QUICKNESS (GENERAL)

QUICKNESS (GENERAL)

QUICKNESS (GENERAL)

Action: Free • Range: Personal • Duration: Sustained • Cost: 1 point per rank
Under the Hood: Quickness
Quickness, like many power effects, is not especially realistic; it allows you to do things like disassemble an entire car as a free action at a high enough rank (around rank 13-14), but doesn’t have any effect on how many attacks you can make on your turn. Why? Two reasons: first because allowing any character potentially thousands of attacks per turn would slow down the game and be hugely unbalancing (to say the least). Second, and perhaps more important, it’s how superhuman quickness works in the comics: speedsters do routine things in the blink of an eye, but in fights they don’t really act more often than anyone else. See Super-Speed for some examples of the super-fast attacks speedsters might have, in addition to their Quickness.
You can perform routine tasks—anything that can be done as a routine check (see Routine Checks in The Basics)—fast, perhaps very fast. Subtract your effect rank from the normal time rank to perform a task to determine how long it takes you. So, for example, if you have Quickness 7, a routine task normally taking an hour (time rank 9) takes you (9 – 7 = time rank 2) 30 seconds. Non-routine checks are not affected by Quickness, nor is movement speed.
If you can perform a task in less than a second (time rank –2), the GM may choose to treat that task as a free action for you (although the GM can still limit the number of free actions you can accomplish in a turn as usual).

FLAWS

Limited to One Type: Your Quickness applies to only physical or mental tasks, not both. –1 cost per rank.
Limited to One Task: Your Quickness applies to only one particular task, such as reading, mathematical calculations, and so forth. –2 cost per rank.
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