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Re: Game design musing: It's About Time (Part II)
Thu, 2007-02-08 00:46 — tboneYep, a computer can handle fancy time measurements – or just about any number-crunchy system – just fine. Making a tabletop RPG version is the real challenge.
"Quanta under 1s" – good wording, I'll have to borrow that. As far as I know, no one has made a tabletop version that's simple to play. As you point out, when you get to quanta that small, even reaction time itself becomes a big factor. (Which – if it were made playable – would be a big and interesting factor.)
Re Aces and Eights: Interesting. From the little info online and a few play aid downloads, it looks like an AP system, with actions costing a set number of "counts" (=0.1 sec each, I gather). There's also a Speed stat, though it's not clear w/out the rulebook how that comes into play – namely, whether it somehow modifies the "count" cost for actions, or whether it doesn't, and every gunfighter takes the same time to perform any given action.
Either way, by measuring action times in these tiny "counts", the game is able to differentiate between, to name one visible example, the time to acquire a target in a near arc, vs time to acquire one in a far arc. Could be interesting to play.