Changing turn sequence

[tbone]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

I think the one exception where changes to turn order might make sense is having Wait move the players turn order to where it is triggered, but to make that work right you’d still need effects tied to the character’s turn from before to stay attached to the old point in the turn order, so playability weighs against it.

I've seen discussions of the idea, but I haven't tested it and can't comment on playability.

I think it'd work like this:

Example turn sequence for four characters:

A B C D A B C D A B C D ...

Allowing Wait to mix things up:

After some A B C D... goes by, C chooses Wait, does nothing while D takes a turn, then acts before A's turn. Using "*" to indicate "chooses Wait" and "^" to indicate "turns Wait into action before the next character's turn", it looks like this:

A B C D .... A B C* D C^ A B D C A B D C

The sequence is now A B D C ....

A bit later, A decides to pull a Wait. A lets B and D take turns, then jumps into action before C:

A B D C ... A* B D A^ C B D A C B D A C ...

Starting with C, the sequence now becomes C B D A ...

==

Setting aside the good or bad of that, do I even have the idea right?

[Witchking]

I would as a GM avoid this like the plague.

- It adds more dice rolls

- At times the turn order gets lost now between 4-6 PC's, friendly NPC's and the baddies Nevermind re-ordering every turn.

And most important of all

- GURPS is a point buy system. Players have either spent points to go early in the turn or have gotten point back to go later in the turn. I get enough random with all the other dice rolls. Why not add a +1d6 roll every turn to see what a players effective Broadsword skill will be that turn?

Nope they paid for it, they get it. A small island of certainty in a cruel, capricious universe.

[cmdicely]

Originally Posted by tbone

Setting aside the good or bad of that, do I even have the idea right?

Yep, that's the idea.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Yep, that's the idea.

This is one of the more workable schemes for messing with the turn sequence - you can just continue to use the state of defenses and so forth from before they opted to Wait until they do act, basically pretend the "turn" when they declared the Wait never happened and everything resets at their new one.

In the long run it results is somebody who takes Wait a lot getting fewer total actions than everybody else, but how many combats are going to run long enough for it to be very noticeable? I don't feel like it adds a lot - but there are some people who feel like it's important to avoid anything that could allow you to take two actions in a row, which you otherwise might with properly timed waits - and there aren't any really serious problems with it. It amount to you can declare the interval between your turns to be more than 1 but less than 2 seconds instead of a flat 1 second if you want to. As long as you treat the duration of anything you set off on your turn as something with an independent turn of its own, so you can't use this to stretch durations, it seems relatively harmless.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

Speed doesn’t change how frequently your turns are, so it shouldn’t make your next one sooner or later after a change in combat, either.

(I once was working on set of House Rules where speed did change how frequent your turns were but it would have been unwieldy in play, and has since been abandoned.)

Once a character whose speed changes has reached the top or bottom of the turn order there would be no place to go from there, so there would be no change in turn frequency.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Once a character whose speed changes has reached the top or bottom of the turn order there would be no place to go from there, so there would be no change in turn frequency.

Sure there is, into the next "round". With this mechanic you can in principle Wait again every time your turn comes around, never act, and delay the reset of your defenses from your first turn until the end of the combat if you like. Why you would want too I dunno, but you [could].

Keep in mind that GURPS doesn't actually use "rounds" for anything, so there is no mechanical "top" or "bottom" of the turn order, it's purely a meta-thing you are considering important because a lot of games do care about it and trained you, and a lot of other gamers, to think it matters.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by cmdicely

I think the one exception where changes to turn order might make sense is having Wait move the players turn order to where it is triggered, but to make that work right you’d still need effects tied to the character’s turn from before to stay attached to the old point in the turn order, so playability weighs against it.

This is the way waits work in DnD, or at least how they did back when I played it. The fact it means you end up essentially losing turns, even if whatever you were Waiting for happened (due to shifting when you act), meant most people didn't use it outside of some very special circumstances (I think the only time I tried to use a Wait during combat, I was an archer and I opted to Wait to shoot the enemy spellcaster if they started casting a spell, so as to have a chance to interrupt the casting; it ended up being a moot point as one of the other characters killed the spellcaster before his turn came up) - and, of course, a lot of the time whatever trigger you set for your Wait never happens, and you end up just wasting that turn anyway. What may make a Wait more palatable would be to not require the player to declare a trigger, instead allowing them to interrupt pretty much anything (so long as they do so before dice are rolled), but have it shift their turn order for the rest of the battle. Rather than a Wait to shoot at whatever comes through the door and then being unable to react when the foe comes through the window, you can just declare a generic Wait and then if an enemy shows up - by walking through the doorway, jumping through the window, phasing through the ceiling, or whatever), you can simply shoot them (although if the GM decides you could be surprised by what happens, as in the case of watching a door and then someone jumps through the window, you may need to make an appropriate roll to avoid being caught by surprise and thus being unable to act after all)... or if you're waiting to shoot a spellcaster if he starts casting, and someone else kills him, you can simply target a different foe (the DM of the campaign in the above case actually let me do just that). That's probably not quite as realistic, but would probably be fine for most campaigns.

Originally Posted by Donny Brook

Once a character whose speed changes has reached the top or bottom of the turn order there would be no place to go from there, so there would be no change in turn frequency.

I suspect he was talking about something where acting pushed you back in the turn order, and how much of a shift occurred depended on your Basic Speed. So, off-hand, let's say everyone starts at their Basic Speed, then drops by 50/(Basic Speed) every time they act. So someone with BS 10 (-5 per action) would go at 10, 5, 0, -5, -10, etc, while someone with BS 5 (-10 per action) would go at 5, -5, -15, etc. So BS 10 is roughly comparable to having ATR 1, when compared to someone with BS 5. You'd want some method of looping back around to the start of another turn, to avoid negatives as well as get a proper sense of time. Honestly, having it loop back to 10 when it hits 0 would probably work, and have anyone with BS above 10 still start at 10 (but use actual BS to determine start order and how much they shift per action), could work. So, above, that would be 10, 5, 10(R2), 5(R2), 10(R3), etc and 5, 5(R2), 5(R3), etc, respectively.

But then you've got to change the price for Basic Speed, as well as how it's initially generated (every +5 to BS should be [100] without the boost to Move and Dodge, to match ATR, although Move takes care of itself - don't have BS directly modify it, and so someone with BS 10 and Move 5 is still moving at a rate of 10 yards per second, because they can move 5 yards twice over the course of a single second), and you potentially wind up with a headache in play (the guy with BS 7.5 would be at -(20/3), or -6.67, per action - 7.5, 0.83, 4.17(R2), 7.5(R3), etc). Largely ends up being more work than it's worth, although my experience was trying to make something much more involved (where how much you shifted down was determined by what you did - less action now means you get to act again sooner), so maybe something like the above wouldn't be quite so bad.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I suspect he was talking about something where acting pushed you back in the turn order ...

So, nothing whatsoever to do with my post that he quoted?