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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 7687918" data-attributes="member: 16814">It doesn't, and you're starting to catch on.Yup, after you roll initiative, that's right.  Doesn't say you have to roll initiative in order to resolve an attack, though.  That's you reading in. The rules don't say lots of things that still happen.  They provide a framework for the most common events that occur, to use to adjudicate those common events and to use as a guide to adjudicate uncommon ones.  They are not comprehensive and proscriptive, but guidelines.  DMs have the leeway to adjudicate situations not covered by the rules, or covered imperfectly.  The rules, in this case, describe the common event of running combats under initiative.  That doesn't mean that, since this was described, you must shoehorn all similar events into those constraints.  If it makes sense to have an attack outside of initiative, then that's what's called for and the rules, again being neither comprehensive or proscriptive, allow for such rulings.Oh, you are starting to catch on!  i disagree, mostly because there's considerable general confusion on this matter and a number of people that think that such a ruling is detrimental to their games.I disagree that the DM is only there for extreme outliers and must, in all other cases, shoehorn all events into the narrow constraints of the rules.  Rather, I think the DM is there to use the rules as guidelines to adjudicate player actions.  The only real rule of DMing is to remain consistent in those adjudications.Rogues did not gain such a bonus in 3.x.  Traps didn't roll initiative (usually) in that system either.  So there is a long standing, common exception to 'all attacks occur within combat and therefore initiative [ed. paraphrasing here].' As for surprise, the DM determines when characters are surprised.  That's the rule.  Some rules are provided to help adjudicate surprise consistently if you roll initiative, but nothing there states that you can only be surprised if you also roll initiative.  That's the most common case, granted, but if your reading of the rules extends to the ludicrous point that no one can ever be surprised by an unknown and unseen trap going off, you're now in the arena of breaking trope.I sincerely doubt it.  Especially since those abilities don't say anything about 'surprise' but instead have wording along the lines of 'attack you are aware of.'  Hard to say that you could be aware of an unseen and undetected trap going off, neh?</blockquote>

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