Q&A with Jeff Berry

[aldarron]

Hey Chirine,

I asked an EPT question regarding the one minute round on the ODD74 forum you might know the answer to. http://odd74.proboards.com/index.cgi?ac ... 375&page=1 It may relate to how Dave was handling rounds in Blackmoor too. Any Thoughts?

I do happen to know the answer to this one; may I suggest having a look at a copy of the original "Chainmail" which, back in those ancient days of yore, was the standard set of miniatures combat rules here in the Upper Midwest:

"The ratio of figures to assumed is 1:20, the ground scale is 1":10 yards, and one turn of play is roughly equivalent to one minute of time in battle."

Everybody associated with the Castle and Crusade Society used these rules back then, as the WRG rules sets were very hard to get as you had to send off to some mythical place called "England" to have them mailed to you. As far as I know, the original RPG game sessions used "Chainmail" with the man-to-man rules, and everybody used the one minute round as the standard. From there, it got into the RPG rules that came out of those games.

Does this help, or am I making things more confused?

yours, Chirine

Well, the thing I'm not sure about really is whether a round means one dice roll or two, meaning does the EPT 1 minute round have one roll for the attacker and one counterattack for the defender, or does it just have one roll for the attacker, followed by a whole new 1 minute round for the defenders counter attack. Here's the quote from EPT that I'm refering to:

"combat rounds are fought in pairs: one for the attacker..., one for the defender. Thus, if the defender is slain during the attacker's round, he still gets a chance to strike a "dying blow" on his last round."

This makes it sound like both attacker and defender get a full seperate minute/round. If the defender who is killed gets a full attack round, then no combat can last less than an average of 2 minutes, since a round averages 1 minute.


The other complication is that "A fighter always gets to strike during any combat round..." meaning presumably that they attack either 10 times in a 10 minute turn where other characters attack 5 times, or they attack 20 times when most characters attack 10.

BTW, I've looked in the AD&D books, both 1e and 2e and it's as clear as mud there too.