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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 7182922" data-attributes="member: 6787650">Again, that's not how surprise works in 5E.Again, you clearly misunderstand the initiative variant I'm using, because "the normal mechanics of the game" are not being overridden. This is how Delay always works, in combat or out of combat. You always lose initiative automatically to anyone who is not delaying; and you always get to declare your own action after their actions are resolved. See discussion with Harzel.The way this works is not rooted at all in the metagame; it's rooted in the fictional positioning and my experience in fencing. If you pause for a beat to see what your opponent is going to do, guess what? You're a beat behind, and if he wants to he can seize the initiative and try a maneuver to which you will have to respond. (Hopefully in a way that makes him regret trying it.) If however you pause for a beat and he doesn't do anything, you can act and now you have the initiative to try something. In short, making a decision to act occupies a measurable space of time (c.f. OODA loops), and if you make your decision first, you have the advantage when it comes to acting first.Um, no. Pausing to think/decide what to do, and therefore Delaying, is quite normal in combat, both D&D combat and in real-life combat. It's why fencing matches don't always go as fast as hyperkinetic GURPS combat (one blow per second per combatant), and it's why Civil War battles lasted for hours and not just for the amount of time it would take for every guy on one side to shoot one guy on the other side.Continuous, hyperkinetic combat is not normal.This sort of situation doesn't generally happen at my table, but if it did, I agree that Readied Actions would be resolved first before anything else, including Tidal Wave. That's not a rules disagreement though; that's just you saying you create certain kinds of content (tense, armed standoffs) more frequently than perhaps others do. My impression of the OP is that Shoalar Whatisface was not engaged in that kind of a hair-trigger standoff with the PCs.I suspect that one reason you have hair-trigger standoffs so often could be because your rule system is apparently inadequate to having any OTHER kind of standoff. If you tried to have a more normal-but-wary negotiation with potentially-hostile business partners (like pretty much every business negotiation that takes place on Firefly), you can't get away with holding guns to each other's heads the whole time. You should be prepared for and capable of violence, but not on the verge of violence, or you'll kill the deal. This is the situation where Delay is more appropriate than Ready: Attack. It's a middle ground between coming unarmed and unarmored to a parlay vs. coming with readied actions to kill everything in sight.</blockquote>

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