it used to be that rarer mechanics like orbital reassembly, calling in assets, activating certain trait skills (and others outside of the category of "things you could do every turn") would use one or both of the actions you on a combat turn. playtesting made it clear:
it's just more fun when you can take a full turn every turn!
sure, is it a bit absurd and very powerful that:
- you can call in once/twice-per-mission, powerful assets like an ORBITAL BEAM instantly
- you can deploy a squad beacon & then get reassembled in orbit and dropped in instantly on top of the beacon, even if it's near a SYNC POINT (which has to be 100m away from a reassembly point by any other method)
but the right way to balance that is to make enemies have similar & powerful capabilities. because going "everyone else got to do 2 things this turn--because you used the closer spawn you only get to do one" is just less fun! PLANET FIST is tactical, but its tactical combat is 110% more about staying fast & fun then requiring perfect planning & efficiency.
i felt myself doing all this ad hoc in playtesting--why would i strip this player of the ability to do something full & cool this round, and make them wait until it goes all the way around and come back them? fuck it, treat [x] as instant! so i slowly just started revising the rulebook to take the same approach!
my philosophy has steadily become: if you're gonna make a character skip a turn (or perhaps even worse, have a turn where they don't get to meaningfully inhabit their character) you better have a very good reason!
part of the point of PLANET FIST is that it combines the Powered by the Apocalypse approach with a tactical wargame formula, such that players can flexibly describe what they want to do, and GMs can specify a 2D6+ATTRIBUTE roll to provide highly variable consequences.
as i thought more about this post, what separates the kind of actions i described above (and the others i have made instant) is that they are "procedural"--you say that you're doing them, and they have very specific, automatic outcomes.
it's fun having them available, but also, what feels expressive in a PLANET FIST turn is those flexible, highly narrative actions with variable outcomes. my design philosophy has increasingly become: anything that strips the player of the ability to do that on any given turn is anti-fun. allow them those powerful & necessary procedural actions, yes, but never at expense of doing something flexible, varied, and narrative every time their turn comes around.
LOVE this way of putting it (especially calling them "procedural").
It's not exactly the same because most of my designs focus on more per-round action economy instead of single expressive actions but this is why I made movement into its own per-class power set in Valiant Horizon instead of the standard "move action" - I found that melee classes were doing less things than non-melee because they had to move + do a thing instead of just do two things! And that's no fun. So now they all move differently in addition to acting differently.
