in 1977, and says on page 9 that combat rounds are 10 seconds long.
  • The 1e Monster Manual came out in December of that year.
  • The Player’s Handbook came out the next year, in June of 1978, with the Dungeon Master’s Guide finishing the trio in 1979. (The DMG is not particularly relevant here since the PHB already established that combat rounds are one minute long.)
This sandwiches Holmes between two editions that both use 1 minute rounds. Furthermore, Holmes is clearly intended to as an introduction to AD&D, not OD&D, despite some people grouping it with OD&D: it refers multiple times to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Now, I can see no scenario in which it makes sense to start people off using 10 second combat rounds only to switch them to 1 minute combat rounds of ten 6 second segments. The single most plausible interpretation of these events to my mind is that the intention was to use 10 second rounds in AD&D, but then Gary changed his mind and decided to keep the 1 minute rounds but divide them into ten segments of 6 seconds each.

It is possible that the intention was to keep rounds 1 minute long but divide them into six 10 second segments. And this gets to a facet of the question I haven’t addressed: why 10 seconds? The answer can be found in Supplement 2: Blackmoor.

The Blackmoor supplement introduced a new variant initiative system that split the round into eight segments: six movement segments, one pre-movement segment, and one post-movement segment. Movement was now to be done on a segment-by-segment basis, with a table for dissecting how far a character could move in each segment based on their per-round movement rate, and attacks occurred on specific segments depending on a number of factors including the character’s Dexterity.

My sense is that the pre-movement and post-movement segments were essentially intended to take a negligible amount of time each — essentially, they were for quick reactions and actions gotten in at the last-second — leaving the 60 seconds of round time divided equally between the six movement segments, making them 10 seconds each. Voila: the origin of 10 second rounds.

The AD&D 1e combat round is similarly divided into segments, but they’re 6 seconds long each and so there are ten of them. This can be a seen as a straightforward variant of the Blackmoor system, and indeed AD&D also tracks events on a segment-by-segment basis — though only in special cases, unlike the Blackmoor system. In AD&D segments are used primarily for surprise segments, when characters get multiple attacks per round, to determine whether an attack interrupts a spell, or whether a spell gets delayed until the next round.

So could the intention have been to use 1 minute rounds with 10 second segments in AD&D, instead of 6 second segments, but otherwise keep the rest of the AD&D (or perhaps Blackmoor) initiative system? It’s possible, but one thing does slightly push against this: A 1st level fighter by Holmes can attack up to 6 times, once per round, while in OD&D and AD&D he can attack at most (I think) 3 times, and that only in very favorable circumstances, including very high Dexterity, a light weapon, and light or no armor.

One piece of evidence I was going to offer was that Basic D&D allowed characters to move twice as fast as OD&D and AD&D characters, between 20 and 40 feet per 10 seconds (between 1.5 and 3 mph). However, I double-checked and that’s a B/X and BECMI thing; Holmes’ speeds track with OD&D and AD&D.

Eh, I suppose it’s possible.

So that leaves one question big question outstanding: why the change to one minute rounds and six second segments? I actually don’t necessarily think this was about the lawsuit with Arneson — which happened in 1979, after the change was made, but if that possibility was already on the horizon then it might have been a way to distinguish AD&D from both Holmes D&D and Arneson’s Blackmoor supplement.

My guess at the moment is simply that (a) he decided that six attacks per minute was too many and (b) ten is a nicer number than six.

Well, that’ll wrap this up. One little bit of trivia before I go: Chainmail does not seem to define the length of its turns, but if we assume a marching speed of about 3mph for light and heavy infantry (move: 9”), then that works out very nearly perfectly if each Chainmail turn is one minute long.
 
