Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ferghis" data-source="post: 5139469" data-attributes="member: 40483">For what it's worth, I'm leaning towards not allowing it myself, but I'd like to flesh this out a bit further, mostly because some details still don't quite make sense to me.SurpriseSurprise applies when people aren't expecting something. If a player is (legitimately) expecting an attack, or in the case of the sniper that is aware that of the guards coming down on him, surprise rules aren't really relevant.The issue here is that the actions in the examples have consequences on the next round, and if they are taken "in the round before," so to speak, the characters would already have them in effect when initiative is rolled. So, the character that used total defense would have raised defenses if the bad guys won initiative. The effects of total defense explicitly last until the end of your next turn. The guy with the readied action would have it go off when the trigger warranted it, even if it was before his or her initiative dictated. That's the whole point of using these kinds of actions.Potential solutionsOne idea might be to roll initiative as soon as a character declares they are taking a combat action, even if there's no trace of attacks being resolved anytime soon. I can't really find fault in this notion, other than it's not what the DMG recommends, and it sounds annoying. If players are given combat tracking jobs or other game-duties that apply only to combat, this has the added benefit of being annoying to the players if it's done uselessly. Still, this is not my ideal solution.Obviously, there have to be limits to prevent abuse. For starters, I wouldn't allow any kind of combat action during any sort of resting. Also, taking standard actions definitely cuts down travel speed. But I'd love a reasonable mechanic that went further than what Aulirophile described. Something along the lines of I already see a few problems with this rule. First, it takes away from the notion that the player characters are highly capable heroes. Second, it's exactly the kind of book-keeping that 4e wants to move away from. Third, I'm not sure what kinds of actions trigger it. I might apply something like this to perception checks that find nothing. It's basically a way to simulate mental fatigue. For example, if players start checking traps every 5 feet of a long corridor, many of them are going to get progressively worse at it. The good thing about this rule is that it can turn these situations into something of a skill challenge, if players use multiple skills to keep their attention focused, and must choose between aiding the will check and the perception check, for example. Actually, maybe turning this into a skill challenge is a good idea, but I'm terrible at putting those together. Another benefit is that it would encourage players to rotate the characters that perform such actions, so as to minimize the penalty incurred by each character.Obviously. "Your helpless old mother opens the door. Given the helpless condition, roll critical damage."  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

Verification