I'm surprised no one has mentioned the "Tales of" series of games. Great RPGs with a near Street Fighter type of combat system. Tales of Symphonia was the newest edition to the series and is worth a look.

I don't mind either - it really depends on the game.

Final Fantasy Tactics was slow and boring because there weren't a lot of tactical options.

Fallout's turn based approach was good fun because you did have a lot of tactical options: hiding behind walls, dynamite traps, spray and pray or tactical sniper shots. As long as you turned on "NPCs Always Run" so the 100 radscorpions in the area moved at a decent speed, it was fine to sit and watch.

But then Fallout Tactics introduced real-time Fallout-esque combat and the speed and ferocity of some of the battles was cunningly fun. You had all the tactics of Fallout combat but all the speed of a FPS. Good fun.

Then you've got the mix and match system like KotOR. Pause the real-time battle at any time to queue up a list of actions. Not a lot of tactical options though.

It really depends on the type of game you're going to make. If you're making an urban game with a lot of room for strategy, turn based is fine. If you're setting the game in the middle of open plains, real-time is better.

I may be the only person in the universe who's played The Temple Of Elemental Evil (the computer game, not the tabletop game). It's a genuinely turn-based D&D game, in contrast to BioWare's real-time D&D games.

TTOEE is terribly buggy and has severe user interface stupidness that makes it irritating to play. But, I find the turn-based combat so enjoyable that I keep playing it despite the major flaws in the rest of the program.

Neverwinter Nights and TTOEE follow nearly the same ruleset. You can, and indeed people have, reimplement TTOEE as a Neverwinter Nights module. It's certainly possible to take a turn-based game and transform it into a real-time game.

The most obvious mechanism is to remove the 'round'. You have turns, but have each participant take their turns without having to wait for anyone else. The usual rules about how long actions take can be used as normal: in D&D you know how long each action takes, in a custom system you need to be sure you know the same.

It should be obvious that it's easier to go from a turn-based system to a real-time system than to go the other way. If you start with a real-time system, then you can easily run into problems where things need to be happening at the same time.