Hi all, I have a question about the talent “Quick to action”.
Retain the Initiative allows two allies to play consecutively for 2 Momentum points.
“the Player may spend 2 Momentum (Immediate) to keep the initiative, handing the action to another Player Character instead. Once a Player has opted to keep the initiative, nobody on that side may keep the initiative again until the opposition have taken at least one Turn of their own. In any case, no character may take more than one Turn in a Round.”
Quick to Action
During the first round of any combat, you and your allies may ignore the normal cost to Retain the Initiative.
Ok, it’s only the first round.
Ok, you can’t Retain the Initiative a second time until an opponent plays.
So the optimal legit pattern for 6 players is: PC1, PC2, NPC1, PC3, PC4, NPC2, PC5, PC6
But how do you understand the “you and your allies” part?
Interpretation (with example using the described pattern) :
You can Retain the Initiative for an ally for free. (You save 2 Momentum points)
Anyone in your team can Retain the initiative for free once. (Your team save 2 Momentum points)
Anyone in your team can Retain the initiative for free multiple time. (Your team save 6 Momentum points, 6 players act and only NPC does…)
The last one seems to be the good one, but it looks really broken for me.
Whenever you or an ally attempts to Retain the Initiative during the first round of combat, they do so at a cost of 0 Momentum. The limit on how often they can Retain the Initiative remains unchanged. So, you could Retain the Initiative several times in the first round (but only once before you have to let the enemy act and there’s nothing preventing them from Retaining the Initiative by spending Threat).
So, it’s the third option you’ve listed… with the caveat that you may not want to Retain, if the enemy has numbers comparable to you - the more actions your side take early in the round, the more people they get to act back-to-back (at no cost) at the end of the round.
Yes, it applies to ship combat too, with the reminder that each NPC ship gets a number of turns per round equal to its Scale, so 6 PCs vs a Scale 6 npc ship is an equal number of turns.
Our current game to reflect this and make it easy to calculate we use the ship scale (EX defiant = difficulty 3, Akira = difficulty 5 and a Galaxy = difficulty 6) as the base difficulty to evade hazards, weapons and the like
With a increase in difficulty per attempt per round. While it may seem high as written. The conn officer without using any momentum is rolling 3 dice (2 for him and 1 for the ship) so depending on stats; 3 to 4 successes is very common. Therefore the larger the ship the more momentum to better the odds needs to be used. And a PC piloting a shuttle (scale 2) simulate a small target being a “leaf in the wind”.
