NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6480472" data-attributes="member: 6787503">I agree with this understanding of initiative. I think it most closely aligns with what is said on p. 69 of the PBR, where the round is described as an organizational structure that has reality only within the game itself and not within the world it describes:"The game organizes the chaos of combat into a cycle of rounds and turns. A round represents about 6 seconds in the game world. During a round, each participant in a battle takes a turn. The order of turns is determined at the beginning of a combat encounter, when everyone rolls initiative." So, if we take the words beginning and start to mean the same thing, then the start of the encounter would be roughly the period of metagame time in which initiative is being rolled. I would extend this back to include all of steps 1-3, basically the period in which the DM is setting things up. Nothing has actually happened yet in-game. So how does the DM determine surprise before anyone has had a chance to act, assuming that it is the actions that unnoticed threats will be taking that will actually cause surprise? If it is monsters surprising characters the answer is simple: because the DM knows what the monsters are going to do on their first round of action to surprise the characters. He knows they are going to be surprised. In the case of characters surprising monsters, however, I suspect it is very much the same thing. The DM can assume that the characters, once positioning themselves to cause surprise, will follow through on surprising the monsters based on the assumption that they'd be fools to squander the opportunity to act with surprise. Hence the DM determines surprise at the beginning of a combat encounter. This does not preclude the possibility of another outcome, however. At this point, there may not even be any combat.I agree with this as well, but only from an in-game perspective. The encounter begins at the gaming table. Step 4 is just the first place where we enter through a window into the game world. At this point the actions (resolved in initiative order) and surprise that were determined at the true beginning of the encounter actually take place within the game.I think this is where all of the above comes into play. The actions that cause surprise don't need to happen before surprise is determined, indeed they cannot, so the surprised party is denied their actions, allowing the other party to act first and "cause" the surprise. The order of actions taken by A or B in that context is irrelevant, if I'm not mistaken.</blockquote>

Verification