Intense Action

One-pager. Intense Action answers how much can you do at once, and how well? It replaces the action-point and "how many actions" bookkeeping that thrashed between every past edition with one idea: attention is finite, and your modifier is how you spread it. Its companion is Initiative — Initiative sets when you act; this sets how much.

There is no action budget to track. In a round you have one primary focus, room for one deliberate secondary action, and your automatic / reflex actions — dodging, flinching, keeping balance, noticing — ticking along underneath. What you can do is set by the body and by skill, not a point pool; what it costs is attention.

Your modifier is how you spread your attention

Split your focus and everything suffers. Declare your deliberate tasks in priority order:

Each task takes −1 for every other task, and −1 more for each task ranked above it. Doing exactly one thing is worth +1 — see Concentrate, below. The ladder doesn't stop at three: keep adding and keep sliding. Take the hit as an ease factor (you do it worse) or as effectiveness (you do less of it) — a divided move covers a third to a half the ground rather than failing outright. Read one column, as always: worse or less.

Concentrate — go all-in on one thing — and buy a bonus at your reflexes' expense. Do exactly one thing this round — one task, one beat, nothing else — and it gains +1 (more for absolute tunnel-vision), but your automatic / reflex actions take a penalty: you won't notice the flanker, you won't dodge well. The sniper who lives inside the scope makes the shot and is oblivious to all else. That trade is the choice.

Promote a reflex when you want it done well. Automatic actions happen on their own at a baseline; spend real attention on one and it climbs — +1 as a secondary, +2 as your primary (measured against leaving it automatic). A sniper watching for a target: make noticing his primary and it's +2 to spot; keep the shot primary but really want to see and it's +1.

A secondary action cannot pre-empt. You can't win the race to act (see Initiative) with something you're only half-attending to — pre-emption belongs to your primary.

How many beats do you get? As many as you like

A statement of intent unfolds as beats — draw · aim · fire, or lunge · wind-up · blow (see Fire and Melee combat). There is no limit on how many you attempt. Every beat past the first is another thing you're attempting, and it goes on the same ladder. Fire once and you're at +1; fire five times and every shot is at −4.

So there is nothing to look up and no threshold to hit. You are never told how many actions you get. You decide how thin to spread yourself, and the dice price it.

Repetitions are tasks. A second shot costs exactly what a second anything costs: −1 to everything, cumulative. A secondary ability — the thing you're only half-attending to — costs −2 a beat instead of −1.

But count outcomes, not rolls. The ladder prices how many things you're trying to accomplish, not how many beats you spend getting there. Three beats of aiming and then a shot is one thing — you are concentrating, and you get the +1 for it. Four shots is four things, at −3 apiece. Advance–attack–retreat is likewise one thing, as it always was. Patience is free; greed is not — which is the distinction that makes a carefully aimed shot better than a snapped one instead of worse.

Skill still converts into rate — continuously, instead of at breakpoints. The gunfighter and the novice may both empty a magazine; the difference is what happens when they do. A Firearms 25 shooter taking two aimed shots is at −1 (EF 4 → SC 100: both land). Going all-in for five puts every shot at −4 (EF 1 → SC 25) — he can, and usually shouldn't. A Firearms 10 shooter tries the same five and is rolling SC 10 a shot: he burns the magazine and accomplishes nothing, which is exactly what that looks like in life. Skill buys you the option to spend beats, not a ration of them.

Melee 18 on the attack: two strikes at −1, or four at −3 if he's desperate to end it. With defence as his secondary, each block is −2 on top.

This deleted three rules and a gotcha. There is no beats divisor, no rounding, and no "an attribute counts double" patch to stop raw attributes buying almost none. Movement in a firefight is simply another task: moving and shooting is two things, at −1 each, and the clumsy character isn't allotted fewer beats — he's just worse at everything he tries to do at once, which he was anyway.

What stops you, now that nothing caps you

Two things, and neither needs bookkeeping. The ladder makes each extra beat worse than the last, so spreading thin has its own price. And a QR10 ends that line of action for the round — the botch that jams the weapon, loses the sight picture, or puts you on the floor. Between them there is no need for a cap: you may always try again, and the game simply stops rewarding it.

