The Tick System

Cthulhu_Wakes

Cthulhu_Wakes

Black Sun in a White World
Can anyone who has EX 2nd Edition please explain the tick sytem to me more thoroughly? My simian mind can't wrap around it at the moment. I just need an idea of how combat flows and works, from what I read from the demo, it was confusing me a little. Anyone clarify?
 
(This is a general overview - someone else can ease in the mechanics if they want).


Combat flows in TICKS, starting from Tick 0.  One tick is approximately one second.


The Join Battle action is what gets you into the combat sequence.  Join Battle is a dice roll, looking for successes, just like any other roll in the game - "initiative" is no longer an exception to the "handful of d10s" norm.


How well you do on your Join Battle roll controls how many ticks you wait from Tick 0, which is when the guy who rolled the best will be acting.  Thus, if Solar Sam gets 6 successes and Lunar Lou gets 9, Lou acts on Tick 0, Sam acts on Tick 3.


Actions have a Speed, which is the "cost" in ticks to complete your action.  Charms are Speed 6 unless otherwise posted, the defensive action is Speed 3, many others are Speed 5.


Multiple actions are now called Flurries.


Each type of action you can take comes with a DV (Defense Value) penalty - in other words, how badly you are opening yourself up by taking the proposed action.
 
The best way I describe the Tick system to new players is to think of Final Fantasy 7, and the way combat worked there.


Your character would take an action, and thereafter a meter would slowly charge up, at which point they could take their next action. The Tick system works like this, but is a bit more complicated.
 
So it takes three seconds to use a Dodge Charm?  Does anyone else think that the designers were mentally retarded?  I can dodge a punch a hell of a lot faster than that, and I don't have Exalted powers!
 
So it takes three seconds to use a Dodge Charm?  Does anyone else think that the designers were mentally retarded?  I can dodge a punch a hell of a lot faster than that' date=' and I don't have Exalted powers![/quote']
I think the idea is that the entire maneuver, including positioning yourself for your next move, takes about 3 seconds.


-S
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Memesis was the one who drew the correlation between ticks and seconds; I don't have the books yet, so I don't know if that is true for the book itself.


 Think of it as arbitrary small time units if it hurts your brain less.
 
Memesis was the one who drew the correlation between ticks and seconds; I don't have the books yet' date=' so I don't know if that is true for the book itself.[/quote']
It's true of the Return to the To5C release, as well as the combat preview posted on the WW main page some weeks back.


-S
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The best way I describe the Tick system to new players is to think of Final Fantasy 7, and the way combat worked there.
Your character would take an action, and thereafter a meter would slowly charge up, at which point they could take their next action. The Tick system works like this, but is a bit more complicated.
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A closer correlation is the Grandia series of games.
 
So it takes three seconds to use a Dodge Charm?  Does anyone else think that the designers were mentally retarded?  I can dodge a punch a hell of a lot faster than that' date=' and I don't have Exalted powers![/quote']
I think whiny players are mentally retarded.  It's nice that you can dodge a punch in less than 3 seconds.  How long does it take you to line up your own counterattack after doing so, or to do something else useful?  THAT is what Speed is measuring.


If you say "but I can dodge and throw a punch in the same second", then I say:  Congratulations, you have discovered what DV (a constant defensive bonus) does for you.


If you say "but I can throw several punches in 5 seconds", then I say:  Congratulations, you have discovered the Flurry rules.
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So it takes three seconds to use a Dodge Charm?
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Actually, if I recall correctly, it is simple charms, that take 6 ticks (which, by the way, translates into 6 seconds, not 3). Aren't most dodge charms reflexive? I don't have my 2e book right now, but that would make sense to me.


Jeppe
 
I know it's early, but ... I would really like to hear from someone who's playtested the tick-system what they think about it's strengths and weaknesses. Is it faster than the turn system? Is it more or less taxing bookeeping? Does it change tactics significantly? For better or worse?

Jeppe said:
"Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"
- Sigmund Freud
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Freud said that? ... That's almost ironic coming from the man who can trace the root of any problem to the influence of your mother during prepubescence ...
 
