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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Anax" data-source="post: 1985758" data-attributes="member: 19868">I agree with (what seems like) the majority of the people here: this sounds like smart tactics to me.  A very nice trick, and well within the spirit of the game.The bad guys, however, have ways to one up this again.  If they see him do it a lot, they can look for something that isn't there.  For example, Feather Fall has no somatic or material components, but most spells do.  As a DM, I probably would have ruled that this prevented this specific trick from working, by the way--guards readying to attack a caster are most likely not going to shoot as soon as somebody opens his mouth.  In any case, though, if this is being done a *lot*, the opposition will eventually wise up and realize it.  And then they'll ready actions to "attack anyone who appears to be making arcane gestures."  Or they'll stop readying and instead unload a full attack's worth of arrows into the guy in the fancy bathrobe.Of course, this is an interesting argument that a high level non-caster has good reason to invest some skill points in Spellcraft--since that allows such a character to tell if there's actually a thread involved.  You don't even need a terribly large amount to be able to distinguish well.  And any character who has worked on techniques for fighting mages should certainly invest.Of further note, I would treat this (and all other quickened spells, or reactive spells like Feather Fall) as the XPH "Immediate Action."  That means that the spell counts against the quickened spells for the round--and at higher levels, the tactic will be potentially less useful if the caster has the ability (through feats or equipment) to quicken spells.  I know I'd rather just try to get two fireballs off.  It is perhaps more obvious in the context of psionics, though, since there are significantly more reactive psionic powers than there are reactive spells.  (Whether that's because this is something they wanted to be special to psionics, or because the authors simply hadn't realized how cool it could be, I'm not sure.)Anyway, interesting tactic.  Thanks for telling about it.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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