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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 4971658" data-attributes="member: 4937">One last thing.  I believe I'm applying the rules as written.  I asserted at the beginning of the thread that the heart of this debate was however that I and almost everyone else regularly applied a house rule at the table, and it was the wide use of that house rule that was causing the trouble.  That house rule is, "You don't have to roll initiative at the start of an encounter."  Every DM, including me, avoids rolling initiative at the start of at least some encounters, either because no one in the scene is 'on gaurd', or the probability of combat is IMO low (which is actually a form of railroading), or because I don't want to give away that the probability of combat is high and thus spoil the natural reactions of the players.  But not rolling initiative in a situation where a threat is present is precisely what leads to this argument.  If you roll initiative at the start of every scene where a threat is or might be present or where either side is on their gaurd, the whole argument goes away and if I was presented with rules lawyerish players, then that's precisely how I would handle it.  We'd roll initiative at the beginning of every encounter regardless until such time as the players shut up and agreed to not try to run the game.Secondly, as to the 'can you take a combat action out of combat', my interpretation of when the game is in a combat state is when there is some character NPC or PC that wants to take a combat action.  There really aren't any other guidelines in the rules.  If the PC offers a combat action, its not my place to say, "No, you can't do that because we are not in combat now."  I'm not a DM that says, "No.", and my reading of the rules is precisely from a 'say, "Yes"' position.  If the player offers the proposition, "As I cautiously move down the corridor, I huddle behind my shield.", whether the players knows it or not (because the player may be new and therefore makes propositions without game language) that player is asking to take a full defense action on this round (and for as long as they advance down the corridor).  I consider it to be frank bad DMing to say, "Ok, I hear your proposition but I'm going to say 'No' to it.  Even though I have tools in the rules for arbitrating your proposition, I'm going to rule that your reasonable action and clear intention has no game effect."  The thing is, taking a full defensive action doesn't fix everything.  For one thing, you give up making attacks of opportunity during the surprise round, which can be huge, and you give up taking double moves.  For another, you can't take any other standard action while moving.  For another, you lose your dodge bonus whenever you are flatfooted so it doesn't help you much if you get surprised.  But if you don't have combat reflexes and don't have anything better to be doing, moving around in a defensive posture is a perfectly reasonable thing to do and I don't see any reason to say 'No' to it.   And frankly, given that its provided for by the rules, my suspicion is that there is a bit of adversarial DMing going on here.If you can describe something which is reasonable and which even a 5 year old can do, its my job to say 'Yes' to it, not to try to figure out how to say, 'No'  That's the guiding philosophy of my game refereeing.  It's not merely my job to enforce the rules.  My job is turn player propositions into concrete rules.  The rules say that if a player proposes to do nothing but defend themselves, they recieve a small bonus to defense in exchange for small penalties in other ways.  That seems perfectly reasonable to me, so I go with it.</blockquote>

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