Quote:
Originally Posted by Plane
It seems like if you can get a free step you should be able to get a step's worth of free acceleration each turn, not sure if that aligns with the text though.
I never liked anything being free, I'd rather everything get a cost and if people can't maintain their cadence we just give them better AP regeneration to handle it.
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Thank you for your answer!
I kept thinking about it. One thing that I agree on is to allow 0 to 20% (1 step/turn) of acceleration, and up to 20% of move speed maintenance as free. In fact I would go further and award it as a recovery action, in order to seal the inconsistency caused otherwise by the "I evaluate the ground + step" exploit.
On the other hand, it might be too much to allow cost-less acceleration of 20% speed/s at running speed, or award some discount when accelerating abruptly from zero to higher values of velocity in 1 sec.
I eventually realized that most of these questions popping out when reading the system came from trying to extrapolate the AP rules outside of the short time and tight spaces combat scale, and follow-up questions like like "what happens when a clerk starts slowly accelerating to catch the bus?".
Perhaps the simplest thing to do is to rule that anything happening sufficiently slower than the second to second scale might be awarded as AP -free. For instance acc = 5% * BM / s or so - (not being a sporty person myself, probably my guesstimates are not good).
1 AP regeneration was something I also thought about, but I have still to make my mind if would be a cinematic advantage for humans, or might be marginally realistic for very fit, HT >= 12, or gen-engineered (at high TL) characters (The peculiar avian respiratory system might qualify perhaps). In fact, not only it gives essentially a free 20%*BM accel/turn, but can be also more flexible and award a free attack/turn.