Readied Actions

[Man in the Funny Hat]

First, they're using the readied actions all the time. It has been increasing to the point where it seems like about 50% of player actions are readied actions lately. This is irritating for bookkeeping, and maybe I'll have to modify my notekeeping system, but it's not really an abuse, more of an overuse.

No, it's clearly an abuse. As is obvious by the lack of extended rules governing readied actions they aren't meant to be 50% of all melee actions.

I can think of only two situations where readied actions are appropriate: indecision and specific preparation. If a character is indecisive about what to do, or indeed to do anything at all, then they ready an action - they move the responsibility for the decision to act to their opponent. What their opponent does triggers their own action rather than the normal straight-forward decision of, "My action is to do XYZ NOW." If a character is in a situation where he takes time to prepare, that is the other situation where readied actions apply. You're still moving the final trigger for the action away from your own decision and onto your opponents action but it's for purposes of achieving a specific timing or order of actions, not because you can't or won't decide what to do.

More problematically, though, readied actions are being used to reverse time and get things to happen before other things happened.

Ready works the way it does because it has to. Its function is to determine the order of resolution for actions. I repeat, it doesn't determine the order in which actions are TAKEN, it determines the order in which the EFFECTS of those actions are resolved. Note how the PH says it is to be used: AFTER your turn is over but BEFORE your next one has begun, and your order in the initiative sequence changes if the readied action is indeed performed. It is thus ultimately merely a means of changing the order in which actions are resolved. Only occasionally can that actually benefit you significantly either by enabling you to prevent or counteract an enemy action or lessen its effects.

People instantly spring into action and declare readied actions: mainly conditional on her "acting offensively". The players seem unsure if she is actually hostile, so someone uses a free action to order her to indicate if she is not hostile and back away. One person tries to ready casting a spell on her "not backing away" - which I disallowed because she was "not backing away" on an ongoing basis - I don't think the rules allow for readied actions on something "not" happening, especially if it's currently not happening.

Readied actions are definitely the territory of DM adjudication because you simply CANNOT take into account all the possible actions that could be readied much less all the actions that could potentially be used as triggers for those actions to be taken. Again, it's vague because it needs to be in order for it to accomodate all the possibilities. But a high degree of specificity is definitely in the players best interests with readied actions and their triggers.

It was wise to completely disallow the silly attempt to ready an action based on what the opponent DOESN'T do. You could base it on when an opponent STOPS doing something but, "I'll cast my spell if she doesn't back away" is useless because it gains the player no advantage whatsoever. It can ONLY be resolved after the opponent has completed their turn and the associated movement that would be allowed - in which case the opponents turn is over and the player may as well have stated, "I do NOTHING this round. I'll cast my spell on my next turn after I see whether she backs away or not." Again, the point of readying the action is to re-order the resolution of actions and change your place in the initiative lineup between the end of your current turn and before the beginning of your next turn.

Unfortunately, the rules in the Player's Handbook appear to indicate that the readied action occurs "before" the action which triggers it and "interrupt" it, and I was unable to find any wording which would prevent the scream from being retroactively preempted, and was forced to concede, but I've been annoyed by it ever since.

The PH uses poor wording. The phrase, "The action occurs just before the action that triggers it," should instead read, "The action is resolved just before the action that triggers it."

There is also a broader question of this interpretation making readied actions too powerful: if you can ready an action for something general (like "offensive action"), and the GM allows the player to state whether he feels the trigger condition has been met (e.g. "she is opening her mouth - do you think this is an offensive action, or would you like to stay readied?"), then the readied action functions as a sort of super held action with temporal privilege.

It's as powerful as you want to let it be. Players know full well if what they are attempting to do with a readied action is abusive of the rules or actually what the rules intended should be allowed. Sometime before your next game go ahead and ask them if they honestly think it's reasonable. Ask them if they think it would be reasonable if you used their own logic against them: "So, what I SHOULD have done is when the banshee appeared I should have had her ready the scream against any of your PC's "acting hostile" or "not surrendering" and thus preempting anything you might do against her?"

