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<blockquote data-quote="Jon_Dahl" data-source="post: 5807296" data-attributes="member: 89822">Players were facing a BBEG. He was aware of all the players, expect for one. The hidden PC had declared to attack as a ready action if the BBEG started to cast a spell. And he was correct: BBEG went for it and tried to cast a spell.However, according to surprising-rules if there are any unaware opponents, there should be a surprise round. So I gave the hidden PC a surprise round. However this was really vague, since the BBEG hadn't actually started to cast yet; you can only start your actions after an initiative are rolled but still the combat had begun because BBEG was attempting to cast a spell! So in other words: Initiative was called because enemy was trying to cast a spell =&gt; Surprise round, but the unaware enemy wasn't actually casting yet so you couldn't disrupt his casting =&gt; Initiative and first round, enemy casting commenced and now it was possible to disrupt him.So I asked the player what he wanted to do during a surprise round. He cast a Lightning Bolt and successfully hit target, which survived.During initiative round BBEG won initiative and cast Black Tentacles which effectively slayed the group.I should've asked if the PC wanted to continue his ready action over the surprise round into the normal rounds, which would have probably disrupted BBEG's casting and saved the whole group. However surprise round interfered with my train of thoughts.I made a costly mistake and had a TPK. Please give a brother a shoulder <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f641.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":(" title="Frown&nbsp; &nbsp; :("&nbsp; data-smilie="3"data-shortname=":(" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Jon_Dahl, post: 5807296, member: 89822"] Players were facing a BBEG. He was aware of all the players, expect for one. The hidden PC had declared to attack as a ready action if the BBEG started to cast a spell. And he was correct: BBEG went for it and tried to cast a spell. However, according to surprising-rules if there are any unaware opponents, there should be a surprise round. So I gave the hidden PC a surprise round. However this was really vague, since the BBEG hadn't actually started to cast yet; you can only start your actions after an initiative are rolled but still the combat had begun because BBEG was attempting to cast a spell! So in other words: Initiative was called because enemy was trying to cast a spell => Surprise round, but the unaware enemy wasn't actually casting yet so you couldn't disrupt his casting => Initiative and first round, enemy casting commenced and now it was possible to disrupt him. So I asked the player what he wanted to do during a surprise round. He cast a Lightning Bolt and successfully hit target, which survived. During initiative round BBEG won initiative and cast Black Tentacles which effectively slayed the group. I should've asked if the PC wanted to continue his ready action over the surprise round into the normal rounds, which would have probably disrupted BBEG's casting and saved the whole group. However surprise round interfered with my train of thoughts. I made a costly mistake and had a TPK. Please give a brother a shoulder :( [/QUOTE]

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