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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 5624439" data-attributes="member: 32740">There is no best answer, no universally correct answer. It's for the PLAYER to figure out and for the DM to decide if it's allowable (see: Adjudicating the Ready Action, DMG p.25). Another issue for the player to deal with round by round. Remember, however, that the Ready action is not an "I Win" button either. The mechanics should not be set up such that a player... gets to decide what he ALLOWS opponents to do to him. Allowing a character to act outside of his turn carries consequences - the possibility of having lost his action entirely or opponents finding ways to circumvent his preparations. In your example the character is moving and readying to kill his hostage. Simple enough except that he can't make the triggers for his kill action either too broad OR overly detailed. That leaves room for opponents to CATCH the character at the disadvantage in which he has voluntarily placed himself by shifting his action to later instead of now when he would be unopposed in resolving it. Exactly, that is the tradeoff the character accepts.  Also, as you, yourself note, in the round the character decides to just pull a bow and shoot instead, or to kill the hostage and take off running he's LOST his readied action for that round because the triggers for his action are not fulfilled. He has to wait until his NEXT turn to change what he wants to do and in that time his opponents could decide to do something different like rush him despite his threats (though again, see DMG p.26 for ways the DM may potentially allow the character to get around changing his mind about actually taking the action he declared). This is all well-handled by the Ready action. The action to be triggered is almost always going to be VERY simple though: "I attack," "I cast my spell at Redshirt #4," "I take a move action," "I jump across the chasm." The events that have to take place that lead to the characters action are what have to be better defined. I think this is all just a matter of better understanding and better adjudicating the Ready action and not of the game needing a new "Reaction" action. As far as I can tell, nothing your Reaction action will do does anything different or better than Ready already does. Reaction action.Ready already.I sound like Dr. Seuss.</blockquote>

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