So, do you know of any strategies for preventing this sort of abuse of readied actions?

Well you could fight fire with fire and simply do to the PC's what they do themselves but only if you really need to in order to prove the point. Doing that sort of thing isn't going to do much to immediately improve your game.

So, advice, suggestions, similar experiences?

COMMUNICATE. TALK to the players about it. Tell them that as DM it is clear that they're abusing the rule, that although they don't want to admit it to themselves they also know they're being abusive because 50% of everything they do is attempting to take advantage of it. Tell them you will NOT allow the abuse to continue one way or another, but for a limited time only, as mere players, they will be allowed to help determine how it's going to be handled. Only THEY can prevent it becoming necessary for you to arbitrarily disallow readied actions. Talk to them about what the rule is there for, how it SHOULD be used, and how it would be better for everyone for the PC's to be taking more positive, IMMEDIATE action, rather than readied actions.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Initiative fun stuff.

First, the 'Start of Combat' is an interesting deal. When it starts is up to the characters involved. The best method is to roll for initiative when the first character takes a combat action.

This requires adjudication from the DM, but works well to emulate the stare down contests and other fun stuff. There was a thread or two on this a while back. Please search cak before ergrinding all those arguments. Prior to combat, the PC's should be granted a modifier to intiative based on how prepared they are for combat compared to the opponents.
This means the Banshee floating through the wall does not nessesarily start combat and the PC's cannot take readied actions.

You Ready vs an action.. you Delay for a 'do this or I shoot' deal. The action readies against should be specific, both on what your target is doing and what you are doing.

A Readied action 'interupts' an opponents action, but does not nessasarily stop that action from being completed. As long as the banshee was still capable of screaming after the party did thier bit, she could scream away...but the power to Readying is that you can potentially take an action away from an opponent.. if you can put them into a status where they cannot complete thier action, they lose it.
This is opposed to Delay where you go prior to the opponent and they can react to the change in circumstances.


I am not sure how, per the RAW, you can abuse a Readied action. I rarely see them used in game except as preparing against a charge... and rarely have anyone charging about.. yet.

I suggest you reacquiant yourself with the RAW on intiative and special actions that affect it.

{edit}
Man in the Funny Hat types faster than I do
Agreed with him

 

[coyote6]

Saying they can't ready an attack "if they don't back away" is trivially handled; the PC just tells the foe "Back off, or else", and then declares that they, "Ready an attack if they do anything but back away" (or "anything but back away or parley", maybe). If the target does nothing, the readied attack doesn't go off; then, since the target chose not to act, the ready PC's next turn comes up, and they then choose to attack (or to re-Ready, maybe).

In this particular case, with the PCs unable to tell that the scream that was just starting was an attack, and the scream being a Supernatural power (IIRC) and thus not interruptable (as opposed to a spell or SLA), I would have let the banshee's scream & the players' attacks all go off at once, essentially simultaneously. It would be possible for everybody to get killed -- the PCs blow their saves, the banshee takes too much damage, and they kill each other off. Not necessarily purely RAW, but it makes sense to me.

 

[EdL]

Thanks for responding, guys. I have some devil's advocate responses for your well thought-out answers. I'd be interested in further feedback.

I'm surprised by this. Does that mean that a group of warriors waiting to be charged by their opponents can't ready an action against the charge because combat has not started yet?Initiative had not been rolled. But to look a little more seriously at this, doesn't that mean that during a parley with a creature who might turn on the party at any moment, it is impossible to ready an action against an expected attack?Again, playing devil's advocate here, what if the only potential threat is the banshee?What about readying against an "anything but" action like in cop shows when a character has a gun pointed at another, "one false move and..." It seems to me that in those situations, doing anything other than standing still or talking provokes a readied action. By your argument, the cop could ready against the suspect running away or pulling a gun but not both.Again, using the example of the police officer with the gun, isn't this, again, standard practice: "If you don't drop the weapon/get down on your knees/back away from the fuse/whatever, I'll shoot."But what if they can inflict enough damage to kill the banshee in one round? According to the rules, readied actions always interrupt the action that sets them off.I recommended the Know (Religion) idea to my friend for understanding the scream to be a standard action at all. Because talking is a free action that can take place during others' initiatives and the scream is not physically distinguishable from it until after the fact, this does seem like a sustainable argument to me. However, it is clear that, because of the way the rules are written that if the scream is recognized the actions go off before it takes place.

