Really? Because, IME, the DM would either say, "You stand up" or "The ogre tries to whack you down before you can stand up; make a Reflex save" or something of that nature.
Only if the DM has a house rule that says a character must make a Reflex save to stand up if an Ogre is standing over him.
Why? Because in mechanical terms, merely because you attempt to stand up doesn't mean that you are able to do it.
As long as you have a move action, you can stand up. That is true in 3E and 4E. The act of standing up could cause a AO in 3E, require a save if the ground you are standing on is slippery, or trigger a readied action from said Ogre to attack you. None of these occur unless you are able to stand up. When you are unconscious you have no actions, thus you can't stand up. Saying your character is trying to do something that is auto-fail does not impact resolution, because we know what the outcome will be - you can't stand up. So whether the DM says you can try or you can't try, the resolution is exactly the same - you can't stand, you do not trigger an AO, you don't have to make a save, and the Ogre cannot trigger his readied attack. With the "say yes" guideline of the 4E DMG, there is no reason to tell the player he cannot describe his death save as an attempt to stand because the resolution of the yes or no is exactly the same.
The difference between a yes and a no to get up and dancing a jig is different. The winking part, who cares? My grandfather laid in oain under heavy sedation dying in the hospital. He hadn't moved for a week. He sat bolt upright, looked around the room worriedly, saw that my grandmother wasn't in the room, then laid down smiling and died on the spot. Too bad he was Unconscious and didn't have any action or Perception of what was going on around him. (Sorry for the downer, but it is a true story, and actually is a feel-good rememberance story for my family. It seemed to us he wanted to be sure my grandmother didn't have to watch him die, so he could finally let go.)
"I X" always means "I try to X" because you never know for certain that a die roll, or an outright failure to succeed, isn't in the offing.
Not always in game terms. There are some actions that are auto-successes and auto-failures. Standing when Unconscious is auto-fail, so trying to stand does no harm because you know your character will fail.
If you unable to do it, then you can't do it even if you declare you are doing it. Your declaration of what you are doing, in fact, has no mechanical meaning except that it denotes that you try.
Right. Trying to stand when you can't has no mechanical meaning. That's why we are calling it color.
Really really.
Well, LostSoul's initial "colour" had the fighter start to claw his way up the wall, and then collapse, so I guess that wasn't colour either. The creature gets an immediate reaction to the wall-clawing-upward. And I guess, then, "4e can be a good game if you violate the rules" is back on.
No, it doesn't. The creature would only get the immediate action if the character actually stood up. But since he can't stand when Unconscious, he didn't actually stand, thus no readied action would be triggered.
The only 4E rules violation is you trying to impose a "Reflex Save" (which doesn't even exist) on a character trying to stand up just because an Ogre is standing over him. You can't claim rules violations when you're just making up stuff that feels right to you and claim it as RAW. This isn't even 3E RAW. 3E RAW would require the Ogre to ready a trip attack or make a trip attack as its AO when the character stands up. Neither is triggered by RAW unless the character actually stands up.
), so I'm not sure I have it right...
