Attacks Per Turn
And the shit they go through.
Alright. These have been brought up a lot over the last few dozen pages, and with the confusion from Spell Casting, I think I should go over them
sooner rather than
later before another misunderstanding crops up.
To begin with, these are exactly what it says on the tin. They are the number of
offensive actions per turn, a given character can take. Now, understand that this counter is not absolute, because each turn is measured in a ten second interval. This means
not everyone is going to use all of their turns
every round. This can be caused by any number of things:
- Position on the battlefield - being far away from the other combatants as a melee fighter means the character is out of range, and thus has to close on a target, thus leading to them having a smaller window of opportunity to utilize their attacks. The opposite is true for a ranged fighter: they have more room to act, thus have more time to utilize their attacks. And vis versa.
- Awareness of what is going on - being a speedy mother fucker is all well and good, but confusion and fog of war is a thing. Being in the perfect position to do something doesn't meant diddly if they don't know that they should... well... do something. Abilities like Game Queen and Limitless Horizon's Diamond Mind ability makes overcoming this a lot easier.
- Attack Negation - or in other words, moving to bat someone's killing blow aside and saving the damsel in distress. (We're all looking at you, Uni.) This is like parrying or outright blocking a blow. It stops what they were doing, but renders you unable to do something yourself.
- Order of attack - also known as not firing into the melee when your ally is up in someone else's face and trying to pound them into submission. Some people are enough of an asshole to take a swing anyway, and risk hitting their own guy to potentially kill them just to get the enemy, but most people are enough of a team player to realize that's kind of a bad idea. Just look at what Nepgear did to Truth.
Now, among these actions, pretty much everyone defaults to basic attacks.
Basic attacks are defined by the given character's
weapon. Such as Solid Core's
Purifier Beam. These are everyone's go-to choice when they initially engage the enemy. It takes one action to utilize, and is pretty straight forward. Special actions though are something else entirely.
Special Actions are Attacks Per Turn (APT) that are spent on actions other than swinging their weapon around like a crazed monkey. The most common Special Action is casting a spell. Under normal circumstances, a given character can only cast a single spell a turn. This means that most characters will save spell use for a moment when it'll have the most situational modifiers that they can manage to stack onto it.
Nepgear's
Celestial Severance though is special in the fact that it's hilariously easy to use. All it really does is give a titanic boost to a single melee attack, thus she can blast it out mid-combo for massive damage.
Other Special Actions though are things like triggering Active Abilities, such as Nepgear's
Core Purge. These are a lot less common, and don't tend to be used a lot because they tend to come with some form of drawback. They're usually used only when their usefulness can outweigh whatever drawback they come with.
[Skill-Based Attack Negation]
These are Special Actions that allow weaker, but more skilled Magical Girls to take on stronger opponents, or skilled individuals to match up with Magical Girls and not splatter in the first round. As they're worded though, they're mostly straight forward:
Barely Competent ----->
Competent ----->
Skilled ----->
Master Skill ----->
Inhuman Skill ----->
Unmatched Skill /
Duelist Dance /
Solar Skill / Similar Derivatives
Each level represents the skill of the character with their given weapon.
Barely Competent and
Competent are characters that barely know one end of their weapon from another, and thus do less damage when engaged in melee combat.
Skilled characters on the other hand start gaining the ability to sacrifice their available ATP in order to negate an opponent's
Basic Attack. Each level over
Skilled requires one less ATP to negate the enemy's attack. This is normally used when one character is trying to save another character from a killing blow, or to temporarily stalemate a stronger character until help arrives.
Under normal circumstances, the highest skill a given character can achieve is the
Inhuman Skill ability, which allows for a 2 to 1 negation ratio. But there are rare abilities, such as
Duelist Dance and
Solar Skill, that can break past this limit, but at the cost of an associated malice or prerequisite. Such as
Solar Skill requiring a boost-spell to be applied, or
Duelist Dance which renders the user unable to react to other targets besides their dance partner.
Unmatched Skill is also available to it's user only because of the nature of their powers and weapon.
As for what Skill Based Attack Negation cannot effect: Spells. That's it.
Other Active Abilities like
Core Purge or
Avatar of Arcana are subject to negation like regular attacks, but Spells are not. The reason Spells can't be effected by this, is that they are, in a way, 'heavier' than regular actions. When a character launches a spell, they're throwing more magical 'weight' behind the action than a regular attack would accrue, allowing the spell to more or less plow through the attempt to negate it.
For example, when Nepgear throws in Celestial Severance during a combo, not only is her enemy facing a sudden blade of unstoppable death, but they're also taking extra metaphorical 'weight' from the attack. A weight that Skill-Based Negation can't compensate for. And this goes for pretty much everyone.
It's another reason that Magical Girls try to keep their spells in reserve: less chance of their enemy seeing it coming and dodging like a mother fucker.
