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Message: <blockquote data-quote="5ekyu" data-source="post: 7572591" data-attributes="member: 6919838">"How absurd they are" as you observe is an opinion. As I have said, house rules are great. By all means make house rules and I hope you eliminate all those absurdities you are bothered by. Got a few house rules myself.Me? Played a lot of RPGs with lotsa lotsa different init systems and "ready" rules. Each produced different problems. Each had their own absurdities. The difference was that the frequency that ready-action-issues came up  in play was always directly proportional to how much the rules favored the ready. The more they attempted to resolve the niche case the more they made the niche case a common event, not niche. You spotlight the glitch even more.As for walking onto trapdoor vs being on trapdoor example - seems obvious to me. One he is already there - other he is moving there. As for moving vs bowing - one set to one way one set to another - I got no rationale for bowing always wins vs moving always wins or one loses vs one wins cuz honestly there are many many imagined examples that can go either way - many other factors at play that the rules dont try to assess. I mean, what if the mover is halted or slowed? Shouldn't that fit into the level vs mover vs bow isdues?What if the mover is proficient in athletics vs a bow guy not proficient in bow? Shouldn't the more skilled archer have a better chance at first than novice picking up the bow for first time. (Ever played in systems where "first resolve" was determined by net successes at task? I have. Adds a whole different take an ready that makes fretting over "ready first" quite absurd to some.)So, fussing over the degrees of absurdity between two different who goes first is like fussing the relative quality of Twinkies vs Hot Pockets. But, taking that into the realm of general bashing with "How could these scenarios never arise in play testing and if they did, why rule it in such an ambiguous manner?" Is truly absurd. They did occur in playtesting and they made a decision, design choice,  to produce a simple and ready-is-fairly-weak rule that you find unsatisfactory. If I had to guess, at least part of that choice came from them also seeing that more powerful ready led to more cases of problems. You want mo' ready mo' often? House rule it. Maybe you will find that silver bullet that system after system has failed. But my guess is it wont be from a ready tweak.Why?**The Underlying  Issue is not Ready**The underlying issue is the initiative system. 5e uses an "actor based init" where who is doing a thing determines when it gets done and what us being done has no impact on that in most cases.That is the underpinning of the action system. When one frets about how you want to lever faster than bow or bow faster than lever, that is trying to turn it into an "action based init" where **what you are doing** is a lot more important than **who is doing it.**I refer you to Unisystem variants and more than a few other systems where the resolution is determined by **action type** and "initiative" is more for declaration and decision. In those systems the default may be that "weapon in hand" beats "move and bow" hands down, no special rule needed. A facet of those is you tailor resolution order to fit genre... Buffy puts even quick spells last, melee before ranged iirc. Meanwhile Doctor Who resolved talking-before-running-before-sciencing-before-fighting as a matter of course. Meanwhile more scifi action resolves weapon in hand first before draw-n-fire or move-n-fire - as a matter of course.But, guess what? That's a bit more complex than roll init and resolve in order of actor and let's not fo a lot of parsing of bow faster than dagger or spell stuff. Its was a design choice for the 5e core rules to use the simpler actor-based approach. Same approach that gave a weak-ready. I dont like hot pockets but like twinkies, yet that doesn't drive me to think hot pockets are absurd or that the makers of hot pockets failed to taste test. Just that they went a different direct than I like. I can buy twinkies or even buy hot pockets and try and fix them up.</blockquote>

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