Quick and Fuzzy thoughts on Fuzzy Turn Length

I often put up odd, untested rules ideas I've had here on this blog just to see the response - yours, and mine.

Bira at Octopus Carnival jumps on board with this approach!

"Two can play at that game!"
- Detective Frank Drebin, as he grabs his own hostage

Fuzzy turn length. Changing the GURPS turn length. It's not a new idea, but it's a thought provoking one as it deals with issues such as Time Spent and not simply multiplying turn length. It's roughly 5-10 seconds, ish, so you can pretty much get in a big action and then move on, or get in a long action given a few turns.

One thing the post says, though, is

These changes make characters such as archers and wizards more powerful in combat, since the number of things they can do over a given amount of turns has increased, while melee-focused character can still take more or less the same number of actions. Note that I have not tested how these changes interact with the magic system, so I can’t measure how much of an impact it’s going to have on spellcasters.

I've played quite a bit with the spell system, and my feeling is you would see the following:

- less concern with getting the breakpoints for speeding up spells. Who cares if Great Haste takes 3 seconds if you can cast it in one turn anyway?

- Missile spells should be unchanged, since for every one turn's worth of sword swipes a wizard gets to build up 1-6d worth of energy into a spell. The balance in unchanged.

- Thanks to sped up casting times, breadth of useful attack spells should be larger.

- Thanks to sped up casting times, people will try to cast Zombie in combat.

- Buff spells will end much more quickly, since their duration is in seconds and minutes, not turns. Changing this to "turns" might restore this balance, but then equally it means you're leaving wizards with second-by-second efficiency but taking it away from others. Some spells will be so short as to be useless (Great Haste), and might need tweaking just to prevent them from being fuzzed out of existance.

- Energy recover will actually occur at a fast enough rate to matter in fights - more so at "10 seconds" than "5 seconds," but it's either +1 FP every 12 turns or 24 turns with Recover Energy-20.

I think it would be interesting to try, but the default magic system is so tightly tied to seconds - and player expectations about spell utility to duration and time to cast - that it might need tweaking in play even as you playtest it.

Still interesting.