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Re: (TFT) MA issues, proposed fix - and 3 or 30 second turns, what's the dif?

----- Original Message ----- From: "John" 
Not trying to be a jerk here, just trying to make my point

No jerkiness implied or inferred.



Goodness.
Thanks.
Now I am OK with the generalization that a turn is around 5 seconds, so if the party's cook is making breakfast, and I want a 3 minute egg, I need to finish off my combat in 36 or fewer rounds, less my egg be overcooked - the issue has simply not come upfor me over the past 30-odd yrs. 
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It may matter in your "beat the clock" scenario, but not in most others. And as my muskateer example shows, it doesn't even have to matter "in front of the curtain" in a time sensitive situation, if the time is measured in turns rather than seconds. 



uhhhh.... I THINK I get what you're saying.
I use "turns" in a flexable manner where a turn varries in duration according to what scale the Action is on. I agree that such "deadlines" are a bit of a device in a way... but then again the players can set arbitrary deadlines as well. 
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Technically you could have a chessboard set up in the middle of the Melee arena and describe both players walking into the arena, taking a seat across the board from each other, set up a board in real-world, and say play. Time the game in real-world time in seconds then divide the total by 5 rounding up to put the game in Melee turns. But we have to scale a myriad of possibilities and there's no way of really knowing... which direction you are going... is it raining is it snowing? is a hurricane a blowing?... 
So we use the real-world as a reference point for communication.
Back then we didn't have as easy a reference to real-world data as we have now. If I have something move 100 hexes in 1 Melee 5 second turn then the players don't have to know the data I used to assign the MA they just see the effect. 
If someone has a problem then I'll reference my data.
And our groups could totally play ball together, we would just have to talk about it for a few seconds first, and the experience mightnot be identical to what had gone on before in the individual games. I am OK with that, though I get that you are trying to make it possible codify those differences away through the rules and your TFT world almanac. 



Yes we would have to talk about "a few seconds first".
A 5 second "turn" on a grid of hexes 1.3m across means that I have some rough tools to use to describe something like a football pass. If we have something like that as a starting point it makes the negotiation go quicker. And I like the idea of trying to tie TFT rules to the World Almanac as that's a pretty objective reference that can be used to describe more fantastical things in really descriptive ways across game-worlds. If we have a basic idea of steel in TFT in game terms then we can both "plug-in" historical data as well as describe the flavor of mythril in my game-world as opposed to yours. 
I guess the anaology is restaurants?
So maybe I'm saying that I want a high-def "turn" cammera that can shoot many frames per second but still have the shutter control to take long exposures. 
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IMO TFT was left half-baked.
So it appeals too me.
There is a level of refernce now-a-days that can be used to comunicate rather than "house-rules" or "rules-lawyer" approach to the problem. 
This is not telling a GM they are wrong about their imagination.
It's trying to give the GM tools to describe their "vission".
If I know Big Ben tosses the pill at 60ish mph I know that's a MA100 in Melee. Impressive enough but if I think Dan Pastorini was the "greatest quarterback of ALL TIME" and intend to represent that in my game-world by having his pass move at MA125 (~75mph) then That tells you a "little bit" about how seriously I'm trying to represent football stuff... 
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