As far as I remember, the Exalted system works on ticks and cool downs:
A "tick" is roughly one second, but is a fuzzy, arbitrary time unit used to demark how long actions take. An "action" is performed on a given "tick," determined by initiative and the speed of actions taken before. Every action has a certain speed, which is a number of ticks of "cooldown" between taking the action and when the character may act again.
~ Someone on the White Wolf Boards
This, and the wiki article on combat were the best explanations I could find on the matter.
- Are there any other systems that use a similar system? Preferably systems that are not spawned from Exalted.
- What are the advantages of such a system? Over, for instance the way D&D or mouse guard do it? Does it add suspense or confusion?