Initiative Roll and Action Points

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Revision as of 17:17, 4 February 2011

This article is about the Initiative Roll, to generate a number of Action Points (APs) for each character per Round, with the higher number of APs getting to act first.

This article will also touch upon Action Point expenditure, and the concept of the "Bank" for storing unused APs that can carry over to the next Round, but these subjects will be dealt with in greater detail in separate articles (especially Action Point expenditure!).

The Reflexes Roll

The Initiative Roll is a roll for the Reflexes derived statistic (derived from Dexterity and Intelligence (Thinking Speed), modified by an Advantage), usually at an RD of 8 for all involved characters, but possibly varying a bit up or downwards depending on preparedness, especially in the very first Round of combat, and also see the Surprise Initiative subsection further down.

This Roll generates a number of Action Points. To this is added any Action Points stored in the AP Bank (often just called "Bank" or "the Bank"), and this total number determines the initiative count, when the character gets to act.

For instance, Helen rolls 2S to generate 12 APs and has nothing stored in her Bank. Roberto rolls 1S to generate 11 APs and has 2 APs stored in his Bank, so his AP total is 13 AP and therefore he gets to act first.

Any result from F-5 and up generates a number of APs that are added to the APs stored in our Bank. A roll result of F-6, however, generates zero AP and also causes you to lose any APs stored in your Bank.

Some characters have Martial Arts Stunts that alters the Fumble outcomes. Normally you look in the second column under Result, but some characters have the Stunt Warrior Reflexes I; they look in the third column. A few have Warrior Reflexes II, and look in the fourth column. These Stunts represent experience in useful combat reactions and habits.

Surprise Initiative

Sometimes the first Initiative Roll of a fight is a Surprise Initiative for one or more combatants, often all combatants on one side (e.g. if they're being ambushed).

A Surprise Initiative Roll has a base RD of 11, but characters with the Danger Sense Power get to lower the RD of Surprise Initiative Rolls only (not normal Initiative Rolls, nor any other Reflexes rolls).

For each Power Level after the first (and like almost all Powers, Danger Sense cannot be had at less than two Power Levels), reduce the RD by 1, thus a character with Danger Sense 2d12 reduces the RD by 1, and a character with Danger Sense 5d12 reduces the RD by 4.

If a character's Danger Sense is subject to an RD bonus, e.g. from permanent or temporary magic, or for whatever other reason, then for each point of RD bonus after the first, reduce the RD of the Initiative Roll by a further 1.

As an example, a character has a Danger Sense of 5d12, temporarily boosted with an RD bonus of -2. The base RD for Surprise Initiative is 11, but the raw Danger Sense dice (the Power Level) reduces this to 7, and the RD modifier of the Danger Sense reduces it further to RD 6. RD penalties to Danger Sense make no difference (they're rare too, anyway).

And yes, this means that if your enemy has enough Danger Sense (5d12, 4d12+2, 3d12+2, or 2d12+3, or any better), then you're better off announcing your presence loudly and clearly to him, rather than trying to ambush him. You're dealing with - and it is possible for your character to know this - someone who cannot safely be ambushed.

Character may also do various things to try to anticipate an ambush. GMs must stomp down hard on metagame thinking, but in many situations it is reasonable and realistic for adventurer-PCs or warrior-PCs to be martially wary, travel with drawn weapons, and so forth. This is exhausting and stressful, but can result in an -1 RD bonus to Surprise Initiatve, or even -2 RD.

And of course, sometimes one player character is sent out as an advance scout, meaning he's the only one rolling for Surprise Initiative when the ambush happens. In that first Round, the other PCs don't get to roll at all, only entering the combat when they reach it, usully in the second Round, maybe 3rd or 4th, and then they roll for normal Initiative. The problem lies in getting one PC to volunteer to be the advance scout. The ideal advance scout has high Perception, very good Reflexes (preferably with some Danger Sense as well) and is heavily armoured. A thief, rogue or ranger archetype built on many GPS fulfills the first two requirements, sometimes also the third, but only very rarely the fourth.

Action Point usage

Action Points can be used to four different types of Actions:

• Offensive Actions
• Reactions (usually defensive)
• Move Actions or Steps
• Other Actions

Some actions cost one or more Rounds to perform, and have little or no AP costs, or they cost a fraction of a Round (usually 1 Second or 1/10 Second) and still have little or no AP cost, such as Spellcasting.

