Immediate Actions and Forum Gaming

[BendBars/LiftGates]

I play in a few forum campaigns and DM another, and in the one I'm DMing I just came across a problem.

The method of each player, on his initiative order, taking his turn and then the DM responding before the next player can act was taking too long. So, we enacted a system where everyone would post their actions and then the DM would resolve all of them at once. It shaves a couple of days off of the round-by-round turnaround, like this:

It's surprising that this hasn't come up yet, but what do you do when someone wants to avoid a messy fate with the use of an immediate action? Immediate reactions are fine, but immediate interrupts can't work as they're intended to.

One of my players just got wrecked by the Body Shield ability of a choker. He wants to use his Cape of the Mountebank to avoid getting grabbed in the first place. If I deny this, then immediate reactions are useless. If I allow it, then immediate reactions involve retconning the round and become too powerful.

What do I do?

 

[vagabundo]

I play in a few forum campaigns and DM another, and in the one I'm DMing I just came across a problem.

The method of each player, on his initiative order, taking his turn and then the DM responding before the next player can act was taking too long. So, we enacted a system where everyone would post their actions and then the DM would resolve all of them at once. It shaves a couple of days off of the round-by-round turnaround, like this:

It's surprising that this hasn't come up yet, but what do you do when someone wants to avoid a messy fate with the use of an immediate action? Immediate reactions are fine, but immediate interrupts can't work as they're intended to.

One of my players just got wrecked by the Body Shield ability of a choker. He wants to use his Cape of the Mountebank to avoid getting grabbed in the first place. If I deny this, then immediate reactions are useless. If I allow it, then immediate reactions involve retconning the round and become too powerful.

What do I do?

I dont have my stuff here, but:

An immediate reaction has to wait until the triggering action completes, then it gets to go.

An immediate interrupt gets to go before the action completes, as soon as the triggering effect occurs.

<wanders off to Compendium to check stuff>

EDIT: <I'm back> It clearly says when you are hit by an attack, so it doesn't negate the attack. It is a reaction to the attack and occurs after it has resolved - so damage done mwahhhhh.

 

[Masquerade]

When running games by PBP in the past, I've handled combat similarly. I required that any action that the character would do during the round had to be stated ahead of time; once I posted what happened, it happened. No retcons. If they have immediate abilities, policies for them must be stated ahead of time. The policy isn't likely to change much round-to-round, so it might be sblocked and copied into each post, but it must be there or it won't be taken into consideration.