Persistent Harrier

[Mummolus]

Had a discussion with my DM the other day about the battlemind's Persistent Harrier class feature.

Persistent Harrier
Battlemind Feature

You slip the bonds of space to strike back at even a distant opponent.
Encounter

Psionic, Teleportation, Weapon
Immediate Reaction Melee weapon
Trigger: An enemy hits or misses you with an attack for the first time during an encounter
Target: The triggering enemy
Special: You can attack the target with this melee attack even if the target is outside your melee reach.
Attack: Constitution vs. AC
Hit: 1[W] + Constitution modifier damage, and you teleport to a square adjacent to the enemy.

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The thing we're unsure of is what happens if two monsters of the same type attack at the same time. PH is a reaction to getting hit, but it specifies that it triggers on the first time you're attacked in that encounter.

This theoretically shouldn't happen a lot, but right now we're a low-level party and we're fighting a lot of same-y monsters. The other night for example a pair of hyenas triggered it.

It's a nice, clear power when you're attacked by one thing, but the DMG recommends grouping identical monsters together and having them move, attack etcetera at the same time and he follows it pretty thoroughly.

It seems to me that only one of the attacks would function, since the second would be against a target no longer in the same square (due to the teleportation aspect), but then we run into the issue of which attack hits and which misses since they're rolled at the same time.

Just wondering how others have handled this, or if there's some rules point I've missed that explains it.

 

[renau1g]

What do you mean they're attacking at the same time?

 

[Mummolus]

The DM Guide suggests grouping identical monsters together for the purpose of attack, movement etcetera to save time. Problem is it frequently gets in the way of these sorts of abilities. You end up with two or three monsters working on the same initiative roll and the DM in this case insists on rolling the attacks together, which is frustrating because it makes Persistent Harrier for example less useful.

 

[Mengu]

Usually moving two creatures and attacking isn't a big deal, until you have to deal with this sort of immediate action. One attack always happens before the other, even for monsters going on the same initiative. It's usually the order I roll the dice, or the order they drop out of my hand if I rolled them together, or I just pick one to be the first attack. You can come up with methods like the lighter color die is always first, etc.

So what happens is first creature hits, the reaction triggers, then the second creature hasn't attacked yet because he didn't have a valid target, assuming the battlemind is no longer within reach. He still has a standard action though, so he can make an attack against something else in range, or charge, or move, or use any other actions it may have.

A bit of "take back" is pretty normal for the DM when you are trying to be quick, and dealing with multiple monster activations at the same time, and an immediate action goes off.

An alternate, and strictly more correct way to deal with the situation is to assume creatures are moving and readying actions until they are all in position, and then attacking. This approach is cleaner from a rules perspective, but can seriously hose monsters, which leads to DM activating monsters one by one to do them justice, which ends up taking a lot longer, which is another undesirable situation. I prefer the looser, faster approach of the occasional take back. It probably happens less than once a session.

 

[twilsemail]

While placing the monsters together in the initiative tracker helps to speed things up for the PCs, they should still be taking individual turns. Monsters acting concurrently can lead to all kinds of problems, like the one's you are experiencing. It would also affect things like OAs, as there is only one OA per character per turn.

 

[Mummolus]

It's actually happening a few times per encounter - we've got a ranger in the group and his Disruptive Strike keeps getting disrupted (hurr hurr) because of this as well.

Anyways, thanks all for the help. Hopefully I can convince the DM to see reason in this case, since the more I think about it the more of our problems have been caused by this issue.

 

[renau1g]

I think your DM is misunderstading things. Even if two monsters go on the same initiative each one still has a unique action, they are not one creature. The only reason to go on same init is to speed up combat. (s)He shouldn't be rolling 3x attack rolls at once.