The Sage on White Raven Tactics

[Slaved]

Sure it would. First, the Warblade has to delay all the way through the round, through all allies and enemies, until she gets to the top of the round and jumps out of the initiative order. Now she grabs the nova-caster and plops her up at the beginning. But now what? She can never actually give the nova-caster another boost for the whole fight. Why not? Well she could waste another whole round to delay arbitrarily higher, but that won't help, since the nova-caster already goes really early, so it makes no practical difference. The abusive WRT is to use it on somebody who just acted so they essentially go twice in the same round. That can work at most once (if your nova-caster or other WRT target is last in the init order. If she is already first, it will work 0 times) with my edit. After that, you can never use it again unless the nova-caster delays to go last in the round, in which point she just lost her opportunity to act first anyway, so it isn't really a gain at all.

With delaying, readying, and other tactics built right into the system a character could still do the same thing.

 

[Slaved]

Isn't this essentially what it does already? It pulls someone to the init count just below the initiator. Doesn't matter if the target goes before or after the initiator, though if they have gone before the initiator is when they effectively get to go twice. So how does this 'fix' the problem you are suggesting?

Once they are pulled below the initiator, the initiator can always delay again to go after the caster and then pull them down again.

I've read your other replies, but I am afraid I don't follow how this "solves" what you want it to solve...

I do not want anything solved personally, I have not seen a problem with it other than having several people with the ability at once but I fix that like I fix a large number of things in the system that stack too well.

With what I suggested it becomes impossible to just have a couple of people go back and forth over and over again, each time it goes around at least one other person will get a turn in between.

 

[Rystil Arden]

With delaying, readying, and other tactics built right into the system a character could still do the same thing.

I fail to see how. With yours, I gave you the example (ally goes right after the two of them). Give me an example please. In the example, it needs to work more than once per fight to give the WRT target back-to-back (or nearly back-to-back is okay, but you can't just raise the target's initiative a tiny bit, since then it doesn't really matter) attacks more than once in the fight without inconveniencing the WRT target by delaying them a huge amount to the point that they might as well have just attacked without WRT. Inconveniencing the Warblade is fine though.

I honestly cannot think of such an example. Right now, the optimum I can see is: WRT target goes last. Warblade either goes first naturally or delays to go first. Warblade uses WRT and pulls target up from end of the round to beginning, and since target just acted at end of round, she goes twice consecutively. But then the Warblade can never use this profitably on her again for the rest of the fight unless she delays all the way to the end again, which is pointless.

 

[Slaved]

White Raven Tactics someone up to initiative 999, they delay down one point of initiative on their turn and act as normal. When you get your Tactics back you ready to do some action after their turn and you White Raven them back up to 999. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Rystil Arden]

White Raven Tactics someone up to initiative 999, they delay down one point of initiative on their turn and act as normal. When you get your Tactics back you ready to do some action after their turn and you White Raven them back up to 999. Rinse and repeat.

I thought of that, but I'm fairly confident it doesn't work. You didn't actually get them two turns the second time around. You just moved them up from 998 to 999, which didn't actually give them any gain, since clearly both of those numbers go before everyone else anyway.

 

[RigaMortus2]

And this brings up the problem of the game being designed around the silly meta-game concept of their being an assumed 4 encounters a day.

That's true too...