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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7183280" data-attributes="member: 4937">What?  I'm too terse for you?  What exactly haven't I responded to?  Do I need to go back and do a sentence by sentence fisking?Fundamentally your position is not very complicated.  You outlined it repeatedly in the thread, and made yourself very clear doing it.   For example:"the PCs haven't declared another action, such as Readying a spell of their own, then their action is implicitly Delay, which means they automatically lose initiative but get to declare an action after Tidal Wave is resolved"And:"This particular example is extremely simple, since there's only one NPC and he's the first one acting: he casts his spell while all the PCs are on implicit Delay (negotiating), and then all the PCs take their turns."My response to both statements is, "Bollocks.  It's utterly unreasonably and unfair to the players to ever assume that they've implicitly taken a Delay action."  I'm not unclear about the really simple assumption or procedures.  In fact, I have gone back read you several times trying to find the thing that I was supposedly missing, only to discover that there really was nothing there to miss.How is my conjecture that PC's are unavoidably subjected to deadly attacks wrong?  Is this not the description of the 5e spell Tidal Wave?"You conjure up a wave of water that crashes down on an area within range. The area can be up to 30 feet long, up to 10 feet wide, and up to 10 feet tall. Each creature in that area must make a Dexterity saving throw. On a failure, a creature takes 4d8 bludgeoning damage and is knocked prone. On a success, a creature takes half as much damage and isn't knocked prone. The water then spreads out across the ground in all directions, extinguishing unprotected flames in its area and within 30 feet of it."Is 4d8 bludgeoning damage not potentially lethal damage?  Did you not just say, "their action is implicitly Delay, which means they automatically lose initiative"?  Let me repeat your word again, "automatically".  That's your description; not mine.  And do you not by your own admission apply actions sequentially, so that the Tidal Wave is fully resolved before the next action in initiative order is declared?  So please explain to me how it is just 'conjectural' that implicit delay unavoidably subjects the players to lethal attacks?I consider it a great breakthrough that we've gone from you declaring I don't understand the rules you are using or your position, to you admitting that you don't understand mine.  However, for these purposes the exact rules I'm using are irrelevant.   The 5e procedures haven't changed so much from past editions of D&D that those procedures are irrelevant, and more to the point, your procedures and the use of "implicit delay" cannot strictly be justified from the 5e RAW anyway.  It's one thing to make an assumption that rounds implicitly occurred before the start of combat, and quite another to implicitly assume a convenient but illogical action ('Delay') was taken.   You're screwing your players out of their fair chance of winning the initiative.I objected because its terrible advice to give to a new player.  My language was initially quite moderate.  If we can drop this whole pretense that I'm too dull to understand the plain sense of the words you have stated, then any slight bitterness in my words will probably go away as well.Seriously, you aren't doing anything concurrently.  I'm not trying to fight about it: that would imply that there was something to actually argue about.   Part of the reason I'm picking on that term is your use of it was confusing and you kept saying you were using "variant" rules, and combined with all these claims I didn't understand you, I had to read through all your posts a few times to insure myself that no, you really weren't actually doing anything concurrently.   Thankfully, your wealth of detail in describing the results of the Delay action meant that I could be really confident in asserting that it wasn't concurrent at all, it's all right there in your description of how delaying had the merit of allowing to you react.</blockquote>

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