Tick Tock

Question: I never understood how to combine the ticks system with stunts, do you have any examples to illustrate how that works? Thanks for the great work and happy honeymoon!

Thanks for your well-wishes - we're probably on a plane to Greece right this very second. Cross your fingers that nobody kills us in an flash riot!

Stunting and ticks are the simplest thing in the world to combine: just don't do any extra work. Actions already have their tick value spelled out for you, either based on a weapon's speed, a boon's stated speed or good old Miscellaneous 5-tick Action. A stunt doesn't change or modify that speed at all; it takes five ticks to stab somebody with a normal sword, and it also takes five ticks to stab somebody with a normal sword while flipping over their shoulders and bellowing a battle cry. Stunts never need to take up any extra tick-time on their own; they're just cool descriptions of actions that already have a tick value, so you don't need to penalize the player's creativity by making their action take longer.

If a PC specifically wants to go for a stunt that will definitely take some extra time - stopping to paint something on a wall in preparation for a ritual in the middle of combat, for example - then you'll need to make an on-the-spot decision about how long that takes to complete. It's easiest to just say that a tick and a second are about the same, so if you think it might take him ten or fifteen seconds to do that, let him know that it'll take him out of the combat for that many ticks unless he finds a condensed way to do it.

(Our players sometimes find it useful to condense the idea down to "actions", basically just chunks of 5 ticks, so we might say, "Okay, that sounds awesome, but it'll take an extra action (i.e., 10 ticks instead of 5), do you still want to go for it?" You don't need to use that kind of terminology, though, especially if your players play other games where actions are actually a measure of combat time and you don't want them getting confused.)

And, of course, if a stunt is happening outside of combat, there's no reason to worry about how many ticks it requires unless you're planning for something to jump the stunter in the middle of the proceedings; just call it "then we stopped for five minutes while Roger did his thing" and leave it at that.

The key is not to get bogged down. The tick system is fabulous about keeping combat moving and everyone involved - don't make it harder for your players, and don't make it harder for yourself. Most of the time, stunts don't have to cost you a thing, and that includes seconds; only make it an issue when a stunt clearly needs more time than the action it's attached to, and check with the player to see if they want to take the hit to go ahead with their cool idea or come up with an alternative to keep from falling behind.