Long Awaited Join Battle Post

Question: There were a whole bunch of questions for this.  And they were generally long.  The basic premise was: How do you work join battle? How do people with high JB get extra actions?  What about Opening Gambit?

           Apparently some people want to know about this. Annes been bugging me to answer this for a while. I'll try to explain it as simply as possible. But its probably gonna end up convoluted and stupid. The reason I havnt written it down, is Im not sure its something Id want to suggest for everyone else. It is much like my fatebond system in that it works for me, but I think its too complicated for other people, especially for others to have to do on the fly all the time. But since you asked for it, the following is how I run Join Battle: 

        Placement on my tick sheet(i dont use a wheel) is on a stratus between 0 and 10. The highest JB goes on tick 0, the lowest(as long as the difference between highest and lowest nonbotch is 5) goes on tick 5, and botches go on tick 10. So the first question becomes, where do the other people go? 

I do a break up of where the other people go based on what they rolled in comparison to each other.  We'll use 5 combatants.  Lets name them, Alan, Guy, John, Kyle and Hal(shout out to Tom).

On their join battles for this combat they got: 65, 35, 25, 10, 5 respectively.  I look at a difference, and figure out an even(ish) spread for them across the 6 spaces.  Something like this. 

0: Alan

1: 

2: Guy

3: John

4: 

5: Kyle and Hal

        This gives us a nice spread so that peoples actions are happening at different times, and the game doesnt turn into "ok all the heros go, ok now all the bad guys go" which I find boring.  Kyle definitely got higher then Hal, but in the grand scheme not high enough to matter so they go on the same last place tick.  And I put a second in between Alan and Guy to show the large spread between their two numbers(even though the two ticks isnt actually a large spread, its a mental thing for the PCs, if they see they go a little before, they'll automatically feel a little superior about their high roll as well).  

       Then I make a break point that seem fair for the spread of JBs.  For this, Id shoot towards the middle(ish) and pick 25.  Everyone who got higher then 25, in addition to going sooner, also get to activate/use X number of "non-interacting with the enemy" actions where X = (their JB - 25)/5.  

Or more simply, for every 5 more then 25 they got on their JB, they get to take an action.  This action cannot interact with the enemy in any way and in our games these actions are often used for body armor, army of one, animal aspect, what have you.  

In our above example, Guy would get to take 2 actions, and Alan would get to take 8 actions.  

But what about Opening Gambit?
Were you yet tired of my rambling?

Ok.  Using the above example.  Hal(like geoff often does) spends for opening gambit.  Now he goes first(and fucks everything up for everyone else).


0: Hal
1: Alan
2: 
3: Guy
4: John
5: Kyle


Hal bumps everyone down.  Even though he has a horrible JB roll, he has a knack that fixes that for him.  Now no one gets any extra JB moves because the knack doesnt actually give Hal a 66 JB(and the actions that go with it) it just lets him go first.  So everyone also loses their extra actions because they are not going before him.  **

If Guy, who has higher epic wits then Hal was to also then use JB itd look like this.

0: Guy
1: Hal
2: Alan
3: 
4: 
5: Kyle and John

As more people use opening gambit, others with lower wits(and anyone else) get bumped down a step towards tick 5.  People with same epic wits stay on the same tick(that gambit'd).

**If you were running into a problem with people using opening gambit to ruin the lives of high wits people, I could see using the same system but still letting the super wits people use the actions they would have gotten had the person not opening gambit'd or all but one of the actions.  But like the feeling of "opening gambit means combat starts right now, no time for shenanigans."  However I dont abuse it(or really use it unless pcs do) and my players havnt had problems in that area.  Usually one person  using opening gambit becomes an opening gambit cascade.  


I hope that helped some people.  As always Im poorer with the written word, and expect many confused questions where I either mistyped or said something that wasnt helpful or enlightening.  But anyway, thats how I do Join Battle, feel free to use whichever way works best for your group.