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Thread: A New Way to Handle Actions and Timing

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    Default A New Way to Handle Actions and Timing

    So this is a system to handle timing in combat. It was mainly designed to remake the action economy so that it was easier to modify in the sense of what you could do on your turn, because anything that granted specific types of actions has always felt clunky to me.

    This system was designed with 3.5 & Pathfinder in mind; I've never played 4e or 5e. I would imagine that it can be ported to other systems. I also mentioned something like this before in another thread, and people linked me lots of other systems for handling actions, but I have yet to come across anything quite like this, AFAIK.


    Anyway...
    Time in combat is measured in"tics" (name pending, feel free to suggest something else). Each time your turn comes up in the initiative order, you spend your tics to act. The base amount is 5 tics.

    A Standard attack takes 3 tics. A standard move takes 2 tics.
    A Full attack takes 5 tics. A Full move takes 5 tics.
    Free actions take 0 (zero) tics, but as a general rule of thumb I usually limit players to a max of 6 per round, and "talking as a free action" is a few words, not an entire monologue.
    The first Swift action you take each turn costs zero tics, but each Swift action after that costs 1 additional tic, cumulatively (i.e. your second Swift action is 1, your third swift action is 2, your fourth swift action is 3, etc).
    Attacks of opportunity cost 1 off-turn tic, and normally everyone starts with a single one of those.


    So, that's basically it for the new rules. The point of this, though, is that now you can use anything at all- spells, feats, items and of course special class abilities to mess with the action economy in all kinds of interesting ways.

    For example, suppose the spell Haste now gives you one additional tic each turn, bringing you up from 5 to 6. You can now take 2 standard actions, you could take 3 move actions (not sure why you would, but it's there; maybe for something that is "move equivalent"). If you pile more tics on top (say, for example, you stack a Ring of Speed plus a Haste Spell) you could take a move action and then follow it up with a Full attack.

    It works the other way to- say for example the spell Slow decreases your base amount from 5 tics to 4. Now you can't make Full actions, and you have to choose between a Standard move and a Standard attack, but you could, for example, take 2 Standard moves.

    And you can get even more specific with this- imagine if (again, just for an example) a Fighter had a class feature that reduced Full attacks from 5 tics to 4. Or a Wizard had a class feature that reduce any Evocation spell by 1 tic (that's possibly OP, but I'm just throwing out examples). You can make certain actions require more or fewer tics depending on the circumstances. And you can use anything to increase or decrease the number of tics someone has.

    Overall I feel like it adds a lot of flexibility to combat, but I'd love to hear some feedback, or if anyone finds it confusing.


    Update: I feel like there should be a specific number of limited types of actions, such as "move", "attack", "spell", "skill", and may be "untyped" aka everything else. And you can have standard costs for each type of action- a standard attack is 3, a full attack is 5, etc. But then you can have abilities, feats, items, and all the rest affect certain action types. For example, something could give you a plain "+1 tic", but it could also be something like "+1 tic that has to be used on attack actions". Or "reduce spell actions by 1 tic".
    And then you can list things as "action-like" as much as you want. Have things that are "move action equivalent" and anything that would affect you move can affect this, whatever it is, but it won't be affected by a bonus that improves your attack-like actions.

    There's so much flexibility and opportunity with a system like this that frankly I'm surprised some game system hasn't tried out something like it.
    Last edited by Deepbluediver; 2018-08-17 at 07:09 PM.
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