Game Rules: Standard Actions and MP

Standard Actions

A standard action will, therefore, take 3-7 rounds of effort to complete. That's most of a day, at the low end, and 2-3 days at the high end—but the time cost in hours isn't really important. Sometimes things will move faster than the 4-6 hour rounds we've discussed, sometimes slower, and if you really need to do something quickly in real time it'll either be possible or impossible with a relatively small relationship to the number of rounds you take.

Instead, the cost of taking many rounds to perform an action is that, first, you're using up more of whatever time you happen to have to accomplish things—burning up more of the scene, if there's any limit at all to how long it will last. And second, you're offering people who might wish to oppose your action more time in which to finish up whatever else they might wish to do and enact some action that opposes you.

It doesn't take much to make your what is into a would have been. All someone has to do is get in your way. It's always better, in the sense of working out what actually does happen, if they don't put up much in the way of opposition, if they just glancingly deflect your intent—but even the lightest interference is enough to disrupt the absolute isness of your actions.

You may normally start a standard (or prompt) action on any round in which you are:

• not executing a standard or prompt action;
• have not used a free action.
  

It then occupies your time, with the exception of available free actions, for the 3-7 rounds that it requires.

Each character, however, has a supply of Magic Points or MP which can be spent to reduce the time that they must invest in a given action. These MP save you one round each. If you spend sufficient MP to reduce an action to one round, it becomes a free action; if you spend enough to reduce its time to 0 rounds, it becomes an "interrupt" (able to preempt even other free actions, and usable even when you don't have a free action available.)

So imagine that you are engaged in a complex Ritual action, occupying 7 rounds. On the second round you use a free action. On the fifth round, you want to use a 5-round Social action, but you can't—you're busy! You spend 4 MP and it's a free action. The very next round you want to do it again, but you don't have a free action available. You spend 5 MP, and use the new action as an interrupt. The very next round, you need to use an ordinary free action; you have to spend one last MP to squeeze it in.

You may spend MP on the action you're currently taking.

Thus another way to do this set of actions, above, is to carry out five rounds of the Ritual action. Then spend 4 MP to complete the Social action as a free action and 2 MP to finish the ritual. The next round, you may start a new Social action, and the round after that you use a free action. This saves you 4 MP, but the savings are somewhat illusory: you are, after all, tied up for the next four rounds.