Altering the Initiative Order

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Since there's no realistic way to have people act twice by delaying their action, I'll just peg this as a bad RAW choice for supposed playability reasons.

You mean in the sense of "I wait until he attacks, and then I attack, and then on my turn I attack again giving him a -4 to parry?" Then, yeah, I agree, but the other interpretation has other issues with it too.

[ericbsmith]

If you wanted to absolutely realistic each character wouldn't have exactly 1.00 second turns, nor would every action take exactly 1.00 seconds. Each action would have a base time, modified by the characters speed. So a swing might be 0.75 seconds and a double swing 1.00 seconds, each modified for their characters speed. So Casting a spell becomes a 3 second action rather than three consecutive Concentrate maneuvers.

I've seen systems similar to this in video games. The problem, of course, is that this is far too complex to keep track of in a table top RPG. So you break it down so that each character has one turn, each turn is 1 second, and just live with the abstraction.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Waiting always changes your sequence, AFAICT.

GURPS turns are about a second, doesn't matter when they start, but they are a sec of action, and your next turn starts a sec after that.

Besides, if waiting didn't change your sequence you'd have people taking two turns in a row, which is clearly wrong.

This is splitting hairs, but having been in a few of these, here we go:

Waiting does NOT change your turn order, but instead postpones your the execution of your actual actions until later within your own turn. When your original turn order comes up again, unless you wait again, you can go right then.

Semantics? Probably. But in fact, you decide when you Wait that instead of acting at t=integer(N) seconds of your own personal time clock, you will act sometime between N and N+1, if the triggering condition occurs.

By rights, there are some things you shouldn't be able to do, since you're eating up part of your turn waiting . . . but game mechanically, it's easier to just say you get a full turn's worth of stuff, but it only happens if your trigger occurs.

But once you Wait, you don't go after Player Y (who set off your trigger) from that point on. If you've got the highest Basic Speed, you "go first" in the sequence, even if your action on your turn is to defer your actual action until some specific thing happens.

In practice, this means that with many Waits, the "action order" and the "basic speed order" may never be the same, but the actual basic speed order is fairly inviolate by RAW.

[Figleaf23]

Originally Posted by Ze'Manel Cunha

Man, I keep finding I have more house rules all the time.

Since there's no realistic way to have people act twice by delaying their action, I'll just peg this as a bad RAW choice for supposed playability reasons.

I don't think your interpretation is wrong. The RAW is not clear and letting faster people move later makes sense.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

You mean in the sense of "I wait until he attacks, and then I attack, and then on my turn I attack again giving him a -4 to parry?" Then, yeah, I agree, but the other interpretation has other issues with it too.

He still gets to attack, though. Your Wait doesn't cancel his action (directly, anyway). He can even if he's good get inside your loop by Riposting on your wait triggered attack, and using it immediately before your next turn.

You are faster, it does make sense that you can react to him attacking and then recover quickly. All of this stuff is actually happening at the same time, remember.

[DouglasCole]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

Realistically everyone isn't standing still and waiting for their "turn", acting for precisely 1.00 second and then standing still again to wait for everybody else to go. Everybody is doing things all once in the same time, and turns are an abstraction.

Not only is this true, but there are some things, like how a Parry interacts with two other characters that are attacking you, that only can be narratively described AFTER the fact! I had this precise conversation with RPK, and the same thing holds true with Waits: you can only really make sense of what happened to a character during any particular one-second slice of time until after that second is over! It's an artifact of the discretization of continuous time.

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

He still gets to attack, though. Your Wait doesn't cancel his action (directly, anyway). He can even if he's good get inside your loop by Riposting on your wait triggered attack, and using it immediately before your next turn.

That's not how Riposte works. It doesn't give you a free, second attack.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

You are faster, it does make sense that you can react to him attacking and then recover quickly. All of this stuff is actually happening at the same time, remember.

You really shouldn't think of this in terms of "faster/slower" terminology. It's just as likely that the "slower" character waits to react to the "faster" character, interrupting his turn and getting the possible advantage.

A, Turn 1: Attack
B, Turn 1: Wait
A, Turn 2: Attack, B interrupts forcing A to defend on his Turn 2
B, Turn 2: Attack, with A being at a penalty for having already defended once during his Turn 2

What's going on here is that this is just an artifact of the abstraction necessary to keep the game relatively simple.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

That's not how Riposte works. It doesn't give you a free, second attack.

He's right. It's sort of like a reversed and inverted Deceptive Attack cross bred with a feint. You choose to take a penalty on your defense, in exchange for giving him a penalty on his defense against that weapon on your next turn. No immediate attack.

Counterattack is the sister-option, basically a normal Deceptive Attack conditional on having parried the guy, which you get to buy the skill penalty off of as a technique.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

That's not how Riposte works. It doesn't give you a free, second attack.

I never said it did. What I am saying is that Wait doesn't automatically cancel the foes action.
Able has Basic Speed 7, Zed has Basic Speed 5.75 but Parry-18

Able (turn 1): I wait for Zed to come within range, then I will attack him first!
Zed (turn 1): I move a step and Attack Able.
Able (turn 1): That triggers my Wait, so I get to attack! I hit!
Zed (turn 1): Okay, I Parry and Riposte for -4. I Succeed.
Zed (turn 1): I get to roll my attack now, but you must defend at -4! Ha!
Able (turn 1): On noes! I failed to defend. I take damage!
Able (turn 2): I get to Attack again but I have shock penalties. If you Parry though it is at a penalty because it will be your second Parry.
EDIT:

Originally Posted by ericbsmith

You really shouldn't think of this in terms of "faster/slower" terminology. It's just as likely that the "slower" character waits to react to the "faster" character, interrupting his turn and getting the possible advantage.

They are complaining about the "unfair" advantage that using Wait can give a character that "goes twice" before another character gets to "go again". I'm pretty sure this always going to benefit the character with the higher Basic Speed. Unless I'm missing something.

Originally Posted by Bruno

He's right. It's sort of like a reversed and inverted Deceptive Attack cross bred with a feint. You choose to take a penalty on your defense, in exchange for giving him a penalty on his defense against that weapon on your next turn. No immediate attack.

I'm not saying that. I'm saying that Waits let you interrupt someone's manuever, but that person still gets to complete his turn.