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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Empirate" data-source="post: 5341354" data-attributes="member: 78958">This made me crack up... <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />Wait, you weren't joking? Every single effect that changes your Initiative (by changing your Dex, for instance) messes up the whole combat. I can't count the times we argued about in-battle castings of Cat's Grace or Nerveskitter. Imagine a one-on-one combat, combatant A has Ini 14, B has 13. A takes a move and a standard action, then B takes a move and a standard action, then casts quickened Cat's Grace as a swift. Now B's initiative is 15, so next round he goes before A. So basically he gets in two turns to A's one, or what?This is the simplest example and doesn't even take into account combatants newly entering combat in later rounds, readying an action or White Raven Tactics. Imagine you're aware that in the next round of combat, new guys will arrive and delve in. Why do they get higher Initiative than you? Can you ready an action to use White Raven Tactics on one of them, even though they haven't "entered" combat yet? What happens to your initiative if you could do so, do you act before or after them? What if you've been first to act in previous rounds, so their Ini will be set to 1 higher than yours next round, but you cast Cat's Grace now? And so on.And don't get me started on the order of action in a surprise round. Or what happens if two people are tied in initiative and start full-round actions. And so on.Initiative is a necessary abstraction to allow a turn-based combat system to work at all. It is much less useful to let it work well. But this is rather a tangent to the OP's questions, sorry to digress so much.</blockquote>

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