How do you handle immediate actions?

[OchreJelly]

In general I find that 4E combat runs pretty smoothly. We have had a year of practice under our collective belts, yet something always seems to be somewhat problematic, and that's bookkeeping immediate actions.

"You are allowed one per round rule" is often forgotten by player and DM (me) alike. In particular with me it's those monsters that have the "do this as an immediate reaction 1/encounter" that I forget about entirely. I have a tendency to hold back on them since they are an encounter ability, and forget about it entirely. I think part of the problem, for me, is that when you are running a monster on its initiative you are looking and focusing directly on the abilities it has at hand, so it's easier to run standard/minor/move actions. When it's not the monster's turn, like when a triggering action would come up, I'm not as focused on what that monster can do so I forget about it.

On the player side I see this happen all the time with the fighter in particular. The fighter may use his combat challenge early on, but later in the round he may try to use a immediate-action-power or combat challenge again before his turn comes up again. When 10 minutes of real time has passed in a complex round, I find this sort of bookkeeping gets overlooked.

Have other people had similar problems? If so, does anyone have advice on how to better track immediate action usage? I'm almost inclined to not worry about it, but I'm sure there's unintended balance issues that could arise.

 

[abyssaldeath]

For players, I would suggest using a counter of some sort, like a card from a poker deck. Face up you have an immediate action available and face down you used it. Each time you turn comes up make sure the card is face up.

For DMs, I'm not sure there is much you can do. You guys have so many monsters to keep track of. I haven't DM'd 4e, but when I did for 3.5 I know there was always some ability that I would forget to use in almost every encounter.

 

[Thundershield]

Yeah, it was a little hard to keep track of for us as well to begin with, but we've started using tokens for that lately. One kind of tokens for Action Points and another for Immediate Actions. Whenever it becomes your turn, you take your Immediate Action token back (which also indicates that you've acknowledged it's your turn now, and yes I know you technically don't get your immediate action back until your turn ends, but you can't use it in your own turn anyway).

Also, this adds to the feel of the game. People immediately notice when someone flips a token in on the table and it clearly signals "now I'm gonna do something special".

I've found that to work well and be a nice alternative to duller forms of bookkeeping.

 

[MatthewJHanson]

When I DM I try to use the monster's immediate action the first time the trigger condition is met, so that I have less chance of forgetting.

 

[Starfox]

When I DM I try to use the monster's immediate action the first time the trigger condition is met, so that I have less chance of forgetting.

This has the added advantage of reducing the time you spend making tactical decisions for monsters.

 

[OchreJelly]

thanks for the suggestions. I think I will recommend tokens to the player that has problems with this. I'm not sure how to make a similar device work as a DM. Maybe I'll make some quick note near the monsters HPs that they have used an immediate action. I do something similar when a monster's regeneration is disabled for a round.