Should Waiting permanently change your place in the turn sequence?

[Dinadon]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I don't see the problem. C does get his chance to hit A while A is still wide-open.

Ditto. And to expand, to Wait for an AOA requires your Wait to effectively be an AOA. So if C attacked A, A could defend, and then just do an Attack. Or not defend, and then at a minimum, have shock penalties to deal. All assuming A's Wait has to trigger after C completes what they're doing.

As for back-to-back turns. I find this situational, but if I thought someone was trying to abuse this I would just have your turn starting trump any pending Wait you may have. Of course, the difficulty in abusing this is your Wait should be perceivable to the character, which prevents meta concepts like turns.

[VIVIT]

Originally Posted by Varyon

The problem with having Wait move the turn order, aside from potential complications, is that, without an exploit like the above, Wait is a very-rarely-used option - it's sufficiently limited that it's only useful in rare situations. Making Wait a worse option by having it shift your position in turn order for the rest of the fight is going to make it used even less frequently. Changing Wait so it doesn't have a trigger, but is instead something like "once you declare a Wait, you may interrupt anybody's turn to take your own," would make it much more useful, and would make it changing your place in the turn order more palatable - a fair trade, rather than making a typically-bad option even worse. Being able to react that effectively isn't terribly realistic, of course, but should work fine for typical GURPS levels of realism.

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.

[Stormcrow]

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.

But it's just one second. A Wait doesn't mean you're sitting around twiddling your thumbs for long stretches of time; it means you pause for a fraction of a second to interrupt a specific thing.

[Varyon]

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.

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.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

I don't see the problem. C does get his chance to hit A while A is still wide-open.

And everybody between A and C gets a chance to swing at him while he's not wide open, but if he attempts to defend his action (All Out Attack C) is now invalid and he's arguably lost his turn, depending on how much detail the GM requires when declaring a Wait. Yeah if he lets you get away with "I Wait until C acts and then I'll take my turn" there's a slight opening there, though I think it's more theoretical than something that ever actually comes up in play, but I'd insist on both more detail on what C has to do to trigger the Wait and exactly what your action will be when that happens, and if it's AoA, then yeah, can't AoA anymore, you Do Nothing. Admittedly it's traditional to allow the player to convert his planned AoA to a normal attack, but you don't [have] to allow that, and requiring Do Nothing if he can't AoA anymore closes this "loophole" just as effectively as rearranging the turn sequence without any extra work to keep track, and no risk of messing up something else you haven't thought of.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by malloyd

And everybody between A and C gets a chance to swing at him while he's not wide open, but if he attempts to defend his action (All Out Attack C) is now invalid and he's arguably lost his turn, depending on how much detail the GM requires when declaring a Wait. Yeah if he lets you get away with "I Wait until C acts and then I'll take my turn" there's a slight opening there, though I think it's more theoretical than something that ever actually comes up in play, but I'd insist on both more detail on what C has to do to trigger the Wait and exactly what your action will be when that happens, and if it's AoA, then yeah, can't AoA anymore, you Do Nothing. Admittedly it's traditional to allow the player to convert his planned AoA to a normal attack, but you don't [have] to allow that, and requiring Do Nothing if he can't AoA anymore closes this "loophole" just as effectively as rearranging the turn sequence without any extra work to keep track, and no risk of messing up something else you haven't thought of.

It's not merely "traditional" to let a character who intended to AoA do a normal Attack instead of a Do Nothing if he/she defended before the Wait was activated - this is the default rule (see B366). And, yeah, making Wait even more restrictive avoids this exploit, but does nothing against the others I listed - Judo Throw->Pin, Arm Lock->Throws From Locks, etc.

To be clear, I'm not saying everyone should have Wait shift the turn sequence. Heck, I'm honestly not certain I'd want to do it. But I don't think everyone basically saying "Nyet! Rules are fine!" is useful for this discussion.

