Question about feat "A Single Moment" in Rokugan Oriental Adventures Setting

[Rokugani_Minion]

Here's a feat in the book by Wulf, Carmen and Mason:


A Single Moment [Crane Technique]

Source: Rokugan Pg. 54

You can focus your chi in the heat of battle.

Prerequisites: Base attack bonus +7 or higher, Improved Initiative

Benefit: You may refocus as a move equivalent action.

Does any know what this feat affects?

Thanks

[Khedrac]

A number of abilities, mainly psionic, either depend on you having your focus or are enacted by you expending your focus, this feat changes the action necessary to refocus - to regain your focus.

The base rules are in the SRD under psionic skills:

If you have 1 or more power points available, you can meditate to attempt to become psionically focused. The DC to become psionically focused is 20. Meditating is a full-round action that provokes attacks of opportunity. When you are psionically focused, you can expend your focus on any single Concentration check you make thereafter. When you expend your focus in this manner, your Concentration check is treated as if you rolled a 15. It’s like taking 10, except that the number you add to your Concentration modifier is 15. You can also expend your focus to gain the benefit of a psionic feat—many psionic feats are activated in this way.
Essentially these are once per encounter abilities that you can spend a full-round action to recover - or a move action with this feat.

[Anymage]

Oriental Adventures was a 3.0 book, while psionic focus only became a thing in 3.5 psionics.

Instead, "refocus" was an action in 3.0 where you could give up your action in order to replace your initiative with 20 plus your modifiers. It was removed in 3.5 because aside from giving you a nice looking initiative number it didn't do anything that delaying didn't.

[Rokugani_Minion]

Oriental Adventures was a 3.0 book, while psionic focus only became a thing in 3.5 psionics.

Instead, "refocus" was an action in 3.0 where you could give up your action in order to replace your initiative with 20 plus your modifiers. It was removed in 3.5 because aside from giving you a nice looking initiative number it didn't do anything that delaying didn't.

Thanks much. Since we are using 3.5, this feat appears obsolete.

Any ideas for updating the benefits of this feat to 3.5?

[Rokugani_Minion]

A number of abilities, mainly psionic, either depend on you having your focus or are enacted by you expending your focus, this feat changes the action necessary to refocus - to regain your focus.

The base rules are in the SRD under psionic skills:

Essentially these are once per encounter abilities that you can spend a full-round action to recover - or a move action with this feat.

Thank you for your reply to my question.

[Beni-Kujaku]

Thanks much. Since we are using 3.5, this feat appears obsolete.

Any ideas for updating the benefits of this feat to 3.5?

"By a move action, you can make your initiative count become 20 (plus any relevant modifier, including Dex). This count is effective from the start of the next round."

It's that simple, and allows you to basically act twice once per fight if your initiative is too low.

[Khedrac]

Oriental Adventures was a 3.0 book, while psionic focus only became a thing in 3.5 psionics.

Instead, "refocus" was an action in 3.0 where you could give up your action in order to replace your initiative with 20 plus your modifiers. It was removed in 3.5 because aside from giving you a nice looking initiative number it didn't do anything that delaying didn't.

Thank-you for the correction - I had completely forgotten about that!

[Ramza00]

"By a move action, you can make your initiative count become 20 (plus any relevant modifier, including Dex). This count is effective from the start of the next round."

It's that simple, and allows you to basically act twice once per fight if your initiative is too low.

So you are doing a shift time / anti ready action here where instead of delaying your initiative you want to move it up?

With the trade off you do not get any net action gain for the next round, just a different place in the initiative order, and for this round and a half you gain a standard action and a swift actionagainst some enemies but not all enemies your 20 minus your d20 initiative roll in exchange for using your move action to focus? And there is no resource loss (like spell points, slots, gp) besides the move action taken?

=====

If I was a DM I would argue against this out of balance principle for it is ultra powerful or not powerful at all depending on your d20 roll at the start of combat (which a 3.5 ring of anticipation makes it 2d20 take best for cheap gold), the player gets to decide if it’s useful or not and thus it is always making the player way more consistent and will steamroll encounters removing risk.

As a player I would love it.

[Chronos]

I don't think that's it. It doesn't just say you can refocus; it says you can refocus your chi. Presumably that book contains rules for focusing chi, and that feat interacts with those rules.

[Tzardok]

One would think so, but on a cursory look I couldn't find anything like that in there. The closest thing I can think of is the Iaijutsu Focus skill, which uses very similiar language, but for one the feat never mentions it, and for another the skill is apparantly not described anywhere in that book, only in Oriental Adventures (which is another book).

[Crake]

Instead, "refocus" was an action in 3.0 where you could give up your action in order to replace your initiative with 20 plus your modifiers. It was removed in 3.5 because aside from giving you a nice looking initiative number it didn't do anything that delaying didn't.

In 3.0, delay could only get you to the bottom of the initiative order, you needed to refocus to come in at the top of (or close to) the next round. 3.5 removed this effect by making initiative counts irrelevant beyond the first round, and just made rounds cyclical, meaning delay would always work until you wanted to act.

Previously, there was a limit on how late you could delay, and how early you could act in a round, based on your initiative bonus, basically meaning that if there was a dispute between two characters trying to delay/refocus, the character with the highest initiative count would get to control the flow of initiative, either going first in the round, or going last.

[Clause]

This is for iayjutsu duels, when in a moment of the duel, you rave a stage named FOCUS. So thus talent is for a specifc rule of a specific action in a specific moment on this specific ambientation.