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No, as soon as any side does something threatening initiative is rolled. There's no double standard. If the PCs say "I pull out a weapon and attack" I say "Ok, roll for initiative" If the NPCs pull out weapons, I'll say "You see the Orcs pull out weapons and start to move towards you, violence...

As a side note, this weird bug in the rules appears to be a side effect of trying to remove "rounds" from the game. There's no reason for the DM to ever keep track of the "beginning of a round" or the "end of a round in 5e. Lair actions happen at Initiative 20, not at the beginning. All spell...

I'm confused. That's exactly what I said it was for. If two people can see each other and one tries to attack the other, you determine who acts first with initiative. If you can't see the other person attack, then they surprise you since you don't see a threat coming at you and therefore don't...

No it doesn't. It requires the person BE a threat and be noticed. I've said in the past, the spirit of the rule appears to be that you see something dangerous at least half a second before it hits you. If so, you aren't surprised as there's time to dodge out of the way. If you are talking to...

I like to compare it directly to the same feature of the other subclass. I've played a Rogue who took Thief as their subclass and I haven't used their feature even once. I suspect both features are meant to be extremely specialized skills for very specific situations. Both of them HAVE a use...

I think the key here is that Assassinate is not meant to be used that often. In theory, the entire group has to make a Stealth check vs the Passive Perception of the enemies. If any of them fail, the enemy isn't surprised. Now, the DM can rule that if the rest of the party is far enough back...

From what I got in the movie was that between ESB and RotJ, Luke basically got 95% of the way to being a Jedi. He learned to be at peace, to plan instead of being reckless, and he realized that winning meant converting his father, not killing him. So most of his growth was completed. He went on...

I've explained this in previous posts, but to summarize. That was the Luke from the first 2 movies. In Return of the Jedi he shows up and his calm, confident, intelligent. He plans the entire rescue of Han multiple layers deep. Han comments how Luke has changed so much, he couldn't imagine the...

Here's what we knew from TFA: Luke had a student destroy his Academy and then left, presumably to find the First Jedi Temple, like Han said. That's all we really knew. So that has us asking: "Why did Luke leave?" "Why go to the First Jedi Temple?" "What can be found there that he's rush off to...

The problem is that I don't want Luke to be just another person who gets caught up in depression. I want the Jedi to be larger than life heroes. I think of them as the Holy Paladins. The ones chosen by the Force to be better than everyone else. They stand up for right. I think of them the same...

Well, I did get the impression that he was trying not to say some things he wasn't allowed to. I came away thinking that what he actually MEANT was that George Lucas had a VERY loose outline for 1-3 that pretty much just said "Clone Wars, Anakin Skywalker falls to the dark side. Then he fights...

I think he took too long to be heroic. He could have left with Rey and actually faced them in person. But he had to be smacked in the head by Yoda and have his tree burnt before he changed his mind and actually decided to help. If he had went in person, he might have been able to save more...

This could be a fun exercise. My first thought is that if you want me to predict what is going to happen in the next movie I just need to imagine where it LOOKS like it is going and just assume it'll do the opposite of that, given the history in this movie. What it looks like it going to happen...

I apologize if I mischaracterized your argument. I really thought that's what you were saying. It was good talking with you, however.

Yes. I'm saying a large number of things in the movie don't follow real world logic. A lightsaber can't work the way it is described, hyperspace isn't really a thing, there is no sound in space, and so on. Most of the physics in the movie are just nonsense. It's been like that for a while. Lucas...

It came from a speech given to us by Pablo Hidalgo, the current canon/lore guy for Star Wars at Disney. He worked for Lucasfilm for many, many years. He was at a convention around 1997-1998. It was just before Episode 1 had come out. One of the people in the crowd asked about why they started...

According to the official information, it destroyed 5 planets in the Hosnian system (all 5 that were in the system) as well as all of the ships in the entire system. The novelization explains that there were Republic bases on 2 of the other planets in the system and they (along with the ships in...

I saw it blow up a bunch of planets. How does that prove they are in the same system? They looked up and saw the beam but there could be one of a thousand explanations for them seeing it that doesn't involve them being in the same system. Like the explanation they give in the novel. You've...

To be fair, the reason they started with "Episode 4" wasn't because that was Lucas' vision. He said that it was because the stuff he wanted to do with Episodes 1-3 required special effects that weren't quite able to be performed yet. So he started with Episode 4 since he felt those movies would...

Wait...so your explanation is that Han decided to take the Falcon to visit his old friend, Maz in order to get a new ship so he could throw the First Order off his trail by getting a new ship. Maz's castle is apparently, located in the same solar system as the HQ of the Republic (the Hosnian...