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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bastoche" data-source="post: 2114810" data-attributes="member: 306">So there. All combattant starts the combat flat-footed until their turn. It's point no1.You want to ready an action to initiate combat? Roll initiative. Everyone starts flat-footed. Everyone is aware so no suprise round. When it's your turn, you can ready an action. You cannot superceed initiative merely by taking a ready action. As you stated, ready an action is a standard action, you may only take at your turn. Since you can't ready an action outside of combat, combat starts when initiative is rolled, i.e. when one character decides to ready an action.If the theifs decide to act in the first round and they win initiative, nothing changes from your thief guild scenario above (WAY above <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> ). I.E. the Wizard eats the sneak attack. However if nobody acts in the first round, at the DM's discretion, it may go on forever until the fight actually occurs at which point nobody is flat-footed. It is implicitly assumed IMO in the DMG that if too many rounds pass (let's say a turn) before anybody acts, initiative must be re-rolled. But at this point it's in the realm of judgement calls/house-ruling.</blockquote>