Movement is a Coordination action

Movement in most games is free, automatic, and therefore dramatically inert — which quietly deletes tripping, slipping, losing your footing on a scree slope, and going down hard on a wet deck. Here it's a task like any other, rolled on Coordination.

It starts easy — on open, level, dry ground the ease factor is high enough that a competent person essentially never fails, so the rule costs nothing when the ground doesn't matter. The ground sets the EF: rubble, scree, ice, a pitching deck, a rooftop, darkness, knee-deep water, a floor full of brass and bodies.

The trade that makes it worth rolling at all: decline, and you simply move — carefully, slowly, at the GM's discretion, as the What counts as a task rule already allows. Roll, and you're buying speed, distance and position; the stumble is the price of asking for them. Nobody rolls to walk across a room. Everyone rolls to cross it fast, under fire, over the furniture.

What counts as a task

A task is a thing you want rolled. That is the whole test, and it polices itself. A step, a shouted word, drawing a weapon, aiming — these aren't tasks; they happen, with honest consequences (pop up to fire and you're still half-exposed when the round ends). There are no "free actions": a thing is either of no consequence, or it isn't free. But it only costs you attention if you cared enough to roll for it. So advance–attack–retreat is one task — the attack — and takes no penalty. Decline to make your movement a task and you simply move: noisily, visibly, at the GM's discretion.

Help sheds tasks

A helper doesn't hand you a bonus — they take a task off your list, and the ladder does the rest. A sniper ranging his own shot and firing is two things (the shot at −1); give him a spotter who owns the ranging and he's down to one, at 0 — the spotter is worth exactly +1, and it falls out of the rule. Two consequences worth having: help can't push you past your own focused best (the ladder bottoms out at one task, so assistance can't be stacked into absurdity), and a helper who takes nothing gives nothing — the shed task is real, the spotter rolls it, and a spotter who blows the roll hands over bad numbers. A helper who is genuinely better than you is a separate thing — good information — earning an ordinary situational bonus (the aimed / braced family), not a rung on this ladder.

Reactions: parry, dodge, flinch, duck

Reactions are tasks too — but ones you didn't plan, so they're priced apart. Not a pool: take as many as you like, each at a cumulative −2. Keep parrying and you simply get worse at it; skill decides how far down that ladder you stay dangerous — so the better fighter gets more good reactions, with no bookkeeping.

The parry you saw coming is cheaper than the parry you didn't. Tasks you declare together share the ladder above; a reaction you were surprised into pays the full −2 each. This is a large part of why waiting — declaring a trigger and holding for it — is worth so much.

• Parry (opposed): a critical parry lets you counter; an overwhelming one leaves the attacker off-balance (disarm, or trade places).
• Dodge (opposed): dodge and give ground for a one-off advantage — which is what makes melee move, fighters circling and yielding ground instead of standing toe-to-toe.
• Flinch / duck: exposed and shot at, ducking back to cover is a legitimate reaction (at the stacking penalty).

Never pay twice

The ladder prices dividing your own attention. The situation's ease factor prices the world — range, cover, light, the target's movement — never your multitasking. If firing-on-the-move already cost −1 for being two tasks, it does not also take a separate "firing on the move" penalty. Charge it once, on the ladder, and leave it there.

Beyond combat

Attention is finite everywhere. A Pursuit is this at a longer tempo — driving and shooting and reading the road split the same way. Space combat is a crew shedding tasks to one another (that is what a crew is for), each station one focused task. And because the split is measured against the round, the rule scales with tempo for free: move-and-watch are two tasks inside a three-second firefight, one-each across an afternoon of tracking.

Emergent tactics: in almost every other RPG, players concentrate fire to kill one target at a time, because a dead enemy is the only less-dangerous enemy. In ForeSight a wound is −(level) to everything and a stun takes an enemy out of the turn, so a hurt, rattled foe is dramatically less dangerous than a healthy one. Once the worst threats are handled, the smart play is to spread attacks across as many enemies as possible — degrade the whole group rather than execute one at a time. It falls out of the rules on its own, and it mirrors how real firefights are won: by suppression, not by headcount.