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Varyon

It's not merely "traditional" to let a character who intended to AoA do a normal Attack instead of a Do Nothing if he/she defended before the Wait was activated - this is the default rule (see B366). And, yeah, making Wait even more restrictive avoids this exploit, but does nothing against the others I listed - Judo Throw->Pin, Arm Lock->Throws From Locks, etc.

To be clear, I'm not saying everyone should have Wait shift the turn sequence. Heck, I'm honestly not certain I'd want to do it. But I don't think everyone basically saying "Nyet! Rules are fine!" is useful for this discussion.

Everyone basically saying "Nyet! Rules are fine!" is useful to the discussion. It means that the OP's proposed solution to a perceived problem is worse than the problem it is meant to solve.

In this instance, the perceived problem is the possibility that a character can All-Out Attack as the Maneuvre deployed from a Wait, which forfeits the character's defenses until his next turn, but if he is the fastest character by initiative and Waits for the slowest character by initiative, his next turn follows immediately, rendering his loss of defenses in an All-Out Attack moot. The proposed solution is to reorder the character's initiative for the remainder of the combat, making the fastest initiative character the slowest (or next to slowest) character by initiative for the rest of the combat.

As pointed out by everybody else, that change doesn't fly, as it is an unreasonable penalty compared to the problem it is meant to resolve.

A fairer solution would be something that causes the Waiting character's turn to cycle back to his original position in the initiative. I was thinking of something along the lines of multiplying everyone's speed by 4 to get rid of fractions, call it Reflexes, and then setting the Waiting character's Reflexes to loop so that his position on the initiative list rises each turn until he is back in his original position, but that quickly became unworkable as the larger the initiative number the higher the Reflexes and the more slowly it would loop back. Something might be done with the reciprocal of Reflexes but at that point it was just becoming too complex to be worth even trying to implement as a solution.

Lacking a fairer solution, it is perfectly fair to say that the proposed solution is worse than the problem. Scientific theories run into this all the time. A proposed theory has to be better as an explanation, meaning it has to provide solutions that the previous theory did not while not disturbing the valid solutions of the previous theory, than the previous theory in order to be adopted.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Curmudgeon

Everyone basically saying "Nyet! Rules are fine!" is useful to the discussion. It means that the OP's proposed solution to a perceived problem is worse than the problem it is meant to solve.

"The solution is worse than the problem" is fine - indeed, it's a useful critique, particularly when paired with a "and here's why," as you included. "The problem doesn't exist" or "I don't see this as a problem, and therefore neither should you" isn't conducive to discussion, in my opinion, and that's what a lot of responses looked like to me. Perhaps I am misreading what people are saying.

Certainly, it may well be the case that there are no solutions that give better results (at least when all is considered, including the complexity - a perfect solution isn't a solution at all if it's extremely difficult and/or time-consuming to implement). But I'm not a big fan of people treating a question as invalid.

Again, I may simply be misreading people, and seeing attitudes that don't actually exist.

[sir_pudding]

You can also Wait to Attack in response to a Wait to AoA.

[Curmudgeon]

Thinking about it a little more, one possible solution to the problem is to change the combat system in a major way. Instead of initiative going from the highest Speed (best reflexes) to the lowest Speed for initiative, run initiative from the lowest Speed (worst reflexes) to the highest Speed.

Some games employ this ordering, suggesting that it better mimics the ability of those with better reflexes to react more quickly to the actions of those less gifted with reflexes. In essence, the slower reacting are locked into their responses, allowing those faster to factor those actions into their choice of response.

Such a re-ordering would do away with Wait altogether, instead replacing it with an Interrupt, whereby a faster reacting character can chose to react to the slower character's declared action's now rather than waiting to see what else develops before he would normally have his go at it.

If you don't particularly like the idea of Interrupts, you could do away with them, but declare that events resolve on the following turn, thus the slower character attacked and successfully got by the quicker character's defenses, but the injury and any penalties for shock don't apply until the sequence starts again. In this scheme, there actually is a common second that is shared for everyone's turn. This would be a major change-up, and I definitely have not playtested the idea to see how completely the entire combat system would need to be re-written, but it would potentially be a fairer solution to the problem posed.