The 1977 Basic Set draft was independently written by Dr. J. Eric Holmes, who didn’t work for TSR and lived in California (he was a college professor), and offered to TSR for publication as a complete manuscript. He was likely familiar with some of the “California scene” D&D variants like CalTech D&D (which grew into Warlock) and the Bay Area “Perrin Conventions” (which grew into RuneQuest), both of which used 10-second rounds because they thought minute-long rounds were too long, and it’s assumed that’s why his draft has 10-second rounds.

Gary Gygax edited Dr. Holmes’ manuscript before publication (mostly to add in references to the parallel in-progress work TSR was doing on AD&D) but for whatever reason left the 10 second rounds (and a few other anomalous rules, like magic-users being able to create scrolls from 1st level, initiative in combat being in Dex order (which required assigning Dex scores to monsters), and daggers getting 2 attacks per round) in place.

Maybe he was thinking of using 10 second rounds in AD&D as well, but we can’t necessarily assume that. Instead it seems most likely he just didn’t edit those parts of the manuscript all that carefully and wasn’t really concerned with the rules being consistent with either OD&D or the upcoming AD&D. Apparently it wasn’t until Lawrence Schick joined TSR (late 1978ish) that any real effort was put into trying to make the rules consistent.
 
Never understood why this distinction would ever mean much at the table. I prefer to think of the round as fairly elastic, definitely not into the granularity of very short rounds but I do prefer the feel of play of B/X despite its technically shorter round duration.
 
FWIW I prefer the 1 minute rounds of AD&D - it makes sense to me given the relatively abstract combat system of D&D and I like the idea that the to-hit roll can represent your one opportunity to do significant damage in what could be multiple exchanges of blows.
 
Well, this is awkward... in addition to my being just plain wrong about the history, I just realized the initiative system is in Eldritch Wizardry, not Blackmoor!

In my defense, I keep all the OD&D supplements in a big binder. I must have gotten confused about which part I was in.
 
I like the idea that the to-hit roll can represent your one opportunity to do significant damage in what could be multiple exchanges of blows.
That's how I present D&D combat. It's absolutely NOT swing-hit, swing miss with the combatants standing in their 5' squares facing off. A "to hit" roll represents your one opportunity to land a telling blow in a furious melee. A miss isn't necessarily a "whiff" or sign of incompetence; it often means that the opportunity to deliver a decisive blow didn't pan out or the opponent didn't leave themselves open. Fighters and their multiple attacks represents their ability to observe or develop more opportunities to deliver a decisive blow.
 
I'm sure many people here have sparred in some form, be it fencing or HEMA or just good old LARPing. 10 seconds is a long time in a fight, and outside pitched battles a minute should actually see most fights concluded long before it's up. The 10-second round also represents that one chance to hit in a flurry of blows, not sure where the 1-minute round of AD&D comes from (well, Gygax, obviously).

One of the many, many, many interesting artefacts of Holmes is that there is a 10-round (i.e. 1 minute) "combat turn" as well as a 10-minute "regular turn". I ran with a literal interpretation of this for spell casting in BLUEHOLME™, so spells cast during combat have their duration cut to 1/10. The in-game justification is combat stress, tying in with being unable to cast spells at all while engaged in melee. "Engaged" in this sense means combatants being within 10 feet of each other, so casters have to stay well away from fights. The latter, incidentally, makes offensive spells with a range of "touch" rather tricky to use.
 
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In the case of missile fire I think of it as waiting for the opportunity to make the shot - so, not a flurry of arrows but there are few openings when trying to shoot at moving enemies. Of course, shooting into melee in old-school D&D was always a fraught tactic! :crossed:
 
No doubt, I’m not complaining I think D&D works just fine as long as you don’t try to break it down to make sense. That’s why I roll my eyes at house rules that try to make D&D combat realistic. It just isn’t that game and trying to do so, well that way leads to madness…
 
I'm sure many people here have sparred in some form, be it fencing or HEMA or just good old LARPing. 10 seconds is a long time in a fight, and outside pitched battles a minute should actually see most fights concluded long before it's up. The 10-second round also represents that one chance to hit in a flurry of blows, not sure where the 1-minute round of AD&D comes from (well, Gygax, obviously).
Indeed, for 1HD or less people (especially unarmored ones who aren't professional soldiers) and critters, most combats will almost certainly end within 1 minute.

