Up until now, the Seek effect had to be used if you had it and observed a character who was concealed. This eliminated the risk of metagaming but also limited the usefulness of the effect for many people because it might have to be expended when it wasn't useful (e.g., against an opponent trying to Hide in plain sight, against an ally, against an opponent who could use at-will concealment repeatedly to force expenditure of all Seeks, etc.).
In order to make Seek more useful while still keeping it accountable, we've updated the effect as follows:
Seek
The action allows the user to see through a single Feign, Hide, or Vanish effect. The action may only be used when the user first observes such an effect out of play. If it is not used immediately, the user may not use Seek against that instance of concealment.
Thus, Seek is no longer compulsory, but must be used immediately or not at all. In this way, we're hoping to make the effect more useful while giving concealed characters a measure of accountability over those using Seek. It's not a sure-fire way to prevent metagaming, but it should still be difficult to metagame by making it a snap decision.
I like this revision A LOT. Having to watch a character to go into said effect kind of negated the whole Seek action, because they had to actually be out of sight for the hide and vanish actions to be effective. I feel like this levels the field and makes taking Seek worth it.
Alex, I was one of the few who tried out seek during the play test for the new system. I can say this much for myself, it wasn't hard at all to recognize those hand motions.
What if you do not recognize that the person is feigned, hidden or vanished immediately? Sometimes in the motion and ruckus of everything it can be difficult to spot someone vanished or feigned as opposed to just using the OOG hand-over-head motion.