My group and I are playing Exalted, Third Edition, a game whose combat system centers in large part around a dynamic initiative system in which the turn order changes from round to round. So far, all of the scripts I've found to automate things like tracking effect durations, etc. work by counting a "round" as the time to cycle from Initiative Count X back to Initiative Count X. The problem is, this doesn't accurately measure the time between a character's turns in EX3, because their Initiative is very likely to change. So, for example, we'd very much like to automate tracking of the Onslaught Penalty, a ubiquitous status effect which resets at the beginning of a character's turn. But if Cathak Sanjuro gains an Onslaught Penalty on Init Count 7, but acts next round on Count 11, a script like cron or the automated round and duration tracker I found won't clear the penalty until Count 7 rolls around again, because that's a 'round' -- Count 7 to Count 7. Is there any kind of a simple fix for this, or would I have to set it up to create a unique counter variable for every character in the combat and update the counter -- adjusting durations and what-not as appropriate -- every time the turn passes to the character? And if so, is tracking one additional hidden variable per combat participant likely to introduce any significant lag (or other problems)?
