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Message: <blockquote data-quote="-=Xar=-" data-source="post: 6580427" data-attributes="member: 26829">During our last session a strange phenomena crept up: the party was investigating a cavern complex and most of the party was checking out one side of a T-intersection, poking around in the webs of well-concealed spiders while the barbarian was 20 feet away searching the other corridor. The PC's who were searching through the webs rolled their perception checks and failed to notice the spiders who, gaining surprise leapt into their faces. But no! The barbarian stated that because of his Feral Instinct he preconsciously felt the danger befalling his party, and because he rolled and won initiative with advantage he could jump into the fray and slaughter the spiders before they even had the chance to jump into the necks of his unknowing comrades!Well, just being a grindy side-encounter it didn't really matter to me if his character was able to pre-emptively smite lurking arachnids from 20' away, but I realized that other situations might come up, lots of other possible scenarios where abilities like this would give rise to unrealistic, or even quite silly and counterproductive results. So where to draw the line?What if the party is walking through the streets and a well-concealed assassin is training a crossbow on one of the party-members forehead, with the intent to pull the trigger? As the hidden killer rolled ungodly high on his hide check he is unnoticed and gains surprise, but the barbarian acts faster and... can't do nothing! Oh, he might go into a rage and wander around, but when the assassins turn comes up he could simply decide to slink back into the shadows for another chance, never giving away his identity, maybe even repeating the same tactic over and over, draining the barbarian of his daily rages by just waving a pointy thing at them from afar...What is the range of this ability anyway? What is the party is all streched-out and one of the members is about to open a door and start an encounter by getting surprised by a mimic that poses as the door itself? Can the barbarian act in the surprise round if he was in the same corridor 30' away? 100'? 200'? And line of sight, what if it was only 10', but around a corner? Would he know the nature of the danger? The range, direction? Would he know if it was his own, his parties or someone else's act or intention that triggered it? Could the barbarian act before the mimic even revealed itself, even though none actually knew it was there? Would he know that the random guy just passing in the crowd was actally just a hair away of plunging his concealed knive into the back of one of the party members? Would he know it if the thug was about to strike down a random passer-by? Could he warn others that something was about to happen if he rolled highest on initiative? What if nothing happens just because his reaction to the looming danger and the thug or mimic, still unnoticed, holds back, changing intent that should have triggered the barbarians reaction the first place? Paradoxes.And again, what's the point of having advantage on initiative in a surprise situation when most of the time this advantage will only result in being unable to react to the surprise itself? Bob the Barbarian and Miffy the Mage are about to be sniped by elven separatists, surprise is declared, initiative is rolled, Bob, elves and then Miffy coming up... Bob feels danger but sees nothing, elves snipe him and the mage: because his initiative advantage Bob was just as useless during the surprise round as Miffy; unable to do anything. If i was the barbarian I would want to forfeit my advantage now delaying is not an option anymore.Something just feel amiss with these rules, never mind the incompleteness...</blockquote>

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