Two characters with atr. { Altered Time Rate }

[Kelly Pedersen]

Originally Posted by Varyon

I'm not certain how this should interact with the "act first" clause of ETS, however - does that just apply to the first action and the others are based on the character's Speed, do recalculate them based on the character's nominal Speed being 1 higher than the highest non-ETS initiative, or do you just reinterpret ETS to give something like +10 to Speed for purposes of turn order?

It seems to me that ETS is all about reaction speed, whereas ATR is about how fast you actually perform actions. Therefore, I'd treat ETS as no faster than your normal Basic Speed, except that your first ATR action would always happen before anyone else's action without ETS. Your subsequent ATR actions would still happen at the same point in init (though I might allow ETS to break ties). So if you have Basic Speed 9, ATR 3, and ETS, and your opponent happens to have Basic Speed 10, you'd still take your first action before them, and then take your second action at Speed 6, and your third at Speed 3.

[phayman53]

Originally Posted by Lia Valenth

But you can't All Out Attack then perform a different action to be able to defend.

I read a house rule a long time ago that might help with this (it is on someone's blog and I have no idea which one, so I am going from memory and this probably is not exactly right):

You no longer can take a AoA then an AoD with ATR [Edit: You can take them, but it defines the action you take for the whole round]. Rather, ATR makes your attacks harder to block (because they come faster) and your defenses easier to do (because you can recover faster). Basically, if you have ATR your targets get -1 to active defenses against your attacks per every extra action you have compared to them and you get +1 to your active defenses per every extra action you have compared to your target.

An example: in a fight between a speedster with ATR 3 (4 actions per turn) and a fast creature with ATR 1 (2 actions per turn), the speedster defends against the fast creature at +2 and the ATR 1 fast creature defends against the speedster at -2. An opponent without ATR, however, would defend against the ATR 3 speedster at -3 and the speedster would defend against them at +3.

This rule, I think, would combine well with splitting an ATR character's actions throughout the turn (essentially giving them extra turns) because the ATR character gets to act more often, is more effective when he/she attacks and defends, and refreshes his/her defenses throughout the round making multiple defenses much better. EDIT: Also, if an ATR character takes AoA or AoD on one of his/her actions, the effects of that All-out action would last only until the character's next action.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by phayman53

I read a house rule a long time ago that might help with this (it is on someone's blog and I have no idea which one, so I am going from memory and this probably is not exactly right)

Too much, I'm afraid. A +2 to all DX-based skills is worth about [30], and reducing that to only apply to deceptive attacks might get it down to [20] or less. +1 to all defenses is worth [30], implying the "can't safely AoA+AoD" Limitation would be worth somewhere in the neighborhood of -50% (as ATR is [100]/level, the above is functionally a +50% Enhancement), which is a bit much. However, if we treated it as a +1 to all combat skills - such that it also improves Block and Parry by +0.5 per level - and maybe a +0.5 per level bonus to Dodge would get it close to my suggested -20%. I'd probably go ahead and let it apply freely against foes with ATR, as their bonuses functionally cancel out your own anyway.