Even if they survive/aren't KOed, they will likely look to un-as the situation ASAP. :hehe:

As with the ten-minute exploration Turn, I just assumed that the one-minute combat round accounted for all sorts of hurry-up-and-wait, minor maneuverings, and the fact that everyone involved in the broader melee (encounter) was on not-quite-the-same schedule, so it was a matter of lumping it all together and abstracting it a bit.

It may just have been a wargamer design thing from that era too.

I recall some design notes from, I think Frank Chadwick, who was criticized for having turns represent a seemingly long time in one of his minis games. His argument was that, basically, gamers tend to only think about the peak performance, flash-of-an-eye moments, and forget about all the average performance, hesitation, and slowdowns that happen even among (perhaps especially among) experienced troops.

Th "long" turn/round scale doesn't really harm anything or change the functional pace of play, it's just that players tend to want everything to be peak performance at all ties and ultra-slo-mo.
 
FWIW I prefer the 1 minute rounds of AD&D - it makes sense to me given the relatively abstract combat system of D&D and I like the idea that the to-hit roll can represent your one opportunity to do significant damage in what could be multiple exchanges of blows.
I found it is totally counter-intuitive to how players think their dice rolls relates to combat. For four decades I consistently find players think of one to-hit roll as equal to a specific swing of your weapon.

One of the virtues of GURPS is that it totally eliminates this issue for combat. Every time you roll is for something specific you want to try to attempt as your character.

I address this in my Majestic Fantasy rules

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I've always felt 1 minute combat rounds are ridiculous. I've always assumed they are a relic of the large scale wargaming roots of D&D.

It's even more ridiculous when the whiffing starts, which D&D and AD&D has built into it heavily. AD&D is probably one of the few systems where the amount of in game time combat takes is longer than the amount of time it takes to resolve it. I remember in the 80s there were lots of jokes about how long combats were if you actually counted the rounds as a minute long. The abstraction starts falling apart as soon as you start bean counting arrows or some other type of ammo or start thinking about movement rates of those not directly engaged or who are fleeing.

Ten seconds is already pretty damn long as well as extremely abstract.
 
More absurd or less absurd when calculated than the 10 second combat round versus real world resolution? :grin:

I mean, I can understand the scuffle and energy aspect, but then you take how many real time minutes to resolve all that for a party of say, 6 PCs?

Why should a player whose character's actions are estimated to take 10 seconds have 5 minutes of real time to plot their next actions?

(BTW, this was that larger scale wargamer thing I was talking about with Frank Chadick. He had his combat turns representing 15 minutes of scale time activities and calculating that they would take about that much real time to resolve. So again, maybe there was just something in wargamer circles in those days where designers were trying to get resolution and time-representation more closely paired up).
 
The timescale of a combat round is hugely dependent on what you imagine is being represented by the events you resolve each round. A boxing match that goes the distance lasts 45 canonical 1-minute D&D rounds, meaning you should expect a competent fighter to land 20-30+ blows, each doing perhaps 1-2 points of damage (debatable, of course, but it can't average 0, and a normal person could be totally incapacitated and possibly killed by one good shot from a trained heavyweight, so this seems reasonable to me). So, in classic D&D terms, even a 10th level fighter will be brought near or to incapacitation in a bout. In this context, the 1 minute round makes perfect sense.

Now switch to a sport-fencing bout, where each exchange typically lasts a few seconds, even if it involves several serious attempts at an attack, and the whole bout, minus judging breaks, might be 2-3 minutes, over which 15 or so total hits probably have been scored (10 by the winner and however many more by the loser).
 
1 minute rounds are one of those things that really bothered me when I was younger that just roll off me these days.

