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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4969964" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, Jeff says he's not interested, but I am.  The reasoning that Jeff describes is one of my principle irritations with PCs, because if we follow this reasoning to its logical conclusion it slows the game down to a crawl and makes roleplaying unnatural and stilted, to say nothing of encouraging anti-social PC behavior.  It's nothing but rules lawyering and lifting rules out of context.While 3rd edition makes no effort to describe what marks the start of an enounter or battle, prior editions of D&D have described the process in great detail.  Third edition also describes very accurately the process of surprise, noting that neither party can be surprised if the other is aware of the other.  Prior editions agree with this general statement and differ only over the mechanics.  In third edition this awareness is through the 'Spot' (or sometimes 'Listen') mechanic.So let us break down the situation.  We have a potential adversary - a Bandit Lord and his minions - and a PC party.  Suppose the encounter occurs on the road.  It could be anywhere, but let's suppose the road to begin with.  The Bandit Lord rides out of the woods some 300' down the road (or 1500' feet, or 30' feet, it doesn't matter really).  Both the PC's and the Bandit Lord make their spot checks.  Both see the other, and neither is surprised.  Either side could act hostilely immediately now, and if winning the initiative could catch the other flat footed for a moment, but this is unlikely to happen as the PC's don't know the Bandit Lord and his men from the King's Huntsman or a group of noble Rangers at this point.  Now, we have one of two ways of proceeding.  If we wanted to be petty about the rules, we ought roll initiative now whether the approaching party is bandits, rangers, or the king's huntsman.  Then we ought to proceed normally with rounds, with each side declaring thier actions in turn.  It really doesn't matters what actions that the participants want to take in those rounds, whether it is parlaying, fighting, or sitting down to take ones boots off.  All those are actions allowed within the framework of a 'round'.  The universe doesn't know what a round is for and so create rounds out of the ether when a fight begins and discard them when talking is going on.  We do that for convience only.  A round is only a convienent period of game time in which a character can perform a meaningful action.  Rounds in this since are occurring all the time, we just don't bother to bog the game down keeping track of all of them.It's quite clear if we proceed in this fashion, that on the first round the bandits (or huntsman or whatever) turn down the road, take their 40' move and ready an action in preperation for possible hostilities.  It's quite clear that the PC's do something of a the same, and since both have acted, even though we are 220' apart and doing no more than talking or other actions that aren't attack actions, neither side can catch the other flatfooted.  They are prepared.  They are carefully observing the other.  The slightest flinch brings some sort of reflex and reaction.  Both observe the other with a wary eye, like the henchmen of two mob bosses who don't like each other but who must meet in some out of the way place.  The idea of at this point reacting and catching the other side unprepared is to be fully frank, nothing less than ridiculous.  You may reacting and go first (or not) but you certainly can't catch the other side at that point unready for battle and hostilities because they've had half a minute or more to prepare and ready themselves for just that.  (Unless, of course, you have a feat like 'flick of the wrist' that lets you do just that.)And, it's equally clear that we can in fact walk around with a readied action if we want to.  No rule prevents it.  No rule prevents us from arbitrating every game day by going through the motions of 14400 rounds except for the fact that it would be tedious to do so.  We can easily imagine an archer walking down a corridor with a notched bow and the readied action 'if anything steps in front of me, I'm going to shoot'.  In fact, in some cases this is the only way the game rules can handle certain situations - for example, suppose the archer wants to watch for traffic on an intersecting corridor.  Unless you can hold a readied action indefinately, any being could arrange so that it was impossible to shoot them simply by arranging so that they never ended their turn standing in the corridor - which of course defies common sense and kills the very sort of simulation of ordinary situations we invent rules for in the first place.And I add, that not only is this in accordance to reason and common sense,  this is pretty much the way the game has always been.So, now that we know that two parties can't surprise the other once we they are aware of each other, the sensible thing is to dispence with the interruption of game mechanics (and the danger that presents to immersion) until such time as its actually relevant.  It doesn't really matter whether we roll initiative when the two parties first meet, or after we've resolved that fighting will actually occur so long as we remember that we didn't begin to count time at 'roll for initiative', but that an endless procession of rounds stretches before we ever get to 'roll for initiative'.Now, it's certainly true that if the villain goes into a speach that stretches across several rounds, that the players may interrupt such a speach at any time and knock a bow and proceed to unleash hell, but unless we run the game with the ridiculous notion that against a foe well aware of the characters and alert to the possibility of hostilities that this will somehow catch them 'flat footed' its quite probable that such silliness wouldn't arise since in most cases the only reason it happens is the PC expects a mechanical reward for their 'ruthlessness'.  Now, does all that mean that its impossible to catch people that are aware of you offguard and flat footed?  No.  It merely means that its impossible to catch people on their gaurd off their gaurd.  If one side or the other prepares a suitable distraction, and gets the other side to relax and be at their ease so that they are no longer on gaurd, then perhaps, 'I pull out a weapon and attack' might meaningfully catch someone flat footed for a moment.  But generally, that's not what is going on.</blockquote>

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