Players want a more Gameist Combat

After months of playing Dungeon World we played a different game the other night. I had a fun time and really enjoyed the game, but the traditional initiative, round-robin turn structure really felt disjointed and "clunky".

Ohhh Dungeon World, you have ruined me!

By all means, hack away! I'm just a little curious what you stand to gain by adding combat turns. What do you want this end result to be? If you want a turn-based system with tiered results, I think it'd be easier to hack the results table into another system, rather than try to ben DW to accommodate turns. Like, it's such a core part of the game, this "conversation" dynamic, that it seems like the system would be really fighting you. But I'd love to see it if you pull it off!

The reason I want to add a turn system or speed is mainly the spells and spell like abilities of final fantasy, I made another topic on a couple of them with haste and slow, but there are so many more, such as stop, double cast, hastega, slowga, poison usually acts on a timer system, so do many things such as the shell and protect spells. In fact any sort of spell in most final fantasies act on a time based system. Instead of homebrewing a completely different system (3.5, 4th edition, etc etc) with final fantasy and the classes and delicate (or not so much) balance of those systems (which I have tried repeatedly), I think adding a component to Dungeon World and slightly modifying ...not necessarily the way of conversation that battle flows, but the frequency in which players can act seems much more achievable than creating and recreating a bajillion rules and balancing math I would have to accomplish with the other systems. Also, I plan to make this battle system completely optional. Moreso for my own amusement of mechanic creation honestly. The game is aimed to be completely playable as you would any other Dungeon World system (I do alter the nomenclature to be a bit more inline with final fantasy (VITality instead of CONstitution etc).

When you think about it final fantasy is pretty abstract in battle anyway (not counting the tactics games, which are amazing by the way). So we will see what happens, but my primary goal is to have an option that felt a bit like final fantasy ATB system. The key word being option.

Something you might consider for a timer mechanism.

When the character activates a spell/power/ability give them some Hold. So long as they possess Hold the power continues to work, however the GM can "spend" moves to take Hold. This would give you a duration but not require it to exist outside of the normal DW flow. There is a good chance that the power will last for the rest of the encounter unless the GM chooses to use his moves on the Hold instead of other things.

Just a thought.

I like Reno's idea. Take a look at how the core book does durations and work with that: there's a lot of "Hold 3 and spend it to make Moves" or "this spell lasts until ____ happens" and stuff like that. I'd say the enemy is Slowed for X actions, or until the player misses a roll, easy stuff like that. Tracking durations can be such a headache, but unpredictable triggers are more fun.

Another quick thought. In my game combat rarely lasts very long (I don't care for grind), so there probably wouldn't be any problem letting spells/powers simply last until the end of the combat/encounter/scene.