OTOH, I could also be okay with "Somewhere between a few seconds and a minute" as the definition.
 
Minute-long combat rounds are one of the (many) D&Disms I wouldn’t retain if I were writing my own game but that I accept and am not bothered with when playing D&D. One thing I do like is that with each round being so long a lot can be accomplished each round (as long as you’re not attacking) - you can move a substantial distance and accomplish just about any other task (digging something out of your pack, administering first aid, etc) in a single round. With shorter rounds a lot of actions take several rounds to complete, which both leads to player boredom and frustration if they might have to wait a half-hour of real time to complete something fairly simple and mundane, and also makes it unduly dangerous if they might be subjected to multiple missile or spell attacks during that time. I feel like this was a deliberate decision (or at least a happy accident with a positive unintended consequence) to encourage players to try to do other stuff in combat besides just stand and trade blows and makes the game more dynamic and fun - or at least it does for me.
 
The timescale of a combat round is hugely dependent on what you imagine is being represented by the events you resolve each round. A boxing match that goes the distance lasts 45 canonical 1-minute D&D rounds, meaning you should expect a competent fighter to land 20-30+ blows, each doing perhaps 1-2 points of damage (debatable, of course, but it can't average 0, and a normal person could be totally incapacitated and possibly killed by one good shot from a trained heavyweight, so this seems reasonable to me). So, in classic D&D terms, even a 10th level fighter will be brought near or to incapacitation in a bout. In this context, the 1 minute round makes perfect sense.

Now switch to a sport-fencing bout, where each exchange typically lasts a few seconds, even if it involves several serious attempts at an attack, and the whole bout, minus judging breaks, might be 2-3 minutes, over which 15 or so total hits probably have been scored (10 by the winner and however many more by the loser).

In the non-HW weight classes a boxer can throw more than a hundred punches a round, a good boxer lands around 40% of their power punches, although the rates are different between a jab and a power punch (anything besides a jab is a power punch) whereas an elite boxer can often land more than 50 percent of their power punches.

Basically D&D not surprisingly can't model a boxing match very well, especially with a punch being 1-2 dmg each landed shot, unless you give a boxer a mountain of hit points.
 
Another time consideration in B/X is that you always round up the time combat took to the next full round Turn (ten minutes) to represent post-combat recovery before moving on. That rule made if clear to me that there was a level of abstraction in the time-keeping in D&D, so the one-minute combat rounds don't bother me.
 
Time in combat is one of those very tricky things when you really start to try to pin them down. I think there are valid arguments for the 10 second versus the 1 minute round

Seconds and minutes just strike me as kinda odd measurements in a fantasy rpg. I assume clocks of a kind existed but I can't think the average person would have thought in such units. Bit of an odd complaint I realize but it would be like running a fantasy world with metres and kilometres.
 
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If you are carefully tracking to time to see when torches burn out and spells expire, it makes sense to make one minute the smallest unit of measurement you ever have to deal with.
 
In the non-HW weight classes a boxer can throw more than a hundred punches a round, a good boxer lands around 40% of their power punches, although the rates are different between a jab and a power punch (anything besides a jab is a power punch) whereas an elite boxer can often land more than 50 percent of their power punches.

Basically D&D not surprisingly can't model a boxing match very well, especially with a punch being 1-2 dmg each landed shot, unless you give a boxer a mountain of hit points.
I disagree with the take that each punch thrown is being modeled by D&D as an attack roll. The D&D attack roll is an abstraction that measures the chance you deliver a consequential blow that results in hit point reduction (itself an abstraction that measures your reserves/capacity to continue fighting rather than something simple like blood loss or whatever). Few of the individual punches a boxer lands in a round substantially diminish an opponent's ability to keep going; most are preparing the ground for a more substantial hit.
 
