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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FieserMoep" data-source="post: 7480522" data-attributes="member: 6919650">We handled it this way:  Suprise rounds are only for actual surprises. They take effort, intention and skill to pull of. They grant a strong reward for that.If someone attacks or does something aggressive and thus escalates a situation like striking with a sword we roll for initiative after they resolved their attempt.On the first round of Combat they don't act again.To me its important to resolve the initial trigger to have a clear stage that allows the PCs and Players a concious mind about what happened. For some people it may be important to only act in self defense when needed etc. Ofc. someone may announce that they are looking for physical giveaways like tensing muscles, changes of stance but these at best would be guesses unless you started to actually read someones mind. If they get clues and think someone is going to attack, they may initiate combat themselves but then it would just go the same. To me its important to not award the aggressor with two rounds for the price of one or to diminish the strict rules of surprise. It may diminish the value of high initiative scores and/or boosts for at best you can act second after the trigger but that is the price if you wait to see if someone actually goes through with his threat. Ofc. I still allow reactions etc. to be taken against that initial attack.Another system I tried was announcing the offensive move and then resolving it by proper initiative but you have to be very vague about the nature of that action for a low Ini Score may result in that action not being viable or even possible at all.Bad example: You see the Thug lunging forward to hit X with his fist after you insulted his mom. He rolls poorly and at that point his actual narrative-target ran out of range and he goes for someone completely else.Good example: You notice that time for talk is over, muscles tense and expressions change, they mean business.While Vague the second example require one thing to work. And that is accepting that your PCs might have some default abilities of reading body language etc.Thus I reserve this for the other system where I allow Insight Checks so people may try to get ahead of another aggressor and thus receive the default first turn.</blockquote>

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