As others have said, basically yes to most of these questions. Which are among the 1001 Reasons Why I Hate D&D Rules. That being said, however, even I agree that these bozo's are way out of line! (Hey, I grumble a lot, but I still play!)

 

[ackron]

My players use readied actions a lot as well, but mostly they ready their action for what their allies are planning to do, rather than what the enemies are planning to do. This is the most useful application of the readied action IMO.

For example a fighter and a rogue turn a corner and are attacked by a goblin archer 15 feet away. They lose initiative, and the goblin shoots them. The rogue will move to the other side of the goblin, and ready an action to attack him as soon as the party fighter moves into flanking position. Then, on the fighter's turn, he moves up to the goblin. As soon as he is in flanking position, the rogue's readied action is triggered and he attacks. Then the fighter finishes his turn by attacking the goblin as well. In this case, readied actions allowed both the players to attack with the flanking bonus on the first round of combat, whereas otherwise only one of them would have been able to get the bonus.

Your allies are usually a lot more predictable than your enemies.

 

[Anax]

The division between being in-initiative and being out-of-initiative can be slightly tricky. The first thing is to make sure everybody has the same idea of what it is to be "in-initiative" vs "out-of-initiative". This can vary from group to group, but I think it'll tend to settle on a common idea as time goes on and you try to figure out what's reasonable. (If people aren't interested in being reasonable, the issue is more of a player-DM interaction problem.)

The model my group usually use is this (though we don't have anything codified, this is the way we generally behave.)

1) If the players are wandering around doing things, they are out of initiative. One really good thing to note here is that you cannot (normally) take 10 or take 20 while in combat. So if your rogue is advancing carefully down the corridor, taking 10 on search checks looking for traps, the group is *not* in combat. Not in combat generally implies not in initiative.

That restriction on taking 10 and the like is a good reason (in the meta-game) that players don't stay in initiative all the time. The game model is that the kind of focus you enter while in initiative is stressful. (Hence, you're less certain of your skills, etc.)

2) If an enemy jumps out and attacks, initiative begins. If the PCs weren't aware of the enemy, there may be a surprise round. If the PCs were aware of the enemy, there won't be.

This sometimes leads to confusion over whether people know they're being attacked, and when. Let's say they're facing a wizard in his tower, and discussing with him the possibility of stopping his experiments with were-cows (which are terrifying the villagers.) The wizard decides that he's had enough of arguments, and begins to cast a fireball spell.

The players have no readied actions at this point, but they are ready to be attacked, and are aware of the enemy. The wizard doesn't get a surprise round. But what about the players who come before the wizard in initiative order? The reasonable way to treat this is that they know he is beginning to act (he's begun to drop into a fighting stance, or whipped his staff out, or whatever), but they do not know what action he is going to take. Players who roll higher initiative than the wizard might choose to ready an action at this point, or choose to delay until they see what the wizard does.

We usually make sure we say "the wizard enters initiative" at this point in the game, to avoid revealing exactly what the wizard is going to do. The actions of the characters (ready, delay, immediately leap forward and attack) denote a sort of second-order level of readiness. If the characters think the wizard might just be preparing to flee, for example, they might not immediately leap forward and attack. The more aggressive (and paranoid) folks will tend to attack first and find out that the wizard was going to cast dimension door later. The less aggressive (and trusting) folks will tend to delay to find out that the wizard has, in fact, cast a fireball and set it in their laps.