I think an interesting question for people who prefer a combat system that models each distinct movement or action (which sometimes includes me!) is: how are we supposed to resolve combat at that level of granularity if we want a fight to be resolvable in a reasonable period of time, which I would put at no more than a couple of minutes for a garden variety clash between a PC and a not-too-important NPC or monster?

Similarly, how should we represent the part of close combat that occupies most of the time in most circumstances: all the subtle movement and posturing of guards as combatants seek the positioning and tempo to launch an attack? No form of close combat really looks like two Rock'em Sock'em Robots banging away at each other (besides a few brief moments when a fight reaches a decisive 'crisis').

Generally, the way a combatant demonstrates some form of skill and mastery is by controlling where their opponent is in relation to themselves, and acting decisively at a precise moment when their opponent is in a poor position. This is true of boxing, fencing, wrestling and everything else you can easily think of. To my knowledge, there are no combat systems that do this well, and the only ones I've seen that really try are just too slow to work well as table top gaming engines. In this sense, representing combat with deep versimilitude is the white whale of gaming. And from what I've seen of them, all common video games are similarly bad (or, usually, much worse).

Once you get frustrated thinking through possible solutions to these problems, you might decide that abstract to-hit rolls and hit points are basically fine in the context of a table top game where a lot of things other than attack rolls happen in an evening of play.
 
In my mind, most of the physics fundamentals of role playing (length, mass, time, speed, etc.) are abstracted and as long as they are internally consistent then one doesn't really need to struggle too much with realism. 5E has a 6-second turn, where a character can move around 30 feet and make an attack action plus a bonus action. Or, in 6 seconds one can double-move somewhere around 60 feet if they wish to be running and have no action. I know that I should grab a calculator to find out if this running speed is at all realistic, but the gamer part of me has never bothered to do this. If it "works" in the game then the exact numbers don't really matter that much.
 
Similarly, how should we represent the part of close combat that occupies most of the time in most circumstances: all the subtle movement and posturing of guards as combatants seek the positioning and tempo to launch an attack? No form of close combat really looks like two Rock'em Sock'em Robots banging away at each other (besides a few brief moments when a fight reaches a decisive 'crisis').
Good point. There are lots of combat actions that make more sense at a minute time scale, such as a thief disarming a trap. The argument for 6-second often centers around it being more "realistic", but there are plenty of places where actions being accomplished in 6 seconds in 5E seems unlikely. A minute combat round also helps avoid situations where a player might spend several rounds completing the same action.

I used to run GURPS with its 1-second rounds, which leads to lots of of issues in adjudicating any action that takes longer than making a blind swing at someone. That was the game where I began simply not worrying about the exact length of rounds in most combat round.

To continue my point from my last post, the one-minute combat rounds and ten-minute turns work very well for tracking time in a dungeon crawl. It gives a good framework for situations where you need to track time objectively as opposed to the more common GM technique of "Um, i guess it took you were in there for three hours or so." (which admittedly is perfectly fine for most RPG adventures). That's the main reason I would always go with 1-minute rounds in a game focused on old-school exploration.The time-keeping may not seem accurate if you like it at it blow-by-blow, but the results work fine for the purpose of knowing how long the entire fight took.
 
More heretically, a lot of the same arguments for the one-minute combat round for hand-to-hand apply equally well to ranged combat, even modern ranged combat.

It isn't the telling strike that takes a long time, it's everything before and after that instant.
 
As mentioned above, if a combat is expected to take a full turn anyway the round length doesn't really matter so B/X doesn't have this issue. In D&D and Holmes, however, combats over 10 rounds would go past one turn.
 
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Don’t have a lot of time this weekend to participate in this, but finding it very fascinating. A couple of points:

I’ve found the various actions in 5e that realistically take more than 6 seconds to be slightly irritating, but I try to view it as a superpower to do things at that speed.

we haven’t even begun to talk about endurance over a fight.
 
