In contrast 5e uses 6 second combat rounds, during which you can nominally:-
- move about 10m ( or rather your moement rate )
- cast a spell/hit/perform other significant action
- possibly perform some reaction
- possibly perform one or more bonus actions ( particularly in Larian's implementation )
- interact with a single object in the environment as a free action
which is all a lot more frantic than is actually reasonable for 6 seconds, in real life.
Actually, you'd be surprised...
There are a number of people who have taken the time and effort to make videos depicting the real-life implications of the 5e rules and limitations, and when actually acted out in real space with real people, they are *surprisingly* valid and realistic.
Here's a video of someone performing a few six second rounds:
https://blumineck.tumblr.com/post/6...ng-my-quest-to-post-my-content-so-othersIt's quite feasible without being frenetic or taxed.
For someone that has planned out what actions they will do, has prepared their understanding of the battlespace, has targets that are not doing anything inconvenient like moving about, or trying to hit you, then yes, you can probably manage a few rounds of make-believe 5e timings. Just look at some old Errol Flynn movies for proof!
But I did say "real life", in which you might be moving into an unknown space, with questionable lighting, with active, mobile enemies, while wearing heavy armour and vision-restricting helm, and wielding a heavy maul. In such circumstnces, you'd be lucky to take a few paces and swing your maul once in a six-second window, let alone multiple times for a higher level fighter, or the various ancillery actions alowed by the rules.
The truth is that the six-second round is a fairly arbitrary evolution of the AD&D one minute round, which was divided into 10 six-second segments. There were several ( not necessarily good ) reasons for that:-
- players acted simultaneously, so movement could be divided into 6 second chunks to move pieces across the play surface to see where contact actually occured, according to player-specified orders
- spell casting time at one point was specified in 6-second segments, so you knew when in the round a spell fired
- melee/ranged weapon speed at one point was specified in 6-second segments, so you knew when your hit ocurred
( note that back then, 2 actors in combat COULD actually kill each other as alternating turns were not used )
For no particularly good reason ( well, continuity, perhaps ), the six-second segment became the new combat round in 3e, and has remained ever since, regardless of what has to fit into it. In the older rules, there were actually aspects that depended on timing ( casting time & weapon speed modifying initiative to determine the order of events ), but in the newer rules, timing is no longer important.
I think it would have been better to simply delete the reference to an actual round duration, given that everything moved to action-based anyway; but old habits die hard, so now we have a system where you can perform up to 7 activities in six seconds, all without breaking stride.
