Time

Your GM may use different timescales depending on the situation. They may use minutes when exploring buildings and other artificial spaces, hours when tracking over outdoor locations or structures whose size is so vast that the characters are effectively outdoors. For longer journeys, particularly interstellar travel, days are used.

During any contest, the pacing is more frenetic, and we use a standard of units, which are covered in the headings below:

free-action (f-act)

A free action is one that is both a short duration (definitely less than a round), requires very little exertion, and can be done at the same time as other actions. Speaking is a commonly taken free-action.

bonus-action (b-act)

re-action (re-act)

move-action (mv-act)

The move-action is considered to occur at the same time as any other actions in a contest (except another move-action). This means that it occur's over the six-second time period of the round.

you can move up to your speed. You can move at any time, either before or after your act. You can also split your move, carrying out part of your movement before your act, and part after your act.

main-action (m-act)

round (rnd)

A round is a unit of time usually within the context of a contest, and is roughly 6 seconds duration. During the round, each creature participating in a contest takes a turn.

minute (min)

A minute is 10 rounds of contest time

scene

A scene is around 10 minutes of time.

hour (hr)

day

rest

A rest is not really a time unit, but in many areas of the rules, it is equated to a day, because humans, and just about every other biological creature, requires 6-8 hours of sleep every day. Sleep is a major component of rest.

prep

The prep unit is used in action instructions to indicate that the action has been taken previously, as in it was prepared. Prep is therefore also not a time unit.

Other Time Units

Additional time units are use, mostly for the story-telling component of the game. On usit that requires a bit of explanation is the year.

A year, being 365 days on Earth, has long since been surpassed, as the cycles and seasons on millions of colonies have dictated. This has fragmented the reckonings of civilisations, so that the question of "what year it is" for one civilisation will be a different number to another, and even the length of those years differs.

For the purposes of storytelling and discription of places and their histories, we continue to use one Earth year as the standard measure for that time frame. This is to make it easier for players to get a feel for the passage of time, but everyone should realise that all the characters in the game will undertand these things differently.