Of course, the players can also choose, at any time, to enter initiative. And as soon as they do so, everybody else rolls for initiative, and the wizard can tell something is starting to happen. It's much more common on this side for a player to just say "I shoot the wizard", at which point the cat's kind of out of the bag--but the right thing to do is to have all of the other characters be aware that this character is about to do something, but not what.

There *is* also a place for surprise in this kind of circumstance, although it can be hard to adjudicate. If people have let down their guard (on either side), then a sudden action could result in a surprise round taking place. This makes more sense when people aren't expecting trouble in the first place (in a seemingly secure area--perhaps a council chamber, where one of the council members suddenly fires a poisoned bolt with a concealed hand-crossbow and reveals that it is a traitor.)

3) When in overtly hostile territory, of course, surprise and initiative tend to be much easier to adjudicate. The PCs avoid being in initiative because it makes skill checks easier. Both sides will tend to attack from concealment when possible, providing surprise rounds in the typical way.

4) After a fight, there are two ways that initiative can end. The first is that the players can decided to leave initiative--allowing them to take 10 on skill checks again. (For example, only one enemy is left alive, and they want to start making intimidate checks on him, or start tracking the enemy, or the like.)

The second is that the DM gets fed up with their initiative-hungry ways and says "okay, you're not in initiative any more." A DM will probably only do this if all the enemies who are in initiative have left the area in which players can detect them, and the players haven't done anything requiring initiative in a round or two.

Our combats usually finish up with a round or two of "I delay" and "I ready an action to ...", and move actions. This is a good indicator that the action is over, and that staying in initiative has become pointless (except for abusing readied actions.)

Also, if it's a situation where both sides have chosen to start having a conversation, and everybody is spending their rounds talking and delaying, it's perfectly OK to simply declare initiative over. If someone (on either side) later takes aggressive action, rolling for initiative again simply models the fact the ability of everybody to react to the change in circumstances back to hostilities.


I guess I'll note a couple of exceptions to the guidelines above, too. In one of our sessions (one and a half, actually), we were making a lightning raid on an enemy stronghold, through a bolthole in the basement. We knew there was going to be constant fighting, and that the duration of our minute-per-level spells would really really matter. We needed to get in, blitz across the fortress as quickly as we could, and get out, in order to avoid being overwhelmed by enemy troops. For this entire session-and-a-half, we stayed in initiative the whole time, because timekeeping was so important. We loosened up some of the guidelines above (like taking 10) to streamline things--no enemies in sight, taking ten was allowed--no enemies in sight, readying an action was not allowed.)

This worked quite well, but was also pretty stressful. Because we had to do all movement (and even all conversation) in rounds, in order, it was rather difficult to coordinate. And, well, that's as it should be. (In fact, it might not be a bad idea, if you need to impress on players *why* being initiative all the time is troublesome, to set up a scenario like this one. After they've spent player-hours in initiative, they'll begin to yearn for the days when they could act freely.)


The other big exception really requires everybody to have a good understanding of the standard model to be workable: if everybody is interpreting initiative in the same way, *then* it's possible to reasonably start bending the rules in social situations. For example, by allowing Bluff checks and Sleight of Hand checks to create surprise rounds when both sides are fully aware of each other. If everybody is reasonable and understands that this kind of exception is not the normal order of battle, it can be very satisfying to use social skills in this way.


There are also a couple of gotchas. First, the DM has to be somewhat careful about ending initiative by fiat. It can be important to give the players a round or two of uncertainty about whether the fight is over. So, for example, when the wizard dimension doors out, don't immediately end initiative because you know he won't be coming back. The players might want to do something like search hurriedly for clues in the room, in case he does come back, then immediately make a run for it. (On the mirror side of this: if you're in a hurry, you can always end initiative by fiat in this way--explain it in terms of nothing happening for a minute, so initiative ends. It's really all a matter of preference, I suppose.)

