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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8409730" data-attributes="member: 82106">Various physicists rest uneasy in their graves tonight, but I still think that your point is interesting. I've always seen something like 3/4/5e's sequential turn order mechanics as something of a subjective description of the action, not an absolute and cogent causally coherent one. The becomes especially true with things like 4e's out-of-turn actions, the various 'repositioning' abilities of leaders, etc. In other words, I actually see some of the things that, for instance a 4e bard or warlord can do as RETCONS! In other words, you move the orc 2 squares with a power, that isn't (necessarily) the orc being moved back, it could be the orc NEVER MOVED FORWARD, or the Warlord called out that possibility to his ally the fighter and forestalled it from ever happening. More generally, a character sees another character do something in their turn and reacts. Yes, technically they are 'in the same round' (though 4e in particular doesn't define rounds this way) so you might ask why is he seeing something that happens and then acting on it before it takes place? Well, obviously that isn't what happened! He's really a bit behind. Being back in the turn order is "being behind the curve" and thus being more reactive and less proactive, at least in the start of the fight. Those orcs got good init rolls, they got the jump on you! Its possible something that happens in the round will play out fictionally as everyone trying to do stuff at once, but maybe it won't! Maybe your torch threw a spark just as the orcs leapt out and you got caught flat footed. There's plenty of ways to spin whatever happens in a round. I mean, maybe there's a cool way to work all this into a more fiction-first kind of a format, like you can be that jumpy hair-trigger guy that leaps in ahead of others, but sometimes that isn't going to work for you. Maybe it puts you at the head of the order, but also maybe that's not the place to be all the time, and if the fiction is used in a creative way by the GM (how to help this happen) you can really play all this up. Sure, go first Joe, but you're going to have to act blindly!</blockquote>

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