Now this is going to have a rantish ring to it, but please hear me out. Demolitions skill probably should be a task action of some kind instead of complex action. Disarming or placing a bomb in one combat round (which according to the rulebook is roughly 3 seconds) is quite extraordinary, especially when considering that hacking is a task action. 4 disarms per round if you're wired to the max. 8) I didn't read the intro short story to the finish, but I think that there was a part where the rest of the team had to wait for the hacker to finish his business. That would be about 200 combat rounds! Likewise on page 120. Detailed examination = Complex action. *ahem* Lemme look at this reeeal closely like for three bloody seconds! Also, the Speed system EP is now having is kind of unintuitive and seems very antiquated to me. Low speed characters have to wait while the "faster ones" finish their rounds, while a low speed character could well act before a "faster" one. I mean that even Warhammer 1st edition had a patch for a similar problem (Effective Initiative rules, introduced in Apocrypha Now). Effective initiative was calculated from the static initiative score and divided by the number of actions the character had. For example should a character have an Initiative of 100 and 4 actions, he would act on initiative scores 100, 75, 50 and 25. At least Living Steel, Shadowrun and SLA Industries and probably dozens of more games have used the kind of speed system EP is having now, but that doesn't make it a good one. It seems abhorrent to me that game designers keep making the same mistakes over and over again. Then I see a thread like this: http://www.eclipsephase.com/rush-job-fail-faster-task-action-timing-oddness here, and nobody has responded in any way. That makes me wonder if the EP team really even care about what kind of mechanics they'll put into the game... EP as a setting seems pure awesome to me. It is a bit sad that most of the people running it will probably go for another system to run it. I'm not saying any of this out of spite, quite the contrary. If I would have seen this in a game about any other setting, I would have just tossed the bugger to a bin and be done with it. I would even be willing to help out to smooth the system up, should someone so desire. For free.