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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7183206" data-attributes="member: 4937">The problem could be that I'm alternating between using "surprise" in its natural language sense, and surprise as it is technically used.  Yes, regardless of the edition, your procedure does not result in "surprise" in the technical sense.  However, your procedure always does - regardless of the edition - recreate the most fundamental aspect of surprise, that the party with "surprise" is allowed to reliably act first.   So while you have avoided using actual surprise procedures, and avoided creating the actual surprise state (and again, this is true of every edition), your procedure results in a state that is analogous to surprise.   Is it worse than achieving surprise?  In some ways, yes.  But since it is reliable, this is it doesn't depend on random luck or an opposed check, it is also in some ways better than surprise.   And in the case of sides with lethal attacks, which is one of the reasons I'm returning to the gunfighter analogy, it is strictly better than surprise.  You can execute an attack with basically no risk of losing to a 'faster' opponent.That is fundamentally what I object to.  The rules of D&D in every edition make that a doubtful proposition, as it logically would be.  You've just implemented a table contract and procedure of play that ensures that happens all the time as a riskless proposition.Your response only affirmed everything that I had already gathered about your position.  In fact, your three responses in a row still only affirm what I had already gathered about your position.Before I get much further, I should tell you I fenced with the fencing club of two major universities, and been taught by instructors that either were or had trained Olympic fencers.  I am not by any means a good fencer, but please don't assume that I have no personal fight experience - sport or otherwise.Your assuming that I haven't seen these exact problems before.  As for predicting why you haven't seen them, each table is different and each will have a different tolerance for different problems.  I presume your table contract is reasonably durable because its a reasonably close knit group with common aesthetics of play, and that the majority of the table includes dramatic play rather high up in its priorities and competitive play rather low on its priorities, and that you aren't annoying enough in your rulings that this one little quirk makes it worth complaining about how you are handling the scene.   That you've not had a major table argument over this doesn't make it less illogical, or less narrow in its application.  You've already basically admitted that it would be inadequate for the sort of scenes that I've been suggesting as examples, but that those scenes don't come up in your play.Since you've been jumping all over me for not using terms strictly in a technical sense, let me say that regardless of what you want to call it, you don't seem to be using concurrent initiative.  Prior versions of D&D did allow for concurrent actions that are resolved simultaneously, but if they are actually resolved sequentially then by definition they aren't actual concurrent initiative.   Concurrent resolution means that, for example, if we both attack, we don't apply damage until after we resolve both attacks, and then we apply damage simultaneously.   This allows for example for two characters to kill each other in the same round because the actions actually happened concurrently rather than sequentially.   If in fact you do apply damage until the end of both actions then you really are using a concurrent system of resolution, and then I guess I did misunderstand you with regard to that, and then it doesn't really matter who goes first, because you can't be dropped before you get a chance to respond anyway.   But if you are just coloring sequential resolution with the flavor of concurrent action, then you are just playing normal D&D because almost no one actually assumes that the fictional world is literally turn based.Oh bollocks.  Sure, pausing to think is quite normal in combat, but coloring a pause in combat to assess, measure, or plan as a D&D Delay action is just freaking nuts.   I'm glad it is working for you, and go ahead, but do not try to convince me that pausing for a 'beat' in fencing is the same as taking a freaking delay action.  Beats in a fencing match can be freaking fractions of a second - nearly as fast as the eye can follow.   D&D combat has nothing that can deal with fight elements that are that granular and concrete and never has.   D&D combat abstracts whole combinations and passes and exchanges into a few dice rolls and the outcome of that exchange - someone got hit or not, maybe they both did.   Delay is not a granular action!  It involves giving up the initiative not for a beat, but completely, allowing the opponent to complete a full round of action without interruption - as if you did nothing through an entire exchange.  Those pauses in the initiative and other granular aspects of a fencing exchange are subsumed in the action of the scene, not born out mechanically in the rules.  D&D narrates fairly large blocks of time called 'rounds', not individual blows and parries and steps or any other fencing move.  