Reactions are special in that they are performed out-of-turn as a reaction (hence the name) to some other character's actions. Usually, a reaction is a defensive action in response to an offensive action, e.g. if Roberto tries to swing his mace at Helen, she gets to attempt to Dodge, Block, Deflect or Parry, even though it's not her turn to act.

Offensive Actions

Offensive actions are normal attacks, and special attacks such as Power Strike, Critical Strike and Precise Strike, but also attempts to Trip or Disarm.

Charge is a Move Action, as explained further down, not classified as an Offensive Action

Reactions

Reactions are usually defensive in nature, such as Parry (using a weapon), Deflect (the equivalent of parry but done unarmed), Block (using a shield to parry) and Dodge (which normally costs 1 Fatigue Point and requires the character to move 1 hex randomly). A Reaction is always performed in response to another character's action.

The Tactical Strike is a different Reaction, and is performed as a response to a character moving into an adjacent hex to the one one is standing in, without this other character performing a Charge on oneself. A Tactical Strike functions as a normal attack, except the AP cost is lower. Usually much lower. Tactical Strikes are therefore highly useful to "control ground", serving to discourage enemies from trying to run or otherwise move past one, e.g. to get within melee range of more vulnerable allies further behind (traditionally, the lightly armoured noncombatant spellcaster, the squishy/clothie wizard).

Move Actions

Move Actions are actions that lets the character move a number of hexes, noting that some hexes cound double or triple because of obstacles or otherwie being difficult Terrain. The three most common Move Actions are Walk, Run and Charge.

Walk is a "safe" Move Action, one that can be performed in relative safety even on ground that is slippery, covered with caltrops or marbles, or otherwise difficult. Run is more efficient, you get to move further per AP, but it's not safe, so if you Run over unsafe ground, you risk becoming unbalanced or even falling prone. Running also costs 1 Fatigue Point per Move Action.

Charge combines a movement with a melee or unarmed attack (or with a weapon attack, such as a crossbow or firearm), and costs 2 FP. Like Run, it is an unsafe Move Action, when the surface moved over is dangerous.

Characters are softly limited to 2 Move Actions per Round. If a character wishes to perform a 3rd Move Action in any given Round, he must pay 1 FP in addition to all other costs (e..g for Run or Charge), and a 4th Move Action has an added cost of 3 FP.

A 5th Move Action is largely hypothetical, it'll be very rare for a character to be able to afford 5 Move Actions in a Round, even with many Banked APs, a good Initiative Roll, and Martial Arts Stunts to reduce the AP cost of Walking. Solid rules for the 5th Move have not yet been made, but are likely to cost 5 FP, limit the chracter to a Walk, treating this Walk as unsafe (as if it was a Run), and costing 1 Willpower Point.

Step

The Step does not count as a Move Action, so a character can perform as many as these as he wants, as long as he can pay the AP cost. The AP cost depends on the character's Fleetness, but is usually 2 APs per hex.

Steps are a "safe" movement option, so there's no need to worry over dangerous ground, and also they do not cost Fatigue Points (except maybe in borderline absurd cases, like trying to Step in tournament plate mail; creating rules for this is hardly a priority).

Other Move Actions

Other possible Move Actions include Jumping, Sneaking, Crawling and various Parkour-like actions. These count as Move Action, thus sofly limiting the character to 2 per Round.

Swimming and Climbing will most likely be full-Round actions, and thus not need to be handled as Move Actions, but this is not certain yet.

Other Actions

Other Actions may cost APs, or be full-Round Actions. A full-Round Action still costs 1 AP, just to prevent characters who rolled F-6 on Initiative from performing them. Any excess APs may be banked.

Spellcasting

Spellcasting counts as an Other Action, but special rules need to be made for Spellcasting with an CTI of less than 1 Round, e.g. 1 Second or 1/10 Second.

One option is that CTI 1s Spellcasting happens on the Initative Counts of 12, 10, 8, 6, 4 and 2, with the Spell finishing and being cast once the required Progres has been accumulated. One problem with this is that if a Spell goes off on the count of 6 and is an attack spell, the target may not have enough APs to perform a Defensive Action.

For normal CTI 1 Round Spellcasting, if a Spell is completed in a given Round, then it is cast immediately when the next Round begins at a cost of 1 AP, after which the caster can spend the entire Round beginning to cast another Spell, or he can use his remaining APs for someting else.

The AP Bank

The AP Bank is a character's ability to store unused Action Points that can then be used in the next Round, and which also serves to improve his AP Count so that he gets to act sooner.

