Sweet Christmas, what in the Hells were you fighting?
EDIT: wait, when you refer to 'turns', are you referring to 'rounds'? Those are two very different things in 2E; iirc, a turn = 10 rounds, so a round would last about 1 minute and a turn would actually last about 10 minutes.
Ha, forgot about this post.
I can't specifically recall. I think it was a huge battle, we may have been playing Spelljammer or attacking a castle, I know there were several campaigns where we were taking on tons of crap.
And yes, round = 1 minute, turn equals 10 rounds.
In GURPS, each turn is 1 second. 1 turn is going around in the circle to all PCs and NPCs. As others in the thread have stated, sometimes it's important to know how long a battle lasts. For example, if battles last days of game time.. wouldn't your character get hungry?
Also, if you played everything out in real speed, a sword fight either A) takes seconds, or B) Is a series of attacks, parries/blocks and lulls. That's why D&D thought it was logical that each round would be a minute, pretty sure it said as such in the manual. Problem with that logic is that means that literally within a minute's time (which if you've got adrenaline rushing through you, a minute is a LONG time.) a 1st level fighter has like one possibility for attack, that in all likelihood will miss. And yet also a bowman could fire off an arrow in the same amount of time.
In GURPS, you have a one handed sword, you attack, the opponent can either dodge, parry or block. They fail, then you have the possibility of damage. Roll that, and then see what armor they have, minus the DR (Damage Resistance) and apply damage type (Piercing does double on internal organs, while cutting does 1.5 whatever passes the DR.) So while you can hit, you could still potentially do 0 damage. 4th edition even adds in that if you hit some poor sap with a mace, and they're wearing leather or chain mail (flexible armor) it'll still do some trauma. Someone mentioned 1st Ed AD&D doing that, I don't recall that (may have been a supplemental thing?) but that would have helped my respect for 2nd Ed. Where Armor somehow simply made you harder to hit. It was also hilarious that it wasn't until 3rd edition that I saw any rules that said "you're wearing plate mail, you should not get a dexterity bonus to dodge."
By the way, if you really want a rough game, GURPS' combat is extremely deadly as well as detailed. You can very realistically lop off someone's arm with a good hit. I recall in 2nd Ed DM's guide, where it said 'it wouldn't be very fun to play a character with one arm, and is blind in one eye." Sure it would! In fact, GURPS' Advantage/Disadvantage system lets you do that very thing from character creation! It definitely gives you A) personality for your character. B) strong desire to role-play instead of hack/slash.
That was always my problem with D&D (all editions) characters don't have much personality, they're a grouping of stats, and they're defined in their advancement by those stats and what sort of loot you can find.
(sorry for the long post HA!)