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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6993938" data-attributes="member: 42582">[MENTION=6787650]Hemlock[/MENTION] - does your initiative system handle the "stop motion" issue more smoothly?In our 4e game we just suck it up - because of the way off-turn actions work in that system it's mostly only an issue for zones/auras of auto-damage, and normally they're not doing enough damage relative to a victim's hp that it manifests so absurdly as to be worth worrying about.Back in my RM days it came up more often. The game itself has some rules to help handle it (eg the effects of a stun penalty depended on whether or not you had acted between rolling initiative at the start of the round and suffering the penalty), but they didn't deal with every case. When they didn't, we would either groan and suck it up, or work around it in some fashion on an ad hoc basis. One off-shoot of RM's complexity is that the micro-correlations between mechanical events/processes, and events/processes in the fiction, is often fairly clear, which means that coming up with fair ad hoc workarounds that enjoy table consensus is often not too hard. But it still takes time.RM has a lot of variant initiative/action-economy systems (I would say at least half-a-dozen, maybe more, in print), some of which try to achieve true continuous action, but they can get extremely baroque, and I've never used a fully continuous resolution system.Burning Wheel doesn't use initiative at all - instead it goes (i) blind declaration of positioning and actions (which can include attack, parry, dodge, push, lock, etc - all the usual stuff), (ii) positioning roll to work out who gets their desired positioning advantage, (iii) simultaneous resolution. A quirk of the system is that some characters can have more actions than others, which spill over into unopposed action "slots". So a big part of making your declaration is trying to optimise things so you can get off a good strike in an unopposed "slot".It's quite intricate, and much better for duels than large melees - the game offers other, mechanically simpler ways for handling fights where the intricacy is not warranted. But at least in my experience so far it doesn't produce "stop motion" paradoxes.</blockquote>

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