Don’t have a lot of time this weekend to participate in this, but finding it very fascinating. A couple of points:

I’ve found the various actions in 5e that realistically take more than 6 seconds to be slightly irritating, but I try to view it as a superpower to do things at that speed.
And that's without getting into how generous the system is with making non-combat action into free actions, which is harder for me to overlook than the length of a combat round.
 
As mentioned above, if a combat is expected to take a full turn anyway the round length doesn't really matter so V/X doesn't have this issue. In D&D and Holmes, however, combats over 10 rounds would go past one turn.
A D&D fight that lasts more than ten minutes (10 x 1 minute combat rounds) is probably a fairly big deal encounter with either a big ol' baddie or a bunch of little ones mobbing in. or a truly absurd amount of whiffines, suggesting some sort of "combat-puzzle" where normal tactics can't work.

If it goes beyond 2 Turns/ 20 (1 minute) rounds, I would guess that there was a literal battle going on that the PCs were part of, and that the combat was essentially a number of encounters rolling into one another.

It's those kinds of circumstances, however, that make me think the one-minute round makes even more sense.
 
IIRC, there's an old wargame designer term for some of this which may have implications for this discussion: Bottom-Up Design.

Roughly, it's when a designer looks at what may be accomplished at a very atomic level, then uses that for the basis of design at a more zoomed out level.

Sometimes this can create some very distorted results.

A classic example might be asking what a well-trained gunman can do in 3 seconds (or 6 or 10 seconds) and then scale that up based on that, but with the assumption that the same gunman can accomplish that consistently every 3 /6/10 seconds.

It's the bolded part where the flaw tends to come in.

The designer isn't wrong about the first bit. They could be absolutely correct.


A bigger picture concept though is: Does it really-really matter either way?

Considering that at least some of the influence on early RPG design did come from miniatures gaming, and that by current day, some of that influence is likely to flow in the opposite direction as well, a lot of skirmish designers don't bother with exact time scales for a character turn/round. Mostly because it doesn't matter for functional play.
 
A strange coincidence with this thread - I was timing my shots at the archery range two days ago as part of another discussion and came to one shot every 10 seconds, including reload. Lars Anderson shows he can go faster with a different set up. So I can absolutely see how bows are a single shot in this range.


Roughly, it's when a designer looks at what may be accomplished at a very atomic level, then uses that for the basis of design at a more zoomed out level.
This is how I tend to approach the problem, and I find that it is less distorted and more just less fun to play because folks want to gloss over the atomic things. The result is largely the same though.
 
Whoever mentioned the importance of endurance in fights was spot on: in reality, one of the ways a skilled fighter defeats an amature in combat sports, particularly those like wrestling and boxing where you can burn a lot of energy fast, is to basically keep someone at bay for a couple of minutes/rounds till they tire and then nuke them. I have yet to encounter a TTRPG system where that is possible.
 
Whoever mentioned the importance of endurance in fights was spot on: in reality, one of the ways a skilled fighter defeats an amature in combat sports, particularly those like wrestling and boxing where you can burn a lot of energy fast, is to basically keep someone at bay for a couple of minutes/rounds till they tire and then nuke them. I have yet to encounter a TTRPG system where that is possible.
I've never boxed professionally just amateur backyard stuff and goofing around in the military but holy shit going all-out for an extended period of time was EXHAUSTING and this was during the best shape of my life. Pro boxers do crazy amounts of endurance training.
 
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Whoever mentioned the importance of endurance in fights was spot on: in reality, one of the ways a skilled fighter defeats an amature in combat sports, particularly those like wrestling and boxing where you can burn a lot of energy fast, is to basically keep someone at bay for a couple of minutes/rounds till they tire and then nuke them. I have yet to encounter a TTRPG system where that is possible.
Mythras, when you play with the fatigue rules. You start experiencing penalties, even to your endurance rolls, when you fail your first one (at CON in seconds round up to the next round). Third one makes that penalty worse. The others reduce initiative and movement and eventually the number of actions you can take.

I would be shocked if gurps doesn’t handle this.
 
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