What real-time with pause means

A real-time with pause game keeps a clock, and characters move, attack and cast on that clock whether or not the player does anything. The player can stop the clock at any moment, select characters, give each one an order, and start it again. The orders then play out as time passes.

Nothing waits for a turn to end. There are no rounds in which one side acts while the other stands still. Every character on the map is carrying out whatever it was last told, in the same seconds, and the pause is how the player catches up. It is usually shortened to RTwP, and a player who meets the phrase in a store description or a review is being told about a way of playing, not a genre.

Nobody appears to have coined it. The phrase is a description that settled into use, and it sits alongside pausable real-time and active pause, which mean the same thing. We found no designer or publisher who claims it, so we are not going to name one.

The mechanic is older than the Western role-playing games that made it famous. Darklands, made by MPS Labs and published by MicroProse in 1992, let the player pause a battle with the space bar, give each character an order, and resume. Baldur's Gate, developed by BioWare and released by Interplay in December 1998, is the game that made it a standard. It ran Dungeons & Dragons rules, which are written in rounds, on a real-time engine, and that engine went on to carry Planescape: Torment (1999), Icewind Dale (2000) and Baldur's Gate II (2000).

The account from BioWare is a compromise. James Ohlen, one of its designers, has said that Ray Muzyka, who co-founded the studio, liked turn-based games and that he himself liked real-time strategy, and that the pause was a way to satisfy both. Baldur's Gate popularized real-time with pause. It did not invent it.

Four distinctions separate most pause systems, and games settle each one differently.

Frozen Synapse (Mode 7 Games, 2011) is often grouped with these games and should not be. Both sides plan their moves at once with the clock stopped, then the game plays out five seconds, then it stops again. The turns are a fixed length and the player cannot step into one that is running. It is simultaneous turn-based, which is a form of turns, not of real time.

Door Kickers (KillHouse Games, 2014) looks similar at first, because it opens on a paused planning phase in which the player draws a path for each trooper. The difference is that the player can draw new paths while the action runs and can switch between planning and action at any time. It is real-time with pause with a long first pause. The same is true of Door Kickers 2: Task Force North, which entered early access in November 2020 and was fully released in February 2025.

A plan that fails shows its failure in space and time. A flanker who was meant to arrive as the front line opened up arrives three seconds late, and the player sees the gap instead of reading it off a result. The enemy is moving while the plan is carried out, so ranges, doors and cover shift from one second to the next, and timing stays a live problem the whole way through.

It also lets one player command several characters without breaking the fiction. In a turn-based game, six people take turns and five of them stand frozen while the sixth acts. Here they all move together, and what gets split is the player's attention, which is the real difficulty of commanding a squad.

Pause-spam is the main failure. If stopping is free, the strongest play is to stop every second and re-issue orders, which turns the game into a turn-based game with a clumsy interface and no action points to price anything. Designers try to answer it with slow modes, auto-pause rules and fast combat, and none of them removes the incentive.

Reading what is happening is harder than it looks. Several characters, several enemies, spell effects and a damage log all update at once, and a player who stops to look sees a snapshot instead of a sequence. A fight can be lost for reasons nobody saw.

It also punishes looking away. A turn-based game waits. A real-time game does not, and a player who reads a menu, checks a map or lets attention drift can come back to a dead character. Auto-pause exists partly to cover that.

The pause is not limited to role-playing games. City builders such as SimCity (Maxis, 1989) and Paradox Interactive's grand strategy games run on a clock the player can stop and restart. Fallout Tactics (Micro Forté, 2001) set a continuous mode beside two turn-based modes in a squad game. Pathfinder: Kingmaker (Owlcat Games, 2018) and its sequel Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (2021) are designed around real-time with pause and also offer turn-based combat, which Kingmaker gained in an update in August 2020.

Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines (Pyro Studios, 1998) is the useful contrast. It is a real-time game with a pause key, but its design leans on the opposite idea: the patrols keep walking while a plan is carried out, and the usual remedy for a failed plan is to load a save and go in again. Real-time strategy games such as StarCraft (Blizzard, 1998) go further and make speed of execution part of the skill.

RAD Tactics is a squad tactics game for Windows PC, played in real time with pause. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world with zombie and faction combat, it is made in Unity, and it is in development. That is all we are announcing. The rest of this page is about the form, and the games above are where to look for how it goes well and how it goes badly.