And second, non-offensive spell-casting and the like always provides the potential for trouble and misunderstandings. For example, in the wizard scenario above, what if the wizard is going to try to detect the alignment of the party? This is the kind of thing that explains why people will delay until they find out what the enemy casts--or ready an action to counterspell (since that allows the spell to be identified, and a choice of whether to squash it.)



In summary, it all boils down to these ideas (in less-long-winded form!):

* Certain actions cannot be done in initiative.
* Certain other actions can only be done in initiative.
* Players can't choose to enter initiative at will.
* Initiative should end after no combat occurs for a few rounds.
* It's okay to leave initiative and then enter it again later (with a new roll.)
* The DM can declare initiative over at any (reasonable) time.

 

[argo]

Others have covered the "you can't ready an action outside of combat" bit prety well.

The other big mistake your friend appears to be making is the "interrupt" bit. Yes readied actions "interrupt" the action that triggers them. This simply means that the readied action is resolved and its effects applied before the triggering action, it does not mean that the readied action disrupts or stops the triggering action unless the rules say it does (example: the rules say that HP damage distrupts spellcasting) or the readied action itself prevents the character from completing the action (example: grappling a character stops his movement). A character stabbing a banshee with a sword doesn't prevent the banshee from using its wail.

I've never had a problem with readied actions so long as the rules are applied correctly.

 

[Saeviomagy]

1. You can't ready out of combat.
2. You CAN ready for... just about anything. In fact if the DM starts with the "no, you can't ready for 'if they don't surrender/back off' or 'if they take a hostile action'", then players would be well advised to ready for when anyone moves the slightest bit, since you can pass up the opportunity to take your readied action - specifically "Then, any time before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition."

Saying they can't ready an attack "if they don't back away" is trivially handled; the PC just tells the foe "Back off, or else", and then declares that they, "Ready an attack if they do anything but back away" (or "anything but back away or parley", maybe). If the target does nothing, the readied attack doesn't go off; then, since the target chose not to act, the ready PC's next turn comes up, and they then choose to attack (or to re-Ready, maybe).

I don't think the PC needs to do even that. He can just ready for the situation, and if it doesn't occur, he doesn't get his go.

Additionally - I rule that if everyone in a combat is readying or delaying, then COMBAT IS OVER. Which means all readied actions go to nothing, and the first hostile action will again trigger an initiative roll.

In this particular case, with the PCs unable to tell that the scream that was just starting was an attack, and the scream being a Supernatural power (IIRC) and thus not interruptable (as opposed to a spell or SLA),

I don't know where you get this from. SU abilities are every bit as interruptable as a spell or SLA, assuming they actually take an action to perform. Most don't. In any case, a banshee wail is most likely an SLA, and certainly takes a standard action.
The banshee starts wailing, and in some fraction of a second, someone with a readied action realises that this is no ordinary wail, and strikes. And misses, or hits, or whatever the dice say.

All of this is conducive to a style of play which means the characters don't just immediately assault every monster they meet. And I think that's what most DMs would like, isn't it?

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

SU abilities are every bit as interruptable as a spell or SLA

Interuptable: Yes...
Disruptable: Maybe..

A spellcaster specifically must make a concentration check if damaged while casting.
A wailing Banshee does not. However, if the attack in some form silences her, then the Wail gets disrupted.. much as a charge gets disrupted by a succesful Trip.

 

[MichaelH]

I don't know where you get this from. SU abilities are every bit as interruptable as a spell or SLA, assuming they actually take an action to perform. Most don't. In any case, a banshee wail is most likely an SLA, and certainly takes a standard action.

Using a supernatural ability always takes a standard action unless otherwise specified in the description of the ability itself. Among other places, check the last line of the standard action chart in the PHB on page 141. Further, they do not provoke an AoO. Finally, you do not have to make a Concentration check against damage taken or lose the action if it's a supernatural ability. That's spells and spell-like abilities. Check the Concentration skill description for one referance.