Knights & Knaves Alehouse

In the OD&D by the Book section Matthew started a thread "One Minute Rounds and the Alternative Combat System "
it begins with a description from a Conan book where 3 opponents are destroyed in Conan's wake.
Some numbers are stated and the chance of this actually happening are not great.

I think Matthew was saying how OD&D couldn't really simulate this story.
I believe AD&D could simulate a situation like this.

Conan is running from a mob of warriors and he is a few segments ahead of them in movement.
Three 0-level guardsmen are on some stairs and they are suprised when Conan makes a super human leap into them.
Because they are surprised Conan gets an "attack routine" and because they are 0-level he gets 14 attacks per round.
You have 3 dead guardsman even if Conan missed 50% of the time. The segment after Conan continues running.
The bodies becoming a trip wire to the trailing mob of warriors.

In defense of the 14 attacks per round.
From page 62 DMG.
Because the party surprised is (relatively) inactive, the surprising party will
be able to attempt telling blows during each segment of surprise as if the
segment were an entire round!

Even if he doesn't get the 14 attacks he will still get two attacks and perhaps he had surprised them for 2 segments.

It was more along the lines of, it takes a lot longer using the alternative combat system than using Chain Mail Man-to-Man, because the probabilities of scoring a kill are less in the former than in the latter. To put it another way, the alternative combat system is (purposefully) slower in finding a resolution to similar combats, but uses the same time scale.

I think if you want the AD&D combat system to track to any visual scene you pretty much have to take full advantage of the multi-attacks vs 0-level (remembering that 99% of everybody in the world is 0-level) and the per-segment attacks during surprise rules, both of which speed combat way up and get you something closer to the image of Conan chewing through a crowd of mooks. Actual one-attack-per-minute combat is only for hero-vs-hero (or hero-vs-big ass Alpha Monster) duels where there's assumed to be lots of maneuvering and feints and quick flurries of inconclusive action. There was a cool thread a while back at DF where someone posted a YouTube clip of the battle with Shelob in the LOTR movie that lasts about 4 minutes along with a description of what happened in the surprise segment and each of the 4 combat rounds (even though in the clip itself there was tons of running around (remember that in AD&D positioning is fluid with a 10' radius), dropping and picking up items, etc. all of which got glossed over because it didn't result in a wound/no-wound/saving throw/morale check/etc.).

And, last but not least, remember that AD&D's purpose is to make an entertaining game, not to faithfully recreate scenes from books or movies. Super-detailed combat with lots of tactical detail is both slow-moving and difficult for casual players to grasp, but abstracted combat where one roll is telling is unsatisfying because players don't want their characters to die that quickly, so Gygax split the difference, keeping the abstraction but slowing down the pace to (at least in most cases) allow combats to last multiple rounds, giving more opportunity for the players to act without any single action likely to be telling. Gygax actually explains this in some detail in a Dragon editorial from around the time the DMG was released (that I'm pretty sure has been extensively quoted from around here in the past).

T.Foster wrote:

I think if you want the AD&D combat system to track to any visual scene you pretty much have to take full advantage of the multi-attacks vs 0-level (remembering that 99% of everybody in the world is 0-level) and the per-segment attacks during surprise rules, both of which speed combat way up and get you something closer to the image of Conan chewing through a crowd of mooks.

This has been my only way to reconcile the relationship between the two systems.

Solinor wrote:In the OD&D by the Book section Matthew started a thread "One Minute Rounds and the Alternative Combat System "
it begins with a description from a Conan book where 3 opponents are destroyed in Conan's wake.
Some numbers are stated and the chance of this actually happening are not great.

I think Matthew was saying how OD&D couldn't really simulate this story.
I believe AD&D could simulate a situation like this.

Conan is running from a mob of warriors and he is a few segments ahead of them in movement.
Three 0-level guardsmen are on some stairs and they are suprised when Conan makes a super human leap into them.
Because they are surprised Conan gets an "attack routine" and because they are 0-level he gets 14 attacks per round.
You have 3 dead guardsman even if Conan missed 50% of the time. The segment after Conan continues running.
The bodies becoming a trip wire to the trailing mob of warriors.

In defense of the 14 attacks per round.
From page 62 DMG.
Because the party surprised is (relatively) inactive, the surprising party will
be able to attempt telling blows during each segment of surprise as if the
segment were an entire round!

Even if he doesn't get the 14 attacks he will still get two attacks and perhaps he had surprised them for 2 segments.

If a person was able to attack for the entire 10 segments that make up a round (6sec x 10=60 seconds) they could fire 20 arrows or attack 20 times if using 2 weapons, one in each hand, or 10 times with a single weapon.

Also, what surprise ability are you giving Conan here? In this situation, I would think standard 1-2 would be appropriate (running up on them this way).

Btw, I used to HATE the idea of a 1 minute round but have come to love it. The scenario you describe above a good example of how great it works PCs have to remember it cuts both ways as well.

AxeMental wrote:
Also, what surprise ability are you giving Conan here? In this situation, I would think standard 1-2 would be appropriate (running up on them this way).

Just the normal 1-2 surprise as you suggest.

As a barbarian (per UA) surely Conan should surprise on a 1-3

Solinor wrote:

AxeMental wrote:
Also, what surprise ability are you giving Conan here? In this situation, I would think standard 1-2 would be appropriate (running up on them this way).

Just the normal 1-2 surprise as you suggest.

How are you calculating 14 attacks by conan in two segments?

You said: "Because they are surprised Conan gets an "attack routine" and because they are 0-level he gets 14 attacks per round."

I'm pretty sure he's assuming Conan is 14th level.