What Can You Do?
Each week I do an Indies & More post where I take a look at Monte Cook’s Legends and Lore column for the week and share some thoughts on how other games and designers tackle the same issues. I’m not arguing with Monte or speaking for some larger design movement, these are just my thoughts on the same topic coming from a different gaming background. Since Monte’s writing for Wizards of the Coast he can’t talk about how other games deal with these issues, that’s why I write this column. This week Monte’s topic was actions per round.
I’m going to start this one off with a bit of a challenge to Monte’s presumptions and turn his question around: Why do you have turns?
There are a lot of answers. For a tactical boardgame it’s more or less essential to have turns as a matter of practicality. For a competitive game it’s a key part to maintaining an even playing field. If you’re designing a game that’s more or less in those styles, of course, turns.
But what about movies, books, and TV? How often does a director dogmatically cut between each participant in a combat to see what they’re doing, giving each equal time? Does an author devote a paragraph at a time to each side of a battle? In narratives it seems like the common approach is to follow action where it’s happening, focusing in on the interesting moments and not caring too much if everyone gets equal time. If you’re designing a game that’s more like an action movie, turns may not be the answers.
Bringing up my favorite example again, Apocalypse World is turnless, instead giving the GM a mandate to portray the world, which means keeping a vague track of time. There aren’t turns exactly, instead the GM might say “while Yeeze is beating up the gang leader, what are you doing over at the junk pile?”
That’s all slightly off topic. Taking the assumption that yes, there will be turns, how long is a turn? There are infinite options of course. A favorite of mine is volleys in Burning Wheel which are described as “a heartbeat.”
The important bit is not so much the exact time spent in the narrative, or the number of actions a player gets to take: it’s the tie between the player’s choices and the fictional outcomes. Minute-long rounds aren’t a problem when the player chooses an action on a broad scale. If my choice for a round is more of a stance that a specific movement, the round can be long. If what I choose for my character is instead very specific and finite, like swinging a sword, the round can be shorter.
I think that quite a few games, Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel among them, show that it’s not so important how many actions you get in a round or how long a round is, it’s all about how well a round ties to what you want your character to do and your ability to describe that to the group. That’s a lot of what Monte’s getting at, where combat flows more smoothly because I’m saying what my character does directly, with close ties to the fiction, no matter the time scale.
The number of actions in a round and the time at the table we use to play out a combat don’t strike me as all that important, so long as the combat is interesting and rewarding. I’ve played Burning Wheel combats where we spent probably half an hour or more resolving seconds of time for our characters, but it was worthwhile and rewarding because every one of those seconds was dramatic and interesting, often life-and-death even. The exact division of combat and the speed at which combat resolves is far less important than what’s actually happening in the game, so long as what’s happening is exciting and relevant.
The fact is that most adults in a social situation will take turns, at least in a general sense. They won’t share the spotlight exactly, but most people learn that good manners means taking turns, and that follows through into a game. Specific turns aren’t a necessity for people to share play time.
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