From what I've heard so far, it's just like First Ed, but a lot faster. They said combat whitles down a lot and can go *snap fingers* like that now.
 
How long does it take to line up a counterattack?  Less time than you can blink.  If you've studied combat style martial arts, as opposed to the sport or art varients, you would know that.  Hell, there were times when I was studying Tae Know Do that I could not follow all of the attacks, blocks and counterattacks that we would do in sparing, it was just too fast.  Fencing was just as fast.  For the average human being, it takes about a second to attack and block an attack.  A trained hand-to-hand fighter can make two attacks and two blocks in the same time without any problems.  In my opinion, RPGs are supposed to allow people to do more than they could in real life, not to make them into cripples.  Hell, if it takes one of the Exalted six seconds to punch me, I could clobber a Solar without breaking a sweat.
 
Why didn't you bitch about this before, when ALL actions took a full 3 seconds (the length of a 1st Ed. turn)?


If it bothers you so much, cut the time interval for a tick in your games to something smaller. Easy.


-S
 
How long does it take to line up a counterattack?  Less time than you can blink.  If you've studied combat style martial arts' date=' as opposed to the sport or art varients, you would know that.  Hell, there were times when I was studying Tae Know Do that I could not follow all of the attacks, blocks and counterattacks that we would do in sparing, it was just too fast.  Fencing was just as fast.  For the average human being, it takes about a second to attack and block an attack.  A trained hand-to-hand fighter can make two attacks and two blocks in the same time without any problems.  In my opinion, RPGs are supposed to allow people to do more than they could in real life, not to make them into cripples.  Hell, if it takes one of the Exalted six seconds to punch me, I could clobber a Solar without breaking a sweat.[/quote']
Actually... if you need a second to attack and counterattack then you are damn slow for a fencer... but that is besides the point. it is ticks, an abstract system used to simulate combat in a fantasy rpg. rounds were just the same. they are a bit like rubber as long or as short as the story at hands needs them.
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A tick isn't a second. Seriously. A tick is at once much much shorter and much longer than a second. The idea of saying 'a tick is about a second' is to help you ground the mechanics with your life experiences. Don't think that it lets you sit there with a stopwatch during combat.
 
You can take any number of action in a turn, if you want to.  A standard combat turn is three seconds, so what?  It's better than having to wait 6 'ticks' or 6 seconds to do another attack.  I intepreted as the time required for tactical planning as opposed to a limit to an individual's reflexes.  And I agree, one second is way too long for a fencing counterattack, but most people find it hard to believe that they measure time in fencing matchs by the millisecond, and even then you have ties on who attacked whom first.  Humans, with the right training, can have very fast reflexes.
 
You can take any number of action in a turn' date=' if you want to.  A standard combat turn is three seconds, so what?  It's better than having to wait 6 'ticks' or 6 seconds to do another attack.[/quote']
The tick system allows for multiple actions within the same "tick window", just like 1st Edition allows multiple actions in one turn. These are called "Flurries". I don't even have the book, and I know this. Read up before you start knocking it.


-S
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I just don't like it when they change the basic mechanics of the system under me.  At least we had a choice with Power Combat.
 
Conversion from old to new (and the other way) seems pretty straightforward. You're welcome to keep the turn-based system, if this doesn't sit well with you. Personally, I'm looking forward to trying it. Are you sure you're not simply being afraid of change?
 
A friend and I tried the combat system out today. We had two exalts fighting in armor, one with a normal daiklave and one with paired short daiklaves. We had to figure the rules out as we went, so we only got to play two ticks of the fight before we ran out of time. So around two seconds went, acording to what the book suggests. During those two seconds around 7 blows fell, four from one and three from the other. That is damn fast in my book. And because of the essence spent it was seven rather well aimed and precise blows, not the hasty and often sloppy work you would probably see in a "human" flurry. We didn't get to see, what counterattacks would look like or much else.


At first I was a little sceptic, too, about the tick system representing superhumanly fast exalts, but now I must say, that it does seem to live up to it's name. I have to add, that at the same time, that the combatants hacked away on each other they were constantly moving to avoid each other's blows, represented by their DVs.
 
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