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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2582472" data-attributes="member: 7240">Hi guys,A friend of mine has asked me to post his concerns about readied actions to this forum and solicit some reaction. The views expressed below are those of my friend and not necessarily mine. Your feedback would be greatly appreciated.An odd problem came up on the weekend during the game: people seem to be abusing readied actions.  Ironically, of course, it's the same people who habitually complain about the legalism and absurdity of the rules.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.More problematically, though, readied actions are being used to reverse time and get things to happen before other things happened.  For example: the party is currently encountering a banshee.  The banshee (whom they have not yet identified as such) floats through the wall and touches the party bard, doing 3 points of Charisma damage.  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.Anyway, the banshee's next action is to scream, which is her special attack and a supernatural power.  I attempted to rule that the readied action could not have gone off before the scream, because it would be impossible to tell if the scream was an offensive action until it happened (maybe she's just opening her mouth to say "I am not hostile", as they were asking her to indicate).  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.  I believe the language is meant to support things like interrupting a spell, or shooting people as they appear in doorways, not to allow causal paradox: if the scream hasn't taken place, what triggers the readied action - and if the scream is successfully prevented, how did they know it would happen?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.So, do you know of any strategies for preventing this sort of abuse of readied actions?So, advice, suggestions, similar experiences?</blockquote>

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