Quote:
Originally Posted by VIVIT
One idea that I had was to require the player to specify a trigger, but to allow them to cancel the Wait at will and reclaim their turn without interrupting the current one. This removes the risk of losing your turn, but doesn't grant the ability jump to interrupt an event without predicting it. Under such a variant, a Wait would basically entail stepping out of the turn sequence altogether until your condition is met (and you interrupt with your action and step back into the turn sequence before the current turn) or you change your mind (and you step back into the turn sequence after the current turn). In the case of cascading waits, all involved in the cascade return to the turn sequence immediately before the turn that started the cascade, in descending order of the margin of their roll in the QC. Anyone who cancels their Wait during the cascade gets their turn back after the whole thing.
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That can also work - rather than having to wait for your natural turn to come back around if the trigger is rendered unachievable (to use the examples I mentioned in the other thread: if the spellcaster you have opted to Wait against so you can attack them if they start to cast a spell - in hopes of disrupting the casting* - dies, or if you're watching the door and your foe comes through the window), or if you decide something else is more important (say you're watching a spellcaster or the door or whatever, and then your buddy takes an arrow to the face; you might abandon the Wait to go render aid, or take a shot at the archer, or whatever), you can end the Wait early, but it still shifts your place in the turn sequence. I still like the idea of making Waits more worthwhile by allowing you to interrupt something
without having declared it as a trigger, although I'm honestly leaning more toward this being at a penalty than being the default.
Of course, if you do opt to have Waits shift your place in the turn sequence, there's a hairy question about defense penalties to answer. If A has Basic Speed 8, he/she normally gets a turn at 8.00. If A instead opts to Wait a Basic Speed 8 (where any penalties from the prior turn expire), Parries an attack at 6.25, then interrupts an action at 5.5 (changing A's normal turn to occur at 5.51), at what point does that -4 to Parries with the same arm expire? I'm thinking it may be appropriate to have this occur when the character's turn normally would have come up, but any penalties incurred after "cashing in" their Wait would end when the character's actual turn comes up. The simpler way to handle it would be to have the penalties last until the character's new turn comes up, but that risks the Waiting character having to deal with a penalty for much longer than usual, particularly if their Wait gets triggered - or they opt to end it prematurely - very close to when their natural turn would have come up anyway.
*Having not dealt much with the default system for magic in GURPS, I'm not sure if this would actually work.