Okay, so I'm working on a game. Have gone through a couple of redesigns of the kind of game I wanted to make. Drawing board several times. Now I've got it.

I want to make a game that's all about sky pirates. The idea is inspired by ff12 for anyone who's played that. Imagine steam punk meets old school crystal fantasy.

With that in mind, I'm trying to come up with a way to balance time within combat.

In general, I want a balance between traditionally faster weapons like daggers vs traditionally slower weapons like two handed weapons or guns. This is traditionally from like jrpgs not realism.

I've been thinking about how to do it.

One concept I have is that each weapon has a Ready stat which represents how much over the target number to hit is required to basically do a second hit. So weapons like daggers have a lower number and can get more hits in per turn.

The other concept I thought of was an Action Point system which is extremely flexible and allows me to fine tune abilities and such.

The last thought I had was that you could gamble a certain action: for instance each action would have a 1-12 time value. On your turn you would roll a d12 and if you rolled equal to or above the time value, your action happened. Each turn you haven't gotten to perform your action, you get to roll an additional d12 and pick the higher. There's obviously big issues with this concept but I really liked the gamble aspect of it and the randomization of turn Order.

Any insights would be very helpful.