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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 8605566" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yet that's how it feels in play.Too much of an abstraction in this case, IMO.OK, a scenario:Orc init 19PC Alpha init 16PC Beta init 14PC Charlie init 11The Orc and PC Charlie start the round in melee with each other, in a big room.  PC Alpha is across the room to the west, loaded bow in hand.  PC Beta is also across the room next to Alpha, ready to lay down an AoE spell.On its turn the Orc attacks PC Charlie then moves 30' north to the door.  PC Alpha's turn comes up and she shoots at the Orc.  PC Beta's turn comes up and he drops a fireball on the Orc.  PC Charlie then moves his own 30' and attacks the Orc (let's for these purposes assume it survives what A and B did to it and there's still something left to attack <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ).Now if as you suggest Charlie and the Orc in fact move across the room together in the fiction, then why doesn't Alpha's shot suffer penalties for shooting into melee and why doesn't Beta's fireball also hit Charlie?  Because sure as shootin' neither of those things will happen at 98+% of tables; instead the Orc will in effect be counted as being on its own between init 19 and init 11 because movement is treated as a mini-teleport, while Charlie is still where he started.I agree that the Orc and Charlie would realistically move together in the fiction as their fight moves north toward the door.  But that has to be reflected in how everything else is handled during the round, right?  Yet how often is it?If one allows surprise to take up a whole 6-second round, yes.  But it shouldn't; and this is why surprise needs its own subsystem such that the surprised target has no active defenses only for the very first attack - for example if someone with three attacks in a round catches a target by surprise, IMO only the first of those attacks should be against passive defense only and if it's the very first thing to happen in the combat it happens before initiative is even rolled (among many other things, this is one reason I always have people with multiple attacks or shots roll a separate initiative for each one)This assumes anyone notices the King go for the knife and-or realizes what he's about to try to do with it.  I make no such assumption; instead it's handled by die roll - are you caught off guard or not, and if you are you only get your passive defenses agains tthe King's first attack.If problem there is, it's with the abstraction level being too far removed from the in-fiction reality.</blockquote>

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