Under the Hood – 6 Seconds

6 Seconds
By The Warden

If there’s any aspect of roleplaying games which best describe the difference between how the game is played and how the game plays out, it is time. What takes us four hours to play out at the table really only covers minutes in our make-believe world. Even this amount varies depending on what exactly goes on in an individual game; playing out transition scenes of heavy dialogue provides a more accurate equality, but combat is so out of touch with regards to time that it’s almost laughable.

Yet the majority of RPGs make a point to designate the average amount of time our characters use in a single turn. 6 seconds. This can vary from game to game, but this seems to be the average, whether it’s chosen as an accurate measurement based on calculation or simply because it’s the industry standard. At its simplest form, it basically allows for 10 turns to take place within 1 minute assuming all characters are acting in unison. Here’s the kicker: they aren’t. Maybe in combat, but not during a transition scene. No one’s talking simultaneously, they’re having a back-and-forth conversation. And that’s the point. For every significant aspect of your typical RPG (meaning combat or dialogue scenes), there is an equal detriment for why applying a locked time count per turn does not work. So why do we bother and, more importantly, why do we hold to it?

I suppose a better question is to ask why should we care? Because that’s what we do, us geeks. We poke and prod every unnecessary point in every topic we adore until the forum moderator gives us a warning. Besides, that’s what this column is all about. Analyzing what we take for granted in our RPGs to better understand how to apply and how we can use them (or toss them aside) to create better RPGs or appreciate what we love about our classics. Considering how firmly some GMs hold the value of a turn’s length, this topic seems incredibly appropriate while simultaneously vague and difficult.

Let’s cut straight to the point for a bit to help keep this topic reeled in: cataloguing the length of time a single turn takes helps monitor ongoing effects with duration, such as spells or technological effects. How long does that acid fog spell last and how are we supposed to keep track of the time which has passed without some base form of measurement? Let’s face it, aside from Battletech fans, most of us don’t want to consult a chart breaking down how long was our last turn. Wrapping it all into 6 seconds keeps it simple and allows us to focus on what’s truly important: submitting orcs to the horrific effects of acidic vapors. Simple enough, that works.

Perhaps it’s too simple. That’s the point. It’s the same with initiative; keep it simple so we can make attack rolls. What bothers me about 6 seconds is that it’s not bound by any sense of reality or believability and breaks one of the greatest aspects of roleplaying games – the ability to do whatever you can think of. So long as what you think of only requires one action in a 6 second period.

EXPERIMENTS IN TIME

Let’s perform a simple experiment, shall we? Measure out a 30-foot section of your house or apartment and time how long it takes for you to walk it. It takes me an average of 9 seconds to walk 30 feet. Just as the average time spent in a game’s turn is 6 seconds, the average distance walked is 30 feet and that’s in combination with performing at least one major action (such as an attack). Using reality, I can’t reach the full 30 feet until my second turn and I’m a 6’ tall human male who would easily qualify as Medium in every RPG I can find. I would have to run to reach that distance in the 6-second time limit and if I were a character in a game, running would require a two actions and I wouldn’t have time for anything else other than moving that distance. (Actually, I’d be expected to move 60 feet if I ran, so now it looks like we’re much slower than our characters.)

Now let’s step it up a notch. Counting the time on a stopwatch, cell phone, or wristwatch, go into the adjacent room and grab an item off the counter, from a drawer, or anything else appropriate. Doesn’t matter what. How long did that take? For me to fetch my cup of coffee from the kitchen counter in the next room (less than 30’ away), it took me 15 seconds. That’s three turns in game mechanics. If I were a character in a game, it would all take place in one turn. Two, if my GM was a dick about it.

Finally, let’s take a look at that most messed up of “free actions,” speech. Nearly every RPG on the market dictates the ability to speak to allies requires no action at all so long as you do so on your turn. With your time verifying machine in hand, record how long it takes for you to read aloud this sentence.

