Immediate Interrupt Negating Actions

[Eukaryotic]

So I just had a 4e session last night where my DM tried to experiment with 5e Legendary Actions in a Solo monster encounter (the boss of a smuggling syndicate we've been hounding for awhile). One of the Legendary Actions he came up with was an Immediate Interrupt "Dodge" that triggered on a hit and allowed the boss to shift away, thus negating a melee attack. I've been playing a Dragonborn Paladin, and it just so happened that on two consecutive turns I crit with an encounter power and then with a daily power respectively (first times I've ever crit with melee attacks in the campaign). Both times the boss used his Legendary Action to negate my melee attacks. I was pretty frustrated the first time, and ready to just ragequit the second time (it had been a daily power I'd been saving for a special occasion like a boss fight). My Paladin ended up being more or less useless the entire fight despite my best efforts to do...anything. I didn't say anything at the time because I didn't want to be the guy who brings the whole game to a halt just because I wasn't having a fun night. Our group discussed it after though and we came to a general consensus that the mechanic may need to be toned down a bit.

I'm wondering what other people's thoughts are on Immediate Interrupts completely negating a character's action. Is it okay in some circumstances? Is it par for the course? I'm wondering now if I should have just sucked it up and moved on. Maybe the onus was on me to change up my tactics after learning I wasn't going to be much help hitting him with my attack powers. Would appreciate any thoughts or opinions.

 

[Balesir]

There are various PC powers that work very similarly to this, although they are generally encounter powers, and I tend to think that what is good for the goose is good for the gander...

Notice, though, that any creature gets only one Immediate action between the end of one of its turns and the start of its next and cannot use Immediate actions on its own turn. The secret to getting that big strike in is timing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

One of the Legendary Actions he came up with was an Immediate Interrupt "Dodge" that triggered on a hit and allowed the boss to shift away, thus negating a melee attack. I'm wondering what other people's thoughts are on Immediate Interrupts completely negating a character's action.

Most powers you see like that either add to defenses or force a re-roll, or are in response to movement, so you don't have to go through with the attack.

IIRC, the Legendary creature only gets to use such actions so many times. I guess he was saving them specifically to negate crits, which is a legitimate tactic - you'll see players use their Halflings' racial that way, for instance.

Maybe the onus was on me to change up my tactics after learning I wasn't going to be much help hitting him with my attack powers.

The obvious (and really kinda cheesy) counter, of course, is to Ready to deliver your attack on the enemy's turn, when he can't use immediate actions, or on an ally's turn when he's just used the immediate action to spoil the ally's attack. To be less cheesy don't try to get away with 'triggers' like "his turn starts" or "he does something." ;P

 

[Eukaryotic]

That's a good point and makes a lot of sense. You can't just throw a daily down and expect it to be effective no matter what. Unfortunately, I think the DM had forgotten the part about only one Immediate Action per round and had the boss doing all kinds of other Immediate Interrupt tricks in the same round. I think I'll try to bring it up in advance of our next session as a constructive point, thanks!

 

[MwaO]

I think one of the things to remember about DM'ing is it is a lot better to have your players have the sense that their failures are leading to successes, especially when something cool happens, such as a critical hit on a daily or they land some control that would 'end' the combat.

My favorite example of this is all the Solos immune to control. No, don't do that. What you do is that you give them extra actions somehow and each time they lose an extra action due to an effect, the effect gets downgraded.

So Unconscious would turn into Stunned would turn into Dazed, Dazed into Grants CA. Restrained into Immobilized into Slowed.

In any case, I think the problem here is that Legendary Actions from 5e are mostly Immediate Reactions upon the end of a turn of someone attacking them where they get 3 of those Immediate Reactions per turn. That makes them more fun, per say, because the PC gets their effect off and then the Solo gets to stomp on them back.