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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7179123" data-attributes="member: 6787650">You deeply misunderstand what my procedure is.Surprise, in 5E terms, means someone does not get to act this round. I reserve surprise for "code white" situations where you are not expecting any kind of threat, such as werewolves attacking you in the library, or the mental paralysis that happens when your grandmother tries to cut your throat with a knife. Surprise is not going to happen during your meeting with a potentially-hostile NPC: you're aware of a threat. You will not spend a round unable to act.All I suggest is that if you're already using a concurrent initiative system, things play out naturally. As outlined in my response to Harzel above, the guy who's doing the thing that triggers the action automatically goes first, because that's logical. There's a separate question of whether or not the guy can avoid giving out a "tell" that he's about to act, and you could appropriately use Deception vs. Insight for that--but for purposes of this question let's assume there is no tell and it's a "Han shoots Greedo" situation. Even if Greedo survives the blaster bolt, he cannot possibly go back in time and respond to Han's shot before Han makes it. So, Greedo automatically loses initiative this round--but his advantage is that he now gets to declare his action after Han's shot is resolved. I call this "Delay", and some of my players frequently declare this action voluntarily: it's not a punishment.Of course, if the enemy kills you in that first action, as happened with Greedo, then you may very much regret letting the enemy go first this round. If you think the guy you're talking with can crush you like a bug in a single action, keep a very close eye on his tells, or Ready an action first to do something as soon as he raises a hand (to cast a spell), or just back away slowly instead of continuing the conversation.If on the other hand the enemy is just going to do something like 4d8 damage when he wins initiative, then you didn't really lose much of anything by Delaying. You still get your action this round, and you get the moral satisfaction of knowing that you tried to talk things out first.If everyone who hasn't yet acted in a round Delays instead of declaring an action, the round ends and a now round begins. This is how conversations between hostile parties normally work: both sides are just Delaying as they talk, so both sides are willing to continue talking. If you Ready an action to Action Surge the other guy into oblivion the instant the twitches a finger, he will probably notice, and it might put a damper on his willingness to continue talking.What I've found is that allowing Delay to function this way encourages players to negotiate or pause whenever they think they need to, even after combat has already started, because it doesn't mean giving up opportunities to attack or cast spells--merely delaying them. Sometimes this results in a negotiated surrender (by PCs or NPCs). Sometimes this results in Mexican standoffs that last minutes or even hours (when undead are involved), until something changes the status quo.Meh. In a Western gunslinger I'd have more complicated rules for modeling actions with a duration. In 5E I don't find that it would add anything. The only thing it affects is a corner case which is already adequately handled by concurrent initiative's standard construct: implicit Delay.</blockquote>

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