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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5626179" data-attributes="member: 4937">The battle started when the thug stepped out with a knife.  Technically we could have been counting rounds before that (and might have been!), but that is the point where the battle begins.There are several reasons, outlined in the previous posts why we should think that that is so.  You have done nothing to address any of my questions regarding the abitrary and often contridictory nature of your decision regarding when the battle starts.Sure, but if you might have a battle then you are better off rolling initiative.  And if you are going to use the excuse of 'scenes' to obtain a different result than you would by running the battle as a combat, then you certainly should roll initiative instead.  At the very least, nothing in the rules suggests that the thug stepping out with a knife isn't the start of the battle (which definitively shows that I'm within the RAW), and if in fact stepping out with a knife is something that the thug gets to do by virtue of obtaining surprise (which even you have conceded), then the rules STRONGLY imply that throwing initiative is the thing you do next.  The rules don't say, "You get a surprise round... and then possibly an arbitrarily long scene passes.. and then you throw initiative" Yes, and if we ran this as a combat, he still might have done that.  There is nothing that says I have to use an attack action on every round of a combat.   Sure, if the encounter never features anything that requires knowing who goes first, then we obtain the same results from not throwing initiative that we do by throwing it.   But the point is that you've got two different resolution paths depending on where it matters when you throw initiative, and as I've abundantly shown in prior posts - I'm the only one applying the rules in a non-arbitrary and consistant manner in which the DM is removing from himself the temptation to metagame on behalf of one party or the other.</blockquote>

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