I posted this in another thread and was informed that I should join this one, so I am copying my post (and also adding more to it) from there to here:
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Something that should be touched on, I think, is player characters/npcs and how they act out of combat. Currently, once combat starts, everyone involved slows down to turn-by-turn limitations, but everyone else acts normally; this leads to some rather glaring exploits (and time shenanigans on the level of Doctor Who).

For one, you can have one person go and initiate combat and just sit there and never move their turn forward, while having the other three party members go around and do several rounds worth of preparations; or avoid combat entirely to get to whatever goal they have in mind, like looting a dungeon.

Secondly, warlocks can cast find familiar for free and the familiar can get into combat without dragging the warlock along with it. Flaming Sphere also has its own initiative. Using the Warlock's find familiar ability to summon an imp, and another party member summoning a flaming sphere, (or heck, a wizard summoning a familiar too) the warlock can sit back and spam find familiar; the imp's invisibility ensures that it enters combat only when the warlock wants it to, and the flaming sphere being considered a creature ensures that the NPCs attack it and take damage every turn.
Now imagine this: The Warlock summons an imp and gets it real close and has it initiate combat, then the wizard summons a flaming sphere and does the same with it... but does not end the flaming sphere's turn (effectively halting combat). Neither the wizard nor the warlock are in combat. The Warlock's imp runs out of actions, so the warlock summons a new one and rinses/repeats until all the enemies are dead; the enemies never get their own turns, because the warlock is not in combat and keeps adding a new combatant, and the wizard never finishes the flaming sphere's turn.

Even if the wizard did finish the flaming sphere's turn, and combat progressed normally, the warlock would not have to wait for the imp's turn. He could simply summon a new imp and attack, sometimes multiple times in a single npc's turn.

A way to mitigate that would be to force turn-by-turn limitations globally, even those out of combat. As for how it would work with the initiative order, I'd say that party members out of combat would all act on the same turn as the one who started combat, until they roll initiative themselves, and non-party-non-combatants would act on the same turn as the person with the highest initiative (or would act on a predetermined, never changing, global base initiative like 10 or something).
Effectively, all npcs out of combat would act normally (no camera movement, or waiting) but would only move/act within the limitations of one round's worth of actions; so there would be no waiting for x misc npcs to bicker or patrol/etc.



TL;DR: Global turn-by-turn limitations are needed in order to mitigate spamming of spells/summons, that can act on their own initiative, by out of combat wizards/warlocks; as well as to prevent bypassing combat by gaming the system, npcs/players abusing the different timescales (yea I consider the npcs out of combat joining combat, despite their normal patrols taking several minutes, as the devs having npcs abuse the system).


PS: It is also weird to see the world around the limited characters move normally, while those in combat are all effectively frozen in time.

PPS: I greatly dislike how easy it is to "game" the system currently in place. Yes, the system should be fun and easy to use, but taking advantage of the system to complete multiple turns worth of actions is abusing the system (and it is far too easy to do), which in turn reduces the difficulty/immersion.

Last edited by JaceEthaniel; 08/03/21 12:44 AM. Reason: added some more example text.