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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5249758" data-attributes="member: 82106">Well, the idea of Opportunity Attacks is basically if someone turns their back on you and runs away, you get to whack them. You make a "Melee Basic Attack" against them before they actually start to move. That's the basics of it. You can also make an OA if an enemy adjacent to you decides to shoot a bow or something similar (technically if they make a ranged or area attack, but not if its a close or melee attack). This is intended to make the rather unrealistic tactic of standing next to an enemy that is fighting with you and shooting arrows at some guy half the battle field away. It limits the power of ranged attacks and allows characters to shut down enemy artillery by moving up and engaging it. It also means that the party needs to keep the monsters away from their wizards and archers, so it adds a dimension of tactics to the game.Immediate actions can get a bit complicated. They are generally things that a specific character can do out of turn to react to something as it happens. Any power that can be used this way has a 'triggering condition'. When that condition is met you can use the power. If its an Immediate Interrupt then you get to use it before whatever triggered it actually happens. For instance the level 2 Wizard Utility spell Shield is an Immediate Interrupt that triggers when an enemy hits the wizard. It adds 4 to his AC and Reflex defenses, and because it's an interrupt the attacker now has to get past the improved defense of the wizard, which can turn the hit into a miss. Think of them as "Oh, S**t" powers. If its an Immediate Reaction then it happens AFTER the thing that triggered it. So a power that is an Immediate Reaction and lets you shift 1 square if you were hit by an attack won't stop the attack from happening, it just gets you out of the attacker's face, which could save you needing to use your own actions later to do that. Immediate Reactions CAN sometimes come in the middle of things the enemy (or friends) are doing though at times. For instance if an enemy moves 5 squares, you can react to the first square of his movement before he moves the second square, or if he has an attack routine that includes several attacks (like if a Dragon can use both claws and then a bite as a single action) you can react to the first attack before the second and third ones go off.Its a little complicated when you haven't actually played it out, and you WILL find a few odd cases where nobody is 100% sure how something is supposed to work, but you won't run into those all the time and you can just come up with the answer that works for that situation and go on. There are plenty of people that will answer those kinds of questions too, and WotC has a pretty decent FAQ that answers some of them.Remember, the rules are really intended to work out in a fairly common-sensical way. Now and then they include some seemingly rather obscure wording. Generally its there because someone found a way to make some combination of things work in a bad way or to prevent some obscure problem. Other times a rule will just not seem to make sense until it comes up in play. The gist of it is that if there's a situation that a rule doesn't seem to fit very well the idea is to play it so that its cool and fun. There are players out there that are 'munchkins' and will try to bend things to their benefit all the time, so if you run into that feel free to just shut them down. Rule 0 of D&D is that the rules are what the DM decides they are. You don't have to use that much, but don't hesitate if need be.</blockquote>

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