“I have found using seconds to keep track of time to be incredibly accurate. Whenever I doing something as simple as speak through my character, it makes perfect sense to me that my character can speak, swing a sword, shoot a gun, and run across a room in 6 seconds.”

How long did that take? As a character, I would need three turns to state everything clearly (and it didn’t help that I had the pressure of beating my previous time to cause the occasional fumble or two).

DO YOU FIND YOUR CHARACTER DOESN’T HAVE ENOUGH TIME?

Before going any further, I want to make it perfectly clear my goal is not to strike down the 6 Second Rule simply because it is not accurate to reality. My point is simply to demonstrate the absurdity of measuring every single minor action into a realistic measurement.

These are points I’ve made over the past few years in person to many other players when arguments over the 6 Second Rule dominated the table and it often feels like I’m making an infomercial pitch by showing how useless people are unwinding a garden hose in their backyard. Yet what if that infomercial showed you that instead of watering your garden using a bucket with holes drilled into the bottom, you could spray it with water from a hose attached to a spout? To me, measuring our turns in time is like drilling holes in a bucket; there has to be an easier way.

It’s all about the use of measurement in RPGs, not just time. Does your game express length in feet or meters? Miles or kilometers? Or does it use the amount of time it takes for a person to walk over the course of day, then by horseback, or by boat? These are all measurements put into place for our sakes and designers struggle on this choice based on the central market for their game. Some games have found ways to ditch these measurements and work with abstract units instead (such as simply stating distance in squares or hexes rather than feet for tactical RPGs). Time works the same as distance. It’s best applied abstract.

Seeing as all players and Gamemasters require turns to complete their individual objectives, why not simply measure the number of turns something will last? We might as well, because all we’re doing with those 6 seconds is determining how many turns we have available until the spell’s 2 minute duration expires. Screw the 2-minute acid fog and long live the 20-turn acid fog. Or take it a step further and simply state how many rounds it takes until something expires or kicks in.

BEYOND TIME

To quote Inception, we need to go three layers deep. Everything we’ve investigated so far involves keeping track of time using either seconds or turns, but what if we never kept track of time at all? Is it possible to play our games without such measurements or are we aiming for the unreachable?

The beauty of these games is that it’s entirely possible to create one in which time in immaterial, but that’s not the real question. Attempting it for all games is not exactly feasible because many games use time as a device to create tension and drama. A great example is the use of the Escalation Die from the new 13^th Age RPG. A single d6 is placed in the middle of the table at the start of the second round with the “1” side facing up, providing all PCs to have +1 to all their rolls. On the next round, the d6 is becomes a 2 to become a +2 bonus, and so forth until it reaches the ultimate +6. It takes the concept of tracking time and gives it greater purpose other than a countdown to something’s conclusion. Other games set time-based deadlines for the mission’s success, particular heists or other crime-related RPGs or individual one-shots. In these cases, time is a huge factor in the game’s mechanics and enjoyment.

For everything else, it feels forced. Even if a spell lasts 1 minute, 10 turns, or 2 rotations of a potato chip, does your game have combat running that long on a regular basis? In one of my D&D 4e campaigns, the DM announces the start of a new round like a boxing match and we never break the ninth round, yet nearly every spell in the book going longer than a single turn will last at least 10 rounds. In other words, it will last for the entire combat. If it lasts for hours, it will last the entire session or until our characters rest.

I don’t know about you, but as I get older, it feels as if time slips between my fingers like melted butter. We constantly struggle with issues of balancing a heavy workload, finding time for our families, and engaging in precious activities like roleplaying while holding done a steady job, eating right, exercising, and getting a good night’s sleep. Having to concern ourselves with time is much like struggling with money in the game – I don’t like dealing with money in the real world, why the hell would I want to count coins in a make-believe world when I can just steal what I want or take it from the troll I just killed? If I’ve never played a character that’s ever celebrated a birthday, am I really concerned with the exact amount of time required to complete the dungeon?

Speaking of which, that’s all the time we have for this week. Pun intended.