Ready and Delay?

[Stalker0]

Both readying and delaying are still in. Readying no longer interrupts—your action occurs after the action that triggered it, and your initiative moves to directly before the person you readied against. You can still interrupt movement. If you ready to magic missile the next person to come through a door, it triggers as soon as they move into the square past the door, even if they keep moving after that.

Cool. to me the big question is can I ready out of combat? There was always the big confusion in 3.x between surprise rounds and readied actions.

 

[LowSpine]

Both readying and delaying are still in. Readying no longer interrupts—your action occurs after the action that triggered it, and your initiative moves to directly before the person you readied against. You can still interrupt movement. If you ready to magic missile the next person to come through a door, it triggers as soon as they move into the square past the door, even if they keep moving after that.

I take it that if you do not get your action triggered your next turn comes up and you go through your turn as normal(damage - choose actions).

If you want to continue delaying the whole process carries on.

Do you get to roll saves on your turn after you have decided to delay?


a. Suffer ongoing damage.
b. Choose actions. (Delayed/ready)
c. Roll saves.

A. Action triggered.
B. Take up new place in initiative order.

1. Action not triggered.
2. Next turn comes up. Continue as normal. (You have just missed a go.)

I am interested to know how the ready works with different action types.

Could you, for example, take a move action, load a crossbow with a minor action and then ready firing it for a standard action?

 

[OgreBane99]

Ah, no. I prolly shouldn't have mentioned it, I guess - but I do volunteer work for WotC (see the sig), and they're actually very nice to us volunteers.

I skimmed through mine last night and read all of the monsters and some of the rules info (like the Heal skill), cause that's actually pretty relevant for me. Busy with work, or I'd read more of the rest.

/envy
/jealous
/hate
/rage

 

[ki11erDM]

and they're actually very nice to us volunteers.

Yes. They. Are. And have been for year and years. I have to waste to much time at my job know days but some of the more fun times I have ever had was doing volunteer work with them, both before and after the TSR acquisition.

I guess that is why I get so T’ed off at people on these boards posting such crazy conspiracy theories about people they have never meet. /sigh

If you think WoTC is a bunch of money grubbing suits volunteer for a few Cons: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=welcome/conventions/volunteer

 

[keterys]

Both readying and delaying are still in. Readying no longer interrupts—your action occurs after the action that triggered it, and your initiative moves to directly before the person you readied against. You can still interrupt movement. If you ready to magic missile the next person to come through a door, it triggers as soon as they move into the square past the door, even if they keep moving after that.

Thank you, sir. You are a gentleman and a scholar.

P.S. Every single person I've talked to at WotC has been extremely nice, and since meeting a couple and getting to know them via blogs, journals, etc, it makes me sad to see how often they get maligned. Like WotC_Miko had a horrible day the other day because people were going on and on about how WotC editing sucks, when it was all stuff outside her control.

 

[DM_Blake]

IIRC there are no ways to disrupt powers anymore. Unless the AoO kills the caster, the effect gets off.

Ooooh, I so hope you're wrong.

Orc1: Uh oh, that mage over there is surely going to fireball us.
Orc2: Or worse...
Orc1: What can we do? We know it's coming. We're smart enough to anticipate it. Surely we can do something?
Orc2: Yep, we can get ready to roll our saves. Uh, er, wait... Forget the save. Just fall to your knees and pray to Gruumsh that the mage rolls badly.

I really really hope there are alternatives for smart organized combatants to find some way to disrupt the artillery.

 

[Logan_Bonner]

Because of the ways you could exploit delaying and readying, there are some changes to the end-of-turn events when you delay. I don't want to go into that much detail here, but basically you can't delay to extend beneficial effects, nor can you try to kill bad effects by delaying.

 

[keterys]

Awesome. Thanks again!

 

[Dausuul]

delay is an action, your turn ends, you get damage... its your turn again, you get damage once again...

But then you can use delay to eliminate a non-damaging effect.

Say your initiative is 20 and the next guy's initiative is 14, and you're under a status effect that's (save ends) and doesn't inflict damage.

Initiative 20 comes up: "I delay till 19." (rolls saving throw, fails)
Initiative 19 comes up: "I delay till 18." (rolls saving throw, fails)
Initiative 18 comes up: "I delay till 17." (rolls saving throw, fails)
Initiative 17 comes up: "I delay till 16." (rolls saving throw, succeeds)
Initiative 16 comes up: "Okay, now that I've gotten rid of that pesky status effect, here's what I'm actually doing..."

(Obviously, no halfway sensible DM would allow anything as blatant as this, but it wouldn't be hard for a player to invent a reason to delay a couple of times.)

Edit: Ah, okay. Thanks, WotC_Logan. I figured this would have been taken care of, but glad to have it confirmed. Now I'm curious to hear what the solution was...

 

[MindWanderer]

Interesting that the "get two attacks in a row" aspect of readying is still there. I tend to abuse the heck out of that one.