Rate Of Attack

There's a split in RPG design between systems that represent a combat round/turn as being short (6 to 10 seconds) or long (a half-minute to a minute). This divide traces all the way back to 1st edition, where AD&D switched to the "long round". The latter interpretation requires that a "round" be interpreted as multiple extended exchanges with an aggregated outcome.

When playing ACKS last night, I was impressed by just how quickly the battle was over. Essentially from the moment cave entry until the fall of the dragon (split over two separate encounters), the fight took roughly 10 rounds, amounting to about a minute and a half. On that time scale you'd expect that an entire dungeon floor could be cleared out in 20 minutes. Granted, it would require amazing stamina to fight continuously for that long!

That carries over into the tactical battle system as well. A battle involving huge armies clashing still ends in a couple minutes. And that can involve a single hero wiping out multiple platoons, probably amounting to a kill every three seconds or better, under calculations based on the surprisingly generous cleave rules. Any class but a mage can cleave multiple targets, and even bows can get off a number of shots in that ten-second round under the same rule (which I guess means it should be called cleave/multishot!) Shortbows have a natural edge in this system, since they trade in their shorter range for a better cleave multiple, providing a definite incentive for an experienced fighter to downgrade to a lighter ranged weapon.

To provide some visual reference for the standard arguments for this compressed time scale, I did a search for rapid use of realistic weapons by modern-day specialists.

Here's a video of some Viking reinactors:

There's an absolute imperative in this style of fighting for taking shorter, weaker thrusting strokes, rather than the stereotypical wide and reckless swing. It's not particularly theatrical in appearance, relative to your average Hollywood movie, but the sharpness of sword-points makes it mandatory to create constant distance with any opponent. That requires both the sword and shield to be pushed forward at all time, moving in small, unpredictable arcs.

This is, in some sense, a justification of two tropes of fantasy wargaming at once: the short strokes happen fast (allowing substantial improvement in attack rate with experience). But they also aren't very effective at finding more distant kill zones, justifying the value of armor (as blocking instead of absorption) and the idea of whittling down health of a skilled opponent in small increments ("HP loss") to represent declining stamina or coordination-impairing bruise wounds to the sword-arm or shoulder. On the other extreme, an inexperienced or slow defender would take a single stroke to the neck and go down in a matter of seconds.

For ranged weapons, there are plenty of videos communicating the speed of a polished archer with a lightweight recurve bow. In a competition requiring careful aim, the limiting factor is always aiming, not the mechanics of notch and release. Here's a speed shooter firing on the move:

If you wait until the end, you can see that she's just burying the shots in a canvas screen with no attention to precision. Still, the idea of a company of composite shortbow archers unleashing this kind of barrage gives you a sense of how you really might get a chance to fight in the shade as you attempted to close the range on them.

All of the above videos involve normal humans, using mundane weaponry, in non-life-or-death situations. I'd wager that being an immortal elf defending your homeland with a magic bow is worth at least another factor of two in terms of attack capability. Five lethal shots in 10 seconds doesn't seem so crazy in that light.