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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7152577" data-attributes="member: 16814">I'm am not bound by your interpretation of my words.  You could have just as easily responded to my actual words instead of creating a strawman.Check.Check.Check.  The provided mechanism for this is surprise.Now what I said at all -- I've been clear you are not required to provide perfect information, so you're strawmanning again.  What the DM has to do is provide sufficient framing of the situation to justify the start of an encounter.  If the enemy is hidden in ambush, then surprise is appropriate, but you still need to frame the situation.  If everyone is surprised, this is easier, as you can narrate the attack from surprise.  If you have players that aren't surprised because of the Alert feat, it's still incumbent on you to provide information useful to decision making, even if it's something like hearing a twig snap from the forest to your right along with your spidey sense tingling.  Now that player has information with which to make a useful decision (attack from the right) and can do so but doesn't know how many or where exactly.  You can even have enemies on the left and hidden as well.Personally, I go for far more information because holding out information is a tedious game element when unnecessary.  The enemy is already in a tactically strong position with their ambush, and the players should have the ability to play that cool concept they have of the unsurprisable character and not be made to play guessing games because they took a feat that the DM later decides means this ambush doesn't work the way the DM had it in their head.  If you cannot challenge your players while still giving them information, you need to look to your own assumptions, not invent rule loopholes to snare your players.You said in the other post that what starts initiative is the initiation of an attack.  I agree, this is what starts initiative.  The Alert player is just so preternaturally on the ball that when that attack starts, they can react before consciously aware of it.  This is the fiction, but I cannot, as a DM, actually impart that preternatural instinct to my player.  So, instead, I give the player information and let them describe how their character reacts with their cool ability.And that, at the end, is really the crux of the problem here.  The character has abilities that cannot be transferred to the players, but the player is the one playing the game and making the choices.  Your solution is to provide only the information the player can know and skip all of whatever the character have with their ability to not be surprised.  This doesn't address the asymmetry involved and leads to you mistaking a base adherence to "reality" as being a fair adjudicator.  It is not being a fair adjudicator.  If you instead provide the information that the player needs to make the decisions, and then allow the player to describe those actions in accordance with the fiction, it's obviates the asymmetry and avoids things like forcing a player into choosing an action without information or wizards not completing spells when the situation changes or any of the other strange events postulated and allows the game to function smoothly.The bottom bottom line is that if you allow the Alert feat in your game, you are responsible for making it work.  If your solution is to do an end run around the surprise rules so you can effectively force blind actions as a kind of pseudo surprise, claiming you're a fair adjudicator falls flat.  If you don't want to deal with Alert, either narrate over it and don't ask for initiative or don't allow the feat.</blockquote>

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