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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6480173" data-attributes="member: 42582">But what does "sit out" mean in mechanical terms? In pre-5e it looks like Readying or Delaying, which is itself an action in combat, hence meaning that it is no longer the start of the encounter.I don't have a good handle on how to interpret "sit out the first round" in terms of 5e mechanics.This was discussed someway upthread.Part of the issue is that ascertaining surprise, and narrating it, leans heavily on the fiction, whereas initiative rules are mostly metagame devices.One way of fudging it, as a GM, is to narrate A emerging from cover - generating the surprise - then have B attack (because B won initiative) and then have A attack on its turn. The narration for A begins with fiction - after all, everything is happening largely simultaneously in the fiction, and the initiative rules are just a device for mechanically ordering actin resolution - but then shifts to mechanics when it takes its attack second in the round, after B.Whether this is the best way to handle the issue in 5e, I can't say.I don't think it's "perfectly clear", when one group of posters is reading it as a universal quantification and another group is reading it as an existential quantification, and both readings are perfectly permissible interpretations of the natural-language sentence.</blockquote>