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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5626405" data-attributes="member: 4937">I find them plenty meaningful in my own game.And a biased one at that.  I could just as easily argue that you are making sneak attack far more powerful than intended - which incidently seems to have been the complaint of the OP's player.   Moreover, you've also complained that it is illogical how FF works, but when I point out that much of the lack of logic is something you've add to the rules and which isn't found within them, you seem to want to cling to the unreality anyway even though it annoyed you. I mean by that that if you accept the alternative interpretation, of initiative being thrown at some arbitrary point after the battle /combat /encounter/ engagement has begun, then you are arguing that its not possible to have a battle where some one isn't caught unprepared for an attack.  That in my opinion should be discarded as complete nonsense on the face of it.  It doesn't stand to reason that the first round of every combat is an ambush, even when the fighters are fully aware of the other, observing each other before the punch is thrown, and had oppurtunity to ready themselves.  If the rules offer an alternative - and they clearly do - then it should be obvious that the alternative is the intended approach. Whenever it will matters whether any of them are flat-footed, or whenever it matters in what order they take their actions.  If the party walks into a tavern planning to roll the bartender because he's behind on his protection money payments to their boss, the party doesn't get caught flat-footed by anyone they can observe in the bar.  Combat begins when they open the door, even if the party is trying to conceal their intention to attack the bartender when they reach the bar. I suppose that it is, though the rules are quite clear, you do this once they observe the opposing force. How is 'On the round they observe the opponent every single time' applying the rule arbitrarily?  Arbitrary means "by random choice or personal whim, lacking any reason or system".  As far as I can tell, I'm the only one offering a systematic approach.  If that is your definition of arbitrary, what is your definition of consistent?    No, but I think they made the decision to treat all shield bonuses the same regardless of source.  I only pointed out a fairly large shield to try to explain the basis of the reason.  The reasoning still applies to a shield of only 1 square foot, and of course could be made even more strongly by talking about shields of 12 square feet. No, because 3e made the decision to simplify the game by not tracking facing.  That may or may not be inherently dumb, but the logical result of that is that 'behind' loses a particular meaning.   And again, I suspect this is a simplification based on lowest common denominator.  It becomes more immediately obvious that the shield is an impediment to my flat footed attack when I'm attacking from 20 yards away with a ranged weapon.   It's less obvious that a shield that isn't shifted to thwart an attack is an impediment, buts its easy to imagine that its more of an impediment to an attack than no shield would be.  It's not obvious to me that its clearly the wrong way to handle it, because any more 'right' way to handle it would involve very large increases in the complexity of the system.  Given the level of abstraction, it might be more realistic than the alternative.   Now we are going very far afield indeed.  Are you still trying to prove that the game isn't realistic? Those two things aren't mutually exclusive.  I don't have to agree that a simulation is a perfect simulation in order to believe it describes some real life situation.  I had a professor that studied forest fires.  He's modelling program had trees growing on a grid, which is wholly unrealistic, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't describe real life situations.  I worked for another professor that studied protein folding.  His proteins folded on 90 degree angles in perfect little cubes, which is also unrealistic, but doesn't mean that it wasn't describing some real life situation.   Sure, you can refine the model with higher and higher levels of computation, but unless you want to game on a large Beowulf cluster I wouldn't recommend it. No we don't.  I mean that if you are engaged in some rhythmic activity like running, it's not at all clear to me that you are harder to hit while running than someone less good at dodging, unless you've extensively practiced dodging while running. As I said, it would be possible to remove the inconsistancies by changing the langauge of 'denied dex bonus' to 'suffering a penalty to dexterity', but this change would probably be a very large change for what I think is a very small gain.  However, if it bothers you, by all means make those ammendments in your house rules.  I've no problem with DM's customizing their game to their sensibilities provided they do so skillfully.</blockquote>

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