Turn of Combat Reformulated - Velocity

[KarlKost]

Originally Posted by whswhs

* When you say that Velocity 10 equates to Altered Time Rate 1, that seems to point to the idea that +1 to Velocity gives you an additional 1/10 action. But what is a tenth of an action? I don't see how that would have any relevance in combat. If the one-tenth actions are supposed to add up over the span of many terms, that's a lot of extra bookkeeping; if they just get dropped, they don't seem to be worth anything.

Actually it would be Velocity 20 that would equate to ATR 1, V10 would be normal average human, but yeah, this is basically it.
+1 Velocity would indeed be 1/10 of ATR; yes, a fight between someone with V10 and V11 would indeed be a close call, however the V11 would eventually act over the course of 10 seconds a total of 11 times, while the V10 only 10 times.
It's going to be a small difference, but that small difference - 1 action every second vs 1 action every 0.91 seconds - but that small difference can in fact be the difference between life and death (and in truth, +/-1 Velocity has a huge impact). It garantees that the faster fighter will have a privileged sequence of actions before the slower one.

There's more that it does than just that thou - the full meta-trait describes all that each round Velocity value does. It gives a bonus of +1 to all active defenses per +1 (above 10) of Velocity, and applies -1 to the active defenses of the adversaries.

And it does one more thing...

Originally Posted by whswhs

* If you are assuming actual increased speed as part of velocity, you're overlooking one important implication of speed: kinetic energy. If your fist is moving faster it inflicts more damage. If you suppose that a normal person inflicts on the order of 1d, then +1 damage on top of 1d would be on top of 3.5, which would be +(2/7)d, which would be 1.29x kinetic energy; +2 would be 1.57x; +3 would be 1.86x; +1d would be 2x. Velocity 11 would give you 1.21x kinetic energy, Velocity 12 would give you 1.44x, Velocity 13 would give you 1.69x, and Velocity 14 would give you 1.96x; rounding down, I would say that Velocity 12 gave you 1d+1, Velocity 13 gave you 1d+2, and Velocity 15 gave you 2d+1.

...each level of Velocity has also 1 level of Striking ST, exactly to simulate the increase of kinetic energy. Granted, that would not form such precise correlated table, but I guess it's good enough. And yes, the idea would be to have indeed actual increased speed.

That's the reason why this ended up being so expensive, it's because it has a segmented ATR - for 10 points per lvl, it has increased defenses, which ended up being the most expensive part, 30 points/level, it has the "Deceptive Attack" sort of meta trait, which is more of a "DX applied to combat only", which would in theory be 9 CP/level; deceptive attacks give a -2 to skill to inflict a -1 to the active defenses of the oponent, so each lvl of Velocity has 2 levels of that "Combat Only DX", for 18 points/lvl, so that can be converted into a -1 to the adversaries active defenses, and it also have Striking ST for 5 points/level. The total would be 63, but I rounded to 60, particularly because the "Combat Only DX" is being used exclusively to deliver Deceptive attacks, thus the character wouldnt be able to enjoy any other benefits (in fact, that discount may even be bigger than that).

So, in truth, the most expensive parts of it all aint even the ATR part; the ATR is in fact the least expensive one.