That's why it is so ridiculous for you to be claiming that you are doing this, not out of "the convenience of the DMs and the players" as you just admitted (which is I think probably the true and defensible reason), but rather as if Delay were the logical way to color the scene in D&D as a general go to sort of case.There is nothing quite like improperly applying "realism" based on personal experience to create rules nonsense that ends up not matching reality in the slightest.  If you want a realistic fencing simulation, you are much further from the rules set you need than you would be if you wanted a gun-fighting simulation.  Meanwhile...Wait... you think that it is normal to make a character give up his action in order to talk?  Really?   No wonder you think you are being really reasonable and fair.  You think the alternative is to be even more unreasonable.   Talking is free.  If you want to banter with your foe like Errol Flynn Robin Hood or the Masked Man in 'The Princess Bride', go right ahead.  I can't imagine any DM actually punishing that.  Likewise, your idea that this makes players more likely to talk, again strikes me as, "Compared to what?"   Compared to my resolution system, it would sure make me as a player less willing to parlay.  Compared to some of the things you've experienced apparently it does.  However, even then, if I had to guess, you don't run a particularly deadly campaign because otherwise why the heck would you risk automatically giving the other party the first attack?Regardless of how you spin it, your system means that your PC's are subjected at all times to the threat of instantaneous attack to which they cannot respond (at least, not until after the attack and its potentially deadly consequences have resolved).  However, you apparently don't understand my position at all.  Otherwise you wouldn't say things like this:No, because if you just followed the normal procedures instead of assuming implicit delay, you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.   In a less than hair trigger standoff, between two parties that don't trust each other fully, but who aren't quite to the point of hair trigger violence, but who are aware of each other, we just roll for initiative regardless of declared intent.  One side 'goes for their gun' and then all hell breaks lose, but neither side is guaranteed the first complete action.  Precisely because we do have the color of concurrency and actions take a finite amount of time, the side that initiates the action can still lose the initiative to a quicker opponent.  The normal rules do not provide for a process of play that resembles implicit DELAY, but rather the normal process of play assumes a meeting engagement is treated as implicit READY actions that ultimately cancel each other out, resulting in the person with the higher initiative result winning.  Neither side is ever actually delaying, but talking while holding in readiness violence should a threat present itself.   Not only is this convenient, but it is fair.   Only in the event of surprise should this normal process of play be dispensed, or if a player really does declare that they propose to do nothing proactive - even if they are actually attacked and stuck.   But in 30 years of DMing I've really never seen that proposed by a player, and I've never seen DELAY used for what you are routinely forcing players to use it for.   The problem with implicit actions is that they are DMing assumptions, and you are foisting them on your players.  Personally, as a PC I'd never put up with it, and so - because I always strive to be the sort of DM I'd want as a player - I don't impose it on my players either.Briefly let's turn back to that iconic Greedo versus Han scene, and imagine that it is playing out according to your rules - and Greedo is the PC.   You play out the scene, and let's note a few things that are true by your rules:1) Han doesn't even have to be particularly cunning.  With Greedo holding the gun in his face, he can just stand up, whip out his blaster, and shoot him dead while Greedo stares at him.  Because Greedo is implicitly delaying.2) Greedo is an even dumber sap in your universe than he is in Star Wars.  Every being of your world, must reasonably know that in a parlay, the other side will be able to react before they can do anything.   Greedo would have to know from the moment he sits down with Han, that if Han wanted to shoot him, Greedo would be completely unable to stop him, because Greedo would have to know that he was living in a world were talking implied implicitly delaying.  Why in such a world would Greedo stupidly gloat, knowing that all gloaters were giving up their action via an implicit Delay and waiting to be shot?   3) If Greedo really were a PC, he would not have parlayed, because the player would have known the rules, and known the outcome of not firing immediately was to be presumed to delay.  He would have just fired, and taken the body back to Jabba for the reward.I suppose your response would be, "But in that circumstance, I wouldn't use implicit delay."   Fine, but then why the heck would you use it in any circumstance?   The only reason to use it that I can see is that it ensures antagonists - who overwhelmingly versus a heroic party would be the ones to initiate violence - gets to act first!  Speaking of convenient to the DM.</blockquote>

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