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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Afrodyte" data-source="post: 1946376" data-attributes="member: 8713">Mr. T,I like this idea.  It gives opportunities to do more interesting things in combat, which is great for doing things besides roll-hit/miss-damage. Several systems use something like this, the most notable being Feng Shui, but the closest to D20 being Decipher's LotR RPG.Instead of giving people X AP to spend, how about having 1 round be represented by N action slots, where N is a discrete unit of time such as 6 seconds or one minute or what have you.  Anything you do within that allotted time period you can pretty much do without penalty.   If you try to push yourself to do more things in a shorter amount of time, you get a cumulative penalty (say, -5) to each subsequent action (and even then there's only so much you can do).  It actually streamlines the process, since you can pretty much do anything you want but at a certain price.  It also keeps the momentum going because actions that start in one round can roll over to the next, maintaining the pace of events.  In addition, it's easier to adjust the scale of combat since action slots don't have to correspond to the same unit of time in every combat, nor do they represent the same scale of movement and action every time.The difficult part would be adjusting your mindset so that instead of focusing on who's going, you focus on what's happening.  Spells and similar effects can be a bit of a pain, but if you translate casting time from turns or rounds into action slots, it's much easier.  It works best if you do two things.  First, give players more responsibility for keeping up with their characters' action slots and initiative.  Second, rather than each combatant doing everything they can in  one turn, break things down into discrete parts.  Each turn, the player describes what part they are doing.  A charge, for instance, is basically 2 parts: run at your target and attack.  Using Spring Attack is 3 parts: move to the target, attack, and move away.  A player can state their intent so that the proper bonuses and penalties apply, but they can't resolve the entire maneuver all in one go, unless of course the manuever takes up one action slot.</blockquote>

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