Oh man, right now I am going through 5e for my Heartbreaker trying to understand the intent of various rules to shrink them down and make them easier and quicker to understand. This point is really relevant to the whole process and once again I appreciate your insights!
With so many things relying on time tracking, I made an Initiative tracker. It marks the current round and then I mark the round a duration will end. It is a simple process that keeps everything recorded. In campaigns, marking the days to ensure persistent occurrences are tracked, makes for great information the referee may use for prognostications and states of destinations and ports of call.
I once thought it would be fun to make a game where every roll was an opposed roll. Then I sat down to run it, and quickly grew weary of having to roll dice every time a player did anything. I threw it out.
Have you ever considered "power pools" or some such for tracking charge duration? Something like "Ok, that flight spell gives you 30 mana of flight ability" (I'm just making this up as I go here)... and then each action you take using Flight, you roll a d10 and subtract that amount from your mana pool. Players know they have a minimum of 3 actions (if they roll max 10 each time) or it could go much longer. This is easy to track and provides drama (How much mana do you have left?) and opens the door for cool design like "I want to fly faster and higher to escape..." so GM says, "Cool... but roll 2d10 for mana spend this round to do so"... and maybe risk not having enough mana for that last maneuver and something dangerous happens, etc.
This is a clear mechanic that should also feed the drama of the fiction, give the players some cool risk choices to make, and can be applied to both Tactical Actions (micro, zoomed in, incremental, combat style actions on rounds) and Montage Actions (zoomed out, dramatic, result focused story actions).
Oh man, right now I am going through 5e for my Heartbreaker trying to understand the intent of various rules to shrink them down and make them easier and quicker to understand. This point is really relevant to the whole process and once again I appreciate your insights!
With so many things relying on time tracking, I made an Initiative tracker. It marks the current round and then I mark the round a duration will end. It is a simple process that keeps everything recorded. In campaigns, marking the days to ensure persistent occurrences are tracked, makes for great information the referee may use for prognostications and states of destinations and ports of call.
I love the philosophy behind these rule changes. Cypher shines when it's more about narrative than math.
The time frame of "until the combat ends" seems appropriate for some combat abilities, such as Distortion.
I once thought it would be fun to make a game where every roll was an opposed roll. Then I sat down to run it, and quickly grew weary of having to roll dice every time a player did anything. I threw it out.
Have you ever considered "power pools" or some such for tracking charge duration? Something like "Ok, that flight spell gives you 30 mana of flight ability" (I'm just making this up as I go here)... and then each action you take using Flight, you roll a d10 and subtract that amount from your mana pool. Players know they have a minimum of 3 actions (if they roll max 10 each time) or it could go much longer. This is easy to track and provides drama (How much mana do you have left?) and opens the door for cool design like "I want to fly faster and higher to escape..." so GM says, "Cool... but roll 2d10 for mana spend this round to do so"... and maybe risk not having enough mana for that last maneuver and something dangerous happens, etc.
This is a clear mechanic that should also feed the drama of the fiction, give the players some cool risk choices to make, and can be applied to both Tactical Actions (micro, zoomed in, incremental, combat style actions on rounds) and Montage Actions (zoomed out, dramatic, result focused story actions).