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Message: <blockquote data-quote="FormerlyHemlock" data-source="post: 6991320" data-attributes="member: 6787650">I'd probably handle it slightly differently, but I can imagine situations where I'd do it exactly as you did. (Especially now that I know about your approach--I see certain advantages to it.)But since I think we're discussing various peoples' definitions of "role-playing", I'll bring it back around and point out that the way I've handled it and the way you would handle it are both not covered by my definition of roleplaying. I don't know how Robilar's DM (Gygax?) resolved Robilar's orcish army, but my perspective is that if Robilar's player was ever directly making decisions for the orcs on behalf of Robilar (as opposed to making decisions for the orcs on behalf of the orcs, based on what the orcs would be wanting and thinking), he was not at that point engaged in roleplaying.And I think that's okay, sometimes, especially if the DM took that approach because it's smoother than Robilar saying to the DM, "I order these orcs to go there and I draw a map and give these orcs the order to do this," etc. If the DM wants the focus of the scene to be more about the tactical challenge that's undertaken and not about being a people-manager of orcs, then it's appropriate to fall back to wargaming to a degree instead of roleplaying. I think the DM has the right to call for either mode though; one of the best and most entertaining checks on 5E's Planar Binding spell/Necromancer bindings/etc. is for the DM to roleplay the various wights/Mummy Lords/hags/faerie T-Rexes/etc. instead of letting the player wargame them. "When you return to camp after visiting town, you walk into the clearing where you left Baba Yaga and you see her... filling in a hole in the dirt. When she sees you, she starts and looks uneasy, and stands over the hole as if to prevent you from seeing it. You see a child-sized finger bone, picked clean, lying in the grass a few feet away."Yes and no. I never track things strictly round by round. As discussed in the other thread, I allow combatants to declare long actions; I also allow declaration a Delay action which lets you declare after seeing what the other guy did, at the cost of losing initiative, but if all remaining parties in a round Delay then the round ends. So in a Mexican standoff with a Bone Naga, where the Bone Naga has declare a Readied Lightning Bolt for the first PC to come around the corner where they are trapped--if the PCs just say, "I'm Delaying/Readying my attack to hit the Naga as soon as it comes around the corner" (I forget if it was a Ready or a Delay in this case), then as a DM I don't feel the need to ask them six hundred times, "Are you still doing that?"So once the PCs declare an action which is going to take a while to resolve, then as long as the situation doesn't change and the monster doesn't change its action, I just skip ahead to whenever the situation will change: dawn breaks, or the cavalry show up, or one of the PCs wakes up to 1 HP, or the dungeon fills another inch with water.I'm a bit confused. What credit? When I wrote, "At that point, 5E is being a little bit wargame-ish," that was a descriptive statement, not an attribution of credit. It certainly wasn't a contrast with AD&D--I would have done exactly the same thing in AD&D.If you're referring to "One of my favorite things about the way I've been running initiative for the past couple of years," that is not the vanilla 5E initiative system. I hate the vanilla 5E initiative system. That is <a href="http://www.enworld.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?506-D-amp-D-5th-Edition-News-Rules-Homebrews-and-House-Rules" target="_blank">this system*</a>, currently under discussion on another thread. 5E is friendly to rules tweaking, so I'll give it credit for encouraging alternate initiative systems/spell point systems/combat maneuver systems/etc., but that makes it similar to AD&D (2nd edition), not different. I was younger when I played AD&D, so my thinking wasn't as sophisticated then, but the system I use today is directly descended from AD&D initiative. So again, not a contrast with AD&D.-Hemlock/Max* Which I feel like you [MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] and I have recently discussed somewhere, maybe in the "melee is weak" thread, so I'm surprised if you think I've been running vanilla 5E initiative all this time. But I'm getting old and may be misremembering.</blockquote>

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