Georg Zoeller ~
Senior Technical Designer
Dragon Age: Origins uses its own ruleset which, instead of a system ported from tabletop, was created from scratch for the computer.
This has nothing to do with animations - it just means that computers can take into account things that would be too tedious to calculate for combat resolution in pen and paper games (such as z-location difference between characters, weapon speed, materials, etc.)
Characters in Dragon Age act on their own time, meaning there is no concept like a combat round.
http://www.dragonagecentral.com/single/1217038680