I've been playing D&D 5e for 4 years. This is the first time I've seen this chain awakening thing come up. I can't imagine using it as a basis for changing the initiative rules, even if it did bother me. As with your later comment regarding discussing initiative, I think that some amount of that back and forth is quite reasonable and arguably prohibiting it entirely makes the game unplayable, but I realize it's probably a matter of degrees. I don't care about gamespeak happening. I do care about moving forward. So, fine, talk about things in terms of mechanics sometimes, but keep things going. Don't get bogged down in it.
I agree, I don't think I've seen this particular chain. But the initiative/turn system is what makes any chain like that possible, so I've seen others.
There will always be times that rules discussions come up, and we generally make a quick decision and move on. If necessary we'll address it after the session, and if future rulings are different than the one on the fly, so be it.
What we don't have is discussions about initiative and turn order, because we don't use it. Instead, if there are circumstances where we need to know whose action resolves first, we have an opposed initiative check between the relevant creatures. So in this particular scenario, say the fighter was going to attack one of the other goblins, and after the cleric's attack, the goblin decided it was going to try to wake up that goblin. The goblin and the fighter would have an opposed initiative check to see which happens first. Movement isn't tied to your turn, so creatures that are moving are doing so throughout the course of the round. Stuff happens in what we agree is logical based on timing, and in most cases, like two combatants trading blows, it doesn't matter who hits first.
There really was imminent danger. I think I've explained why upthread, but I'm sure it's harder for anyone who wasn't at the game to understand the full context. Goblins were coming from the west. Hobgoblins from the north. We're talking a move and a Dash away, tops. Not attacking the sleeping goblins would have been safe if they would have started a withdrawal back the way they came, and they also got a chance to do that after the goblins fled and closed the door. But, they didn't and even pushed things further. Subsequently, three PCs and an NPC died. No big deal, the backup characters get tapped in and we play on.
I understand what you're saying, but they weren't at risk of opportunity attacks, they could have readied their actions until one of the characters with an initiative turn after the goblins used their action, etc. But again, that's designing your actions in combat around the goblin's initiative count, which doesn't really exist within the fiction. It's representative of the order that actions take in the fiction, but that's different. Again, I don't have any issues with how the combat itself played out in your post, it sounds pretty cool. Just a few points that I find a bit wonky in the mechanics, which is primarily the goblin waking chain, although with only three of them it's not really pushing my suspension of disbelief much, and ultimately I just think that the combat system could be designed better to avoid such things. No complaints about how you handled it, just the design of the game.
