As you might know from reading here before, I hang out on the RPG.net forums a lot. Whenever a discussion about GURPS starts there, some people often complain they feel intimidated or annoyed by the 1-second combat turns.

Other games tend to have a less granular concept of turn duration and of what exactly constitutes an action, so players used to them usually expect to be able to do one “complete thing” in each turn without bothering with detailed setup steps. For example, a ranged attack with a bow in D&D takes a single action that includes aiming, shooting, drawing a new arrow, and nocking it, all of which are distinct steps in GURPS.

I actually like 1-second turns and will be keeping them in my games, but I present here a possible way to make them fuzzier for those groups who don’t enjoy them as much. This is a fairly fundamental change to the base GURPS system, probably lends itself better to games that used simplified combat rules instead of things like detailed hex maps and range measures.

This also helps combat feel a bit more like what you might see in action movies or similar media, which tend to slow down things to make them easier to follow.

Fuzzy Combat in GURPS

Under this rule, a combat round is no longer exactly 1 second long. Now it takes an unspecified amount of time between 5 and 10 seconds long - enough for everyone to act once.

Single-maneuver actions that can be resolved in a 1-second turn under the original rules still take 1 turn to resolve here. This includes most melee and ranged attacks, movement, and the Aim and Evaluate maneuvers. Advantages such as Extra Attack and techniques like Rapid Strike work exactly as written, with the same limitations, but read “seconds” as “turns”. The RoF stat retains its value for all weapons that have it, but read it as “shots per turn” instead of “shots per second”.

Actions that would take multiple consecutive maneuvers over several turns to perform now take 1 turn per 10 seconds or fraction thereof they would originally take. Some examples:

  • Swapping magazines on a modern gun took 3 seconds, so now it takes 1 turn.

  • Reloading a musket took 40 seconds, so it takes 4 turns now.

  • Any spell that would require less than 10 seconds to cast can be cast in a single turn.

  • Searching through your pack for an item took 2d seconds. As the average of that roll is less than 10, it only requires a turn.

  • Picking a lock takes a minute, which means 6 turns. Accepting a -5 penalty to do it in 30 seconds means it takes 3 turns. This makes it possible to do during a fight.

The Fast-Draw skill now encompasses a series of actions taken to speed up a given process. It can reduce the time an appropriate action takes by 1 turn, to a minimum of 0. So you can still use it to draw a weapon and attack on the same turn, or to reload a pistol and keep firing on the same turn. That musket is still going to take 3 turns before it can fire again. You might want to make it Average instead of Easy since a single roll covers a larger set of actions.

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.

Things we Avoided

Note that we didn’t attempt to increase the effective number of actions by the same multiplier as the turn duration. If a character could attack every second under the standard rules, they don’t get to make 5-10 attacks in a single turn here. Aiming or Evaluating for multiple seconds gave you extra bonuses, but you don’t get them automatically here - you must perform those maneuvers for the same number of turns. Our goal is to remove multi-step complex procedures, not to keep counting seconds.

Yes, this is more abstract and perhaps less realistic, and that is the point. If you want to keep tracking events second-by-second, stick with the standard rules.