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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pukunui" data-source="post: 5370609" data-attributes="member: 54629">Because of the segmented nature of the Initiative order, I feel it's hard to pull off action scenes involving carefully timed sequences and/or "forced movement" during combat encounters.I'm running a Star Wars Saga Edition game, so I'll use a SW movie scene as an example: the climactic duel at the end of The Phantom Menace sees Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan chase Maul through a series of force fields that activate at regular intervals, cutting the combatants off from each other at inopportune times in order to heighten the drama.I have no idea how to replicate that scene in my game. I could maybe pull it off outside of combat, but I don't know how I'd incorporate it into a turn-based combat encounter.It seems like the way WotC handles it is to give these sorts of things their own Initiative count(s), but I'm not sure how well that would work in this instance. In order to pull off the sort of thing we see in the movie, I think you'd need to have the force fields acting independently of the Initiative order, perhaps even acting on the individual characters' turns.Either that or you'd need to carefully engineer it so the corridor was just too long for someone to double-move all the way through and then you'd need to make sure your NPC starts his turn several squares ahead of the chasing PCs, so that even if you have both the NPC and the PCs act before the forcefield during the Initiative order, the PCs will still be end up far enough away from the NPC that the forcefield can activate in between them. Another awkward one would be something like the conveyor belt scene in Attack of the Clones. I guess you could just have everyone move a certain number of squares along the conveyor belt at the beginning of each round - or, I suppose you could make it so that you can move at 2x your speed if going in the direction that the conveyor is going, but only half speed if you're going against it (that would be to show movement relative to anything/anyone not on the conveyor belt). But that's still kind of awkward.EDIT: Interestingly enough, according to the SWSE supplement, Galaxy at War, this is exactly how you do it: moving with the belt is 2x speed, against it is half-speed. It also adds an Acrobatics check to avoid being flat-footed while on the belt.I know this sort of thing is partly just a sacrifice you have to make when using turn-based combat, but it still rubs me the wrong way sometimes. Like when doing a chase scene. Instead of actually having one character moving simultaneously with another character, you have this sort of fits-and-starts thing where one character moves away, the other catches up, then the first one moves ahead again, then the other catches up again (and each time the first character tries to break away, the chasing character gets to make an AoO - whereas if they were both moving simultaneously, that might not happen). It's awkward but I don't know how else you'd do it.I suppose maybe you could break up Initiative into a "movement round" and an "action round" but even that is unwieldy and awkward.Thoughts?Thanks,Jonathan</blockquote>

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