Readied actions interrupting charges

[kerbarian]

I prefer ruling in favor of the Readying PC, not the Charging PC.

The Readying PC gave up a Standard Action for a chance to invalidate the Charging PC. The concept of "Sorry, I'm going to make your Readied action worthless" is lame. IMO.

If a character readies an action to move in a way that would really provide protection from a charge (e.g. moves out of charge range, moves back through a line of allies), then that should work. But I find it lame if the target can ready an action to move from one easily-chargeable location to a different easily-chargeable location, and somehow that makes the charge fail.

Readied actions are famous (admittedly, not just from 4e) as a way to abuse the rules, and if an interpretation makes them weaker, that's fine with me.

You talk about a PC giving up a standard action to invalidate a charge (another standard action). That seems reasonable. But what if the PC readied an action to counter-charge the enemy instead of stepping out of the way? By your interpretation, the PC gets his attack and denies an attack to the enemy. Now the readied action has been used to generate action advantage, and that's the kind of thing that readied actions shouldn't generally be capable of, IMO.

None of that affects RAW, but I can see how it would lead us to different interpretations when the rules are ambiguous.

 

[NMcCoy]

For what it's worth, the way it's been in my games is:

"Directly" means "you can't take a shorter path to get there", and if the tactical situation changes you can adjust anything that you haven't done yet without any problem.

So - a storm pillar shows up that would zap you severely if you went through the squares you intended to initially? You can veer around it if your new path is still a shortest path, or if not you can call off the rest of the charge and waste the rest of your action. (My players would kill me if I said "no, you decided to charge so you have to keep moving through the rest of that flame trap, take 2d6+5 for each square.") Your foe shifts back one square? If you've got the movement remaining, keep on charging. If they shift and you haven't made your basic attack, but you took a valid charge path for the guy next to them, feel free to take your swing at them instead.

On the other hand, if you have an interrupt that lets you shift when hit, the hit's already a set thing and can't be backtracked.

In neither of my groups has anyone complained about this being unfair. The rules around readied actions are a little wonky, but anything that makes them less exploitable without making them less usable for sensible purposes ("Acid Orb the first enemy that comes through that door") is good at my table.

The biggest issue (among many, many issues) I have with the "action is preset, and lost if invalidated, period" camp: So if I put my storm pillar to the side, you must charge through all three squares next to it and take the damage. On the other hand, if I ready an action for when you take your first square of charge movement and put the storm pillar directly in front of me, you must stop moving immediately five squares away from me and lose the rest of your standard action because you no longer have a valid charge to make - it's invalidated and therefore the action is lost!

This is patently silly.

 

[vic20]

What creatures have immediate reaction shifts?

Goblins.

 

[gerwen]

I have a "cognitive dissonance" with the most direct path being a non-straight one (i.e. a straight line anywhere from one square to anywhere in another, just like line of effect).

A long curved path might be the same distance, but it is not direct.

If there is an obstacle between the Charger and the target it is. There is no requirement for LOS or LOE between them, so the most direct path around the obstacle is valid.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The first Orc charges and auto-misses, the second Orc moves up and attacks. Opps. It only works for one Readying PC. The rest are SOL when they try to be abusive. And they lost all of those first round good initiatives. That's what DMs are for. To make decisions for NPCs based on what the PCs are doing.

I discussed that in my post. You only have to make ONE orc miss to make it worthwhile (per character). It probably is a bit contrived, but it actually should work pretty well. In any case see the earlier post about counter-charges for an even better tactic which MOST certainly does abuse your way of doing things and is absolutely reliably reproducible. There are other tactics besides counter-charge that would work as well, like letting loose any power which force moves the enemy, etc. A clever party (or DM with the right monsters) is going to make charging at best painful and at worst useless.

If a character readies an action to move in a way that would really provide protection from a charge (e.g. moves out of charge range, moves back through a line of allies), then that should work. But I find it lame if the target can ready an action to move from one easily-chargeable location to a different easily-chargeable location, and somehow that makes the charge fail.

Readied actions are famous (admittedly, not just from 4e) as a way to abuse the rules, and if an interpretation makes them weaker, that's fine with me.

You talk about a PC giving up a standard action to invalidate a charge (another standard action). That seems reasonable. But what if the PC readied an action to counter-charge the enemy instead of stepping out of the way? By your interpretation, the PC gets his attack and denies an attack to the enemy. Now the readied action has been used to generate action advantage, and that's the kind of thing that readied actions shouldn't generally be capable of, IMO.

None of that affects RAW, but I can see how it would lead us to different interpretations when the rules are ambiguous.

Exactly.