All Mammalian and Avian characters automatically have a Bank that can contain 1 AP, due to their neural structure. More primitive life forms may not have this, although note that highly evolved reptiles, e.g. lizardmen, are likely to have quite sophisticated central nervous systems; the statement applies only to terrestrial life forms (but including dinosaurs!).

The Bank is the total amount of APs that may be stored, not the amount that may be accumulated per Round. The Bank size can also be increased via Lores and Martial Arts Stunts. It's fairly easy to get it to size 2 via a Lore, then to size 3 via a cheap Stunt and then to size 4 via an expensive Stunt. All of this has the Tactics: Individual Skill as a prerequisite, although larger scale Tacticss Skills can substitute as per the usual rules.

A larger Bank obviously increases the character's tactical flexibility, and any serious melee or unarmed fighter has a Bank size of 3. A Bank of 4 is attractive, but there are many other Stunts that may be more interesting, dependig on who and what the character is.

Advice

There are many Martial Arts options available to combatant characters, both melee fighters, unarmed fighters and ranged combatants, but you absolutely do want to increase your Bank to a capacity of 2 AP. It's cheap and helps immensely at evening things out, reducing the likelihood of finding yourself in a situation where you have APS you cannot use productively.

Warrior Training I is nice too, but getting your Bank upgraded to 2 APs is much more important. Probably you'll also want a Bank of size 3 before you buy Warrior Training I, but at that point it's a matter of style, and of course how good your Reflexes stat is. The worse your Reflexes are, the more frequently you'll Fumble, which is where Warrior Reflexes I (and II) helps.

Note carefully the many, many, many Stunts that reduce the AP costs of specific combat actions. The stated costs are base costs; almost all can be reduced, and many can be reduced a lot. Perhaps you'd do well to choose one defensive action and two offensive actions to specialize in. Or maybe one defensive, one movement and one offensive; the movement could be the Charge Move Action.

Magic can also do a lot of things. Most powerful "buff" type spells are high-level and so won't be cast often, but permanent magic items can contain many nifty Enhantments, including ones that give you an RD bonus to all Reflexes rolls, and maybe a cheaper one that gives a bonus only to Initiative rolls or even only to Surprise Initiative Rolls (not sure about these two yet, but they are possibilities).

Fast Weapon Enchantments, to add Speed Factors, are also worth looking into. Maybe find one expensive but broad-scope Fast Weapon Enchantment that adds a few Speed Factors, and then a cheap but powerful much narrower one (which then costs only half Essence, as per he rules), maybe one that synergizes with your Martial Arts specialization, for massive one-trick pony power (you could, e.g., become a Master Disarmer), or maybe one that does not, for versatility.

Item Abilities can be good too. IF your weapon is made of wood and is balanced, like a stick, staff or wooden sword (e.g. the bokken favoured by Miyamoto Musashi, the Sengoku-era "sword saint"), look at Shillelagh. Other Item ABilities, although less attractive, exist for heavier weapons.

Please note

Actions are divided into five classes, two movement types, Steps and others, each with their own AP cost, and the first seven have AP costs that can be reduced via Speed Factors, as shown in this temporary article: Action Point table.
(the contents of that article will later be moved into one or more permanent articles)

Professional warriors very often get Speed Factors. One source is simply a high-Quality weapon. One aspect of weapon Quality is high Durability, another is improved damage or Armour Piercing (PA, not to be confused with AP which is a major subject in this article), a third is prettiness (Decoration, expensive materials), and a fourth is balance and usability in the form of an RD bonus, but a fifth aspect of weapon Quality is speed, swinginess, another aspect of weapon balance design, which results in Speed Factors.

A very well-shaped sword can easily give 1 SF on all uses, as a mundane (non-magical) effect.

On top of that, more Speed Factors can be had via Martial Arts Stunts. Usually these are action-specific, i.e. you get 1 or 2 SFs for Normal Attack or for Disarm, but some hugely expensive ones are general-purpose for a given weapon type, e.g. Sword Master which gives +1 SF for all sword uses. (All Martial Arts are weapon-specific).

Martial Arts can also add Speed Factors to Reactions, and to Move Actions, including Charge. Charge cost a lot of APs (base 14 AP, as a Class E action), and is rarely used, but when it is useful it is very useful, and 3 Speed Factors reduces the cost to 11 APs, or 4 Speed Factors reduce it to 9 APs, a popular breakpoint for many warrior types.

Magic can also add Speed Factors, both in form of temporary effects (Spells, Item Abilities, sometimes Powers) and permanent effects (Enchantments, even some Mysteries), and Speed Factors can also be had from mundane or semi-supernatural phenomena such as Berzerkergang states.

