Optional Rules for Companion

[Lys]

Swordmasters can move as freely as Warriors, since they get Cobra Strike to the Warrior's Air Dance. Though they do have to wait longer to get it.

[Dougansf]

Well, no. In 3rd ED you'd have to combine it with the Delayed Action Combat Rule. If you cant move because of low initiative, you have to delay your action until next round. Then you would win Initiative by Default and dont have to roll for it. It boils down to giving up a standard action to be able to move away from the fighter or bring yourself into an advantagous position.

Yeah... no thanks. Sacrificing a Standard Action to get a Move action next round is a horrible trade in any action economy.

It's a neat ruling system and gives the warrior discipline more weight, since the warrior is the only one who may act freely on the battle field, as it should be.

The Warrior (and other fighter Disciplines) have plenty of weight in ED4. See several other posts by Undying around the forums.

[BRW]

I understand that it might be too late to post it in this topic, but I recall a complaint which I read on a Polish forum devoted to ED.

ED seems to need a bunch of very general rules covering rather abstract situations like:

- what happens when one character helps another in an action?
- to what extent can you retake test?
- what happens when you take extra time to a test?
- what happens when you try to do something quickly?
- suppose that a character is bound to succeed in an action. How do you figure out how long will it take?

While some of these situation are addressed in some specific mechanics there is no general guidelines about them and nowadays you can really typically find rules of this kind in RPGs. While I understand that Earthdawn is by design a bit oldschool (which I really find a major upside by the way!), it seems reasonable to include some general advice about this kind of situations that pop up a lot in actual play (it seems to be something that modern RPGs really do better).