Mainly what I'm not getting KD is what do you have against charges? I mean they're a decent tactic that can be optimized pretty well by a few character builds but they are only one tactic amongst many and not overpowered. Immediate Actions CAN by any interpretation certainly negate them under the right circumstances. I just don't see why the target stepping back 5 feet and still being in range and in the line of charge should negate the charge. Characters veering around to go around things on their way to the target, I can see where that could seem a bit hokey, yet at the same time I don't like the potential abuses that forcing people to execute moves into an AoE opens up either. To be honest I think this is the kind of thing that eventually lead the designers to phrase the whole thing in a fairly ambiguous way. The DM is left with a lot of leeway to decide what is or isn't allowable on a case-by-case basis and the DM is in a lot better position to make fair judgements than the rules authors.

 

[jbear]

If you charge and step on a trap, you'd accept that the charge is not carried through. The person charging doesn't complete the action, instead he falls 30' down a big hole onto spikes.

So if in this case when an action has been taken and not carried through because an immeadiate action has interrupted it, why wouldn't this apply to the similar situation that a counter charge has altered the initial action?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If you charge and step on a trap, you'd accept that the charge is not carried through. The person charging doesn't complete the action, instead he falls 30' down a big hole onto spikes.

So if in this case when an action has been taken and not carried through because an immeadiate action has interrupted it, why wouldn't this apply to the similar situation that a counter charge has altered the initial action?

Well, with counter-charges a lot could be said. My point was that in KD's "nothing can change" interpretation of things a counter-charge will ALWAYS work. With a more flexible interpretation a counter-charge MAY still work and it may not. Furthermore the guy deciding whether or not to charge can fairly assess whether or not such a tactic will work. If he's got 2 squares he can certainly move before a counter-charge would be possible then at least he gets his charge attack vs the guy that counter-charged him (they crash together somewhere in the middle) for example. To be totally honest, I think situations where you have a complex action being taken as a reaction to another complex action like counter-charging are best handled by the DM stepping aside from the strict letter of RAW to begin with and saying something like "OK, you charge right back at him, you crash together someplace in the middle, like HERE." In the vast majority of situations the rules work pretty well, but they're abstracting time to a high degree and there are instances where this results in fairly awkward things happening. What about a case where a slower creature reacts to a charge and catches up to a faster creature and attacks it? No general set of rules can cover these things, its up to the DM.

 

[KarinsDad]

Well, with counter-charges a lot could be said. My point was that in KD's "nothing can change" interpretation of things a counter-charge will ALWAYS work. With a more flexible interpretation a counter-charge MAY still work and it may not.

Come on, be honest here.

With your more flexible interpretation, a counter-charge WILL not work 95% of the time (at least for a shift).

You are giving the advantage to the Charging PC to modify his action. You allow him to change movement and you (presumably) allow him to change targets mid-action.

I am making Charge like most other standard actions where what the player says he is doing is what is done. Hence, it gives an advantage to a Readying PC.

Big deal. AS IF a readying PC has any other advantages. Ready is so watered down as to almost be near worthless. Why make it worse?

Mainly what I'm not getting KD is what do you have against charges?

What I'm not getting AA is what do you have against readies?

Charges are fine 99.9% of the time. What is wrong with having a defense against them that uses up a Standard Action. It's not as if there were not a sacrifice there and it's not as if Readying to move away will be used every encounter. It's also not as if the Charging foe couldn't try something else the following round. Both creatures lose a Standard action.

I think thou dost protest too much.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Standard actions can also involve decisions. When a character takes the Use A Power action and uses the Twin Strike power he gets to first choose a target, resolve his attack against it, then choose another target, and resolve the second attack. This is clearly established and there is a FAQ entry stating this outright.

Do you have a link for that? It's not in the PHB FAQ here, and it runs opposite to my understanding based on PHB p269: 1, choose an attack; 2, choose targets; 3, make attack rolls.

I've always read Twin Strike as "Choose both targets, then roll"; to shoot one, then reevaluate before the second shot would require wording along the lines of "Target: One creature; Effect: Make a secondary attack; Secondary Target: The same creature or a different creature".

-Hyp.

 

[Alex319]

Come on, be honest here.

With your more flexible interpretation, a counter-charge WILL not work 95% of the time (at least for a shift).

Why not?

I'm not sure by what you mean "at least for a shift." The counter-charge tactic and the shift tactic are two completely different things.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, here's what he's talking about:

There are two monsters: monster M and player P.

P readies an action to charge monster M when monster M moves.

Monster M declares charge, moves first square, then readied action goes off. P charges M, completing the charge and making his attack. (Even if monster M had immediate interrupts/reactions that would counter it, he can't use them since it's still his turn.) M hasn't moved two squares, he's only moved one, so he can't make his charge attack. (And if we take the "he has to keep going to where he said he was going before" to its conclusion, it's worse than that - he has to continue his move past P to his original destination square, taking an OA. So P has now gotten two attacks for the price of one, plus he negated the enemy's attack to boot.)

So P still got his own action off (he didn't sacrifice anything) and negated M's action.

Also, if you state that the charge has to be completed in the way originally specified, does that mean you accept that if a pit opens up three squares in front of you when you're charging, that you have to keep going and fall into the pit? Or that if someone places a storm pillar next to your charge path, that you have to keep going through and take three squares' worth of storm pillar damage?