Cancellation and Readability

Cancellation policy

Two windows, both in force:

Boundary cancel (primary): cancels allowed at the prep-to-exec boundary, never between exec and recover. Cheap but never free - even a minimal PER cycle, because a free cancel means commitment means nothing.
Deep-prep cancel (fallback): cancelling mid-prep is allowed but costs scale with invested prep: cancel_time = min_cancel + invested_prep * factor A minimum cancel time prevents instant-cancels whenever an interrupt appears.

Readability - the public/private state layer

Every actor's phase state has two layers:

Public: what the world observes (and the UI shows).
Private: what is actually happening in the sim.

Feats and abilities modify the broadcast, not the sim:

Fake a cancel (broadcast "recovering", actually still prepping).
Pretend to continue an action while actually cancelling.
Read others' cancels more accurately (requires Lore/Int investment).

Cancelling must telegraph (the flinch): hands relax, grip shifts. Else cancel-spam has no counterplay. An experienced enemy reads the flinch and punishes it; a wolf does not.

This is also where the game's knowledge system lives: what you and the monsters can read about each other's intentions is a stat, not a given.