You claim there is no universal standard for when initiative applies
I said there is no universal standard for when a battle starts or people become combatants. You have a definition that is subjective...it is not scientific. You're making assumptions about outcome and basing your opinion on that. If you don't have a repeatable and consistent method for how you do it, then it would be arbitrary.
That shouldn't be very difficult to understand.
You remember when you said you'd fall on hubris? It's hubris on your part to believe that your determination of when people become combatants is correct and eveyone else's is wrong if it does not agree with yours...when the very thing we're talking about has no basis in science.
No, I've read the rules and the strict literal interpretation of the RAW gives reasonable results.
That's not what you said. You said that if there were an alternative intepretation that gave you resaonable results, then clearly that alternate interpretation was the one intended. Subjective. Which makes it neither right nor wrong.
...but not every battle begins with at least someone being flat footed at the time of the first attack.
Let me just throw something out there for you to consider...
The concept of being flat footed doesn't really serve a purpose if you aren't within striking distance.
Just throwing that out there.
The rules do for combat encounters.
Here, I think is your blindspot. You're using metagame information to decide whether any encounter could result in a battle. If it
could result in a battle, you are treating it like a battle from the start. If not, and it turns into a battle, then you go back and damage control it. The problem is that making
predictions about whether any given encounter is going to lead to a battle involves hueristics. But you're convincing yourself it is some scientificly obvious methodology. That's my take on it.
Have you spoken to anyone at WotC about how you determine when it's time to roll Initiative...and by extension...apply the FF rule? I fear they might say that there is no right answer!!!
To my knowledge, I haven't done so.
My apologies...I did not mean "you" personally, I meant you as in when oneself does this. I always do that and expect people to know when I'm speaking on a general level rather than personal. My bad.
Not only is that not arbitrary by definition, but speaking as someone who has at times made his living writing modelling software and designing engineering solutions, the degree of accuracy of the model can often be definitively shown to be necessary and sufficient and the amount of error introduced by the simplifying assumtions can likewise be show to be forgivable and sufficient over a wide range of conditions and certainly the ones you are interested in.
Hold up. You're way off the mark here. I'm talking about rationales in arguments. Someone says, "I like this because it's chocolate ice cream" ....then later in another argument, they say" i hate this because it's chocolate ice cream" Deciding when you like or hate something for the same attribute is by definiation ...arbitrary. This is what people do with their "realism" arguments.
You're talking about the sufficiency of a model. A statistical model's value is based on its predictive accuracy. That has nothing to do with someones arguments for why they like or dislike something for the same attribute.
Reflex saves aren't independent of your dex bonus. Anything that changes your dex bonus changes your reflex save.
I'm talking about whether you
get the modifier...not whether the modifier changes. You get REF saves and the bonus modifier even in stuations where you lose your dex modifier to AC because of a no dex modifier state...or am I missing something?
Speaking as some one who tweaks the SRD quite a lot, I disagree. But by all means, have at it.
Do you have any construcive criticism to add on my suggestion or are you just invested in disagreeing someone fix something with a simple solution?
Considering my solution, obviously the idea of being caught "with no dex bonus" now becomes a more more dire consequence. Which would illuminate the fundamental problem in the inartful use of the term "no dex bonus" as a concept. But to the extent that an a 10 Dex person who suddenly finds themselves at -5 AC seems egregious, I wonder how the same reaction does not result when a 30 Dex person finds themselves at -10 to AC as they do now?
I agree that fixing the problem exposes a bigger problem with what WotC really intended when it tried to identify situations where players couldn't react...above a certain modifier but were still penalized below it. This is why I am leaning towards a flat tax on AC for no dex bonus situations.