So don't get upset about how expensive actions are relative to how few APs yo're likely to get. Those AP costs are only base costs, and is it quite easy to reduce them slightly, and rather doable to reduce them a bit further than that.

Count on getting 11 APs per Round. That's enough for a normal attack, or if you apply a few SFs, it's enough for 2 weapon parries. Even without Speed Factors, 11 APs is almost enough for 2 Shield Blocks (if you want to carry around a heavy shield) or 2 Dodges (if you are willing to pay the Fatigue Point cost). Some Rounds you'll get more than 11 APs, some Rounds fewer. Bank as many unused APs as you can.

Also be aware of the possibility of spending FPs to rush combat actions. It's expensive, but if you have a good chance of taking down an enemy, incapacitating him or perhaps even killing him it may well be worth it.

Mini-FAQ

sub-section

Q: How is it possible for my character to know that Ninja Rob has Danger Sense? Isn't this metagame thinking, and therefore wrong?
A: Metagame thinking is wrong, but it is very possible that Ninja Rob has a reputation, perhaps even a formal Reputation, for having some kind of "sixth sense". Your character may have heard of this, but not have sufficient information to deduce whether Ninja Rob has Danger Sense or Empathy or Intuition, or some other Quasi-Psionic Power, but in spite of this it can be perfectly realistic for your character to decide to err on the side of caution, since Ninja Rob's so-called "sixth sense" could well be Danger SEnse.

Another possibility is that your character has attempted to ambush Ninja Rob several times (at least two, preferably three or more) and failed each time. After several such attempts, it is perfectly realistic for your character to conclude that ambushes won't work, and even to suspect that the reason it won't work is because Ninja Rob has Danger Sense.

Or maybe it is well established in the setting that Ninja Rob has Danger Sense. It is, after all, an observable phenomenon (even if it is very difficult to observe), and one that people in many cultures might realistically believe to be an aspect of Human variety, i.e. something that a tiny subset of the Human population has.

The world

A section mainly for the GM, or worldbuilder, about the world impact of the phenomenon, e.g. an Item Creation Power, or an attribute or other stat that may sometimes be starkly high or low relative to the Human average.

World impact

Talk about the effect on the world that this phenomenon would realistically have (taking into account such facts of human nature as greed, ambition and sexual impulses).

The Ärth setting

Talk about how this trait appears and functions in the Ärth historical fantasy setting.

Design Notes

Man, this Action Point stuff is tricky business! Originally Sagatafl didn't use Action Points, which left a lot of questions without obvious answers, such as how many defensive actions a character could perform in a Round.

Another problem was Initiative Rolls. There were complex rules for each of the many possible Initiative Roll outcomes, for what kinds of actions a character was and was not allowed to perform, and if he could do it at base RD or at an RD penalty, depending on how badly his Initiative Roll went. Initiative was only rolled for on the first Round, when any character entered combat, but it was stll horible and unpleasant and had an arbitrary wibe to it.

Speeding up combat, allowing extra actions via permanent magic, temporary magic, martial arts, combat stances, or just sheer determination (Willpower Point expenditure), was also inelegant and clunky, with the smallest "unit of improvement" being the half-Blow, stacking with itself so that if you got 3 half-Blows from three different sources, you'd get to make two Blows per Round in odd-numbered Rounds and three Blows per Round in even-numbered Rounds. Gimped half-Blows were introduced as an attempt to make this system more fine-grained, a Gimped half-Blow allowing a use on even-numbered Rounds but at an +2 RD penalty (hence the word "gimped") and stacking with itself, and also stacking with a non-Gimped half-Blow to allow one Blow every Round at a +1 RD penalty.

All that is gone now, in favour of something much smoother and more elegant, where questions often (but not always) have obvious answers. Like: Who goes first? Highest remaining AP amount! How much can I do? As much as you can afford to do!

Getting rid of those complexities necessitated the introduction of new ones, such as the AP Bank to compensate for the sometimes coarse-grained AP costs of actions (frustration is likely to happen to players who frequently find their characters having to discard APs that can't be used), and of course also the Speed Factor lookup table.

Still, I like these new complexities a lot better than the old ones.

Quick mini-glossary

Explain terms of great relevance to the subject matter of the article here, but not terms that are of generally great importance (e.g. RD).

See also

Action Point table (which is a temporary article! All information contained in it will eventually be moved into other articles, most or all of these not yet created)

Table to use