> each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast I disagree. Apart from choice-paralysis (do I do nothing again or finally go now?), this approach can either be slow or fast. If you slap into each action a bunch of modifiers, temporary modifiers, dice counting (large pools), reaction roll, detraction, comparison, etc that will in the end make that one game-second take ages in play time.

God, PLEASE...go with actually faster combat. It's hard enough to get everyone to commit to showing up to the game for a few hours on any kind of a regular basis. Don't waste what little time they DO have to tell stories together with pointless minutia. Just one guy's (very fervent) opinion.

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided. I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours. The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work. The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice. In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided. I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours. The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work. The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice. In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided. I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours. The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work. The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice. In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I think it's a false dichotomy. You want to decide what your design goals are, the kind of vibe you're trying to generate, and then create systems that support that vibe.

I identified the root of the problem yesterday. I set out to create my ideal fantasy rpg, and as I've been working of the rules it's been a bit difficult to accept that what I've been making is in fact a wargame. This is particularly true for the Fighter class, whose whole thing is the wargame element of the game. So the new strategy is to start with rules for squad-level combat, figure out how to make combat go as quick as possible, and then figure out what happens when a squad has one person in it.

I identified the root of the problem yesterday. I set out to create my ideal fantasy rpg, and as I've been working of the rules it's been a bit difficult to accept that what I've been making is in fact a wargame. This is particularly true for the Fighter class, whose whole thing is the wargame element of the game. So the new strategy is to start with rules for squad-level combat, figure out how to make combat go as quick as possible, and then figure out what happens when a squad has one person in it.

I have been chugging away at making my own fantasy ttrpg for several months now, and a decision I made early on has been bugging me as possibly being misguided. I really want a fast combat system. However, there are two ways the interpret "fast" here. The one I committed to early on was to make each round one second long, so on your turn you only have time to either move or act or do nothing. This does mean each turn feels really fast, since the amount of choices you need to make each round are extremely small, and this also make spellcasting seem way more risky and expensive than it actually is since you need to commit multiple rounds to the casting. It feels fast, but combat can take hours. The other option I did not pursue is to compress each scene into one big roll, creating a system similar to the Narrative Dice system of Genesys where you spend several minutes gathering a pool of dice which represent the chaos and misfortune of the scene, roll them once, augur the bones, and then combat is done. Usually the entire combat scene will take less than 5 minutes, but it's a long 5 minutes filled with details, debate, and checking your work. The reason I was attracted to the more granular first option was mainly because it's ironically the less crunchy option, since your options each round are to either Move, Fight, Defend, Aim, or do a quick Skill Check. However, as the system is growing it's becoming more clear to me that my game is fundamentally not about the fighting, its about the journey there and back to the community you call home. So, I'm starting to think I should have taken a more zoomed-out approach to combat, maybe starting with wargame rules and then working backwards to derive 1-person combat, maybe trying to make my own narrative dice system using the normal polyhedral dice. In the end, my priority is to avoid what most DnD-likes end up doing, which is combat that feels slow and also takes hours, but I gotta go in one direction or other. I'm curious what y'all's preferences are. When you are playing a TTRPG, would you rather play combat that feels fast but actually takes hours, or combat that feels slow but actually takes minutes? What's more important to you?

I think it's a false dichotomy. You want to decide what your design goals are, the kind of vibe you're trying to generate, and then create systems that support that vibe.

I identified the root of the problem yesterday. I set out to create my ideal fantasy rpg, and as I've been working of the rules it's been a bit difficult to accept that what I've been making is in fact a wargame. This is particularly true for the Fighter class, whose whole thing is the wargame element of the game. So the new strategy is to start with rules for squad-level combat, figure out how to make combat go as quick as possible, and then figure out what happens when a squad has one person in it.

...which is exactly how D&D style game engines evolved. There is little logic in using statistics & die rolls for individual troops but that is the weird D&D combat system.