Rules Lawyers needed!

[knifespeaks]

Ok, background first:
33 yrs old, only ever played first ed advanced (never played second) and just recently started again with 3.0/3.5. (2 first ed campaigns which ran concurrently for almost 12 years and ended about 8 years ago).

Not trying to poke holes in 3.5 - there are plenty of things I like about it! But some inconsistencies that I cannot get my head around.

1. My sunder query from earlier here http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=104232

Still not sure what the difference is! I understand what the feat is trying to achieve - what I don't get is what the difference is between the two actions, namely - blocking an attack with my shield (ie, the attacker missed me) and the opponent specifically attacking my shield! An item saving throw would work just fine, but that kinda destroys the 'usefulness' of the feat, doesn't it?

2. Initiative - ok, the PH outlines the roll d20, add dex bonus to get initiative order. This seems to indicate that, in game, if I get a 19 and you get a 12, I am going first. Flip to the DMG (pg 24 to be exact) and it states that the activity in a round is simultaneous! So why add dex bonus and implement feats such as improved initiative? Either I am going first, or I am not.

3. The biggie How long does a spell take to cast - ie, as a 'standard action', exactly how long is this? This ties in with #2. I don't really get the whole standard/move action breakdown anyway, as if I am going last in a combat round (ie, I have less time out of the 6 seconds to act) then losing initiative is no big deal - I can still do 2 things, the same as the dude who won initiative. If a spell takes, let's say 1 second to cast, then I move - it seems a little unreasonable that I can still do both even though I am going last, doesn't it? (I assume that, feats aside, a spell takes a set amount of time to cast, which the rules aren't clear about)

I am running a 3.5/first ed hybrid, as I just can't reconcile these issues! We also have a few females in the group, and frankly the whole battle grid and miniatures thing just doesn't appeal to them - it's a bit too much of a guy thing for them, which is fair enough. And trying to run 3.5 without it seems like a massive headache.

 

[Pielorinho]

2. Initiative - ok, the PH outlines the roll d20, add dex bonus to get initiative order. This seems to indicate that, in game, if I get a 19 and you get a 12, I am going first. Flip to the DMG (pg 24 to be exact) and it states that the activity in a round is simultaneous! So why add dex bonus and implement feats such as improved initiative? Either I am going first, or I am not.

This is what you get when you combine a game with a simulation: it ain't perfect. The way we tend to think of it is that your initiative turn is when you complete the action you've been doing all round long. Everyone's constantly doing stuff in a combat: if combat were really turn-based, it'd be ridiculous. I'd stand stock-still, waiting my turn while other people ran around the battlefield and hacked at me and stuff, until it was my turn, at which point everyone else would stand still waiting for me to finish what I was doing.

3. The biggie How long does a spell take to cast - ie, as a 'standard action', exactly how long is this? This ties in with #2. I don't really get the whole standard/move action breakdown anyway, as if I am going last in a combat round (ie, I have less time out of the 6 seconds to act) then losing initiative is no big deal - I can still do 2 things, the same as the dude who won initiative. If a spell takes, let's say 1 second to cast, then I move - it seems a little unreasonable that I can still do both even though I am going last, doesn't it? (I assume that, feats aside, a spell takes a set amount of time to cast, which the rules aren't clear about)

The rules are deliberately vague on this. Assume that you spend a lot of your six-second round casting a standard-action spell. IF you want specific second-values, though, try going with:

Standard action: 3.1 seconds.
Move: 2.9 seconds.
MEA: 2.4 seconds.
5' step: 0.5 seconds.
Full action: 5.5 seconds.

This almost gets you there--the one exception is that you're not allowed to take a 5' step on any round in which you take a Move. So you can't go Move, MEA, 5'step, even though that only adds up to 5.8 seconds' worth of activity.

But the system is deliberately vague.

Daniel

 

[Hypersmurf]

This is what you get when you combine a game with a simulation: it ain't perfect.

And trying to assign seconds to actions is asking for even more trouble

I'm sixty feet from the evil sorcerer and his bodyguard.

The sorcerer casts Extended Bull's Strength (full round action) on the bodyguard.

The bodyguard charges me (full round action) and makes a single attack.

I make a full attack (full round action) on him.

Obviously, I couldn't start my full attack before the bodyguard arrived (or there would have been nothing to hit); obviously, the bodyguard couldn't start his charge until after the sorcerer had finished casting his spell (range of touch); therefore the actions must have occurred sequentially.

And yet the round is only six seconds. Three sequential full round actions, in six seconds, means that a full-round action takes, at most, 2 seconds.

... right?

-Hyp.

 

[Pielorinho]

Well, yeah--as I said, it's not perfect at all, and I don't recommend doing it, but if people are having trouble understanding how long actions take, that's one way to think about it, as long as you're willing to put up with some contradictions. Think about any part of the game too carefully, and the house of cards falls apart; I'm not particularly interesting in doing that.

Daniel

 

[Orichin]

several of your questions struck my interest knifespeaks, and while I'm not really 100% positive I can give you suggestions on how I have done (or in the case of your initiative question, will do) to iron out those questions for my own games.
1(sunder)-Hong had it pretty much right when he answered your question in the other thread, a shield (especially wooden ones) is used to deflect blows, not block them. The difference being that if used properly, the shield never forms a perpendicular edge to any incoming attack except arrows (for those quick enough to maneuver a shield to block an arrow-quite difficult), making it more likely for the weapon to be shunted along the surface of the shield rather than biting into it. still, stuff happens, if you wish to add something to the game to compensate, I might recommend a house rule saying something like a natural roll of 3 (arbitrary number) against a shieldbearer that does not hit his armor class requires a fortitude save for the shield, difficulty 15; success indicating that nothing happens out of the ordinary, failure indicating that the weapon has struck the shield squarely and the shield has taken 1 point of damage that bypasses it's hardness rating, but can be repaired by armorsmiths or spells like mend or make whole. I would impliment this rule for both wood and steel shields (steel shields are still only a quarter inch thick, if that, in most places and can be dented or have holes punched through them with spears and axes)

2(initiative)-This one's simple in theory, but requires a somewhat organized group, because it slows the combat down a little. I recommend a bastardization of D20 and whitewolf initiative. roll initiative normally, but have the lowest initiative declare their actions aloud before moving on to the next lowest initiative, continue until the highest initiative rolled calls his action, then begin resolving them in the order of highest to lowest, or all at once as DM sees fit. Thus, the person who rolls the highest initiative gains the benefit of being able to react to what everyone else plans on doing in the round.

3(biggie)-This problem is one I've been faced with on countless occasions since 3.0 came out, and I'm 98% certain that there's no way to fix it. I've tried breaking down various actions into various fractions of a round, or into a length of time measured in seconds, but the way the system is layed out with various types of actions being interchangeable or not is just too abstract to do something like that. As far as...

"if I am going last in a combat round (ie, I have less time out of the 6 seconds to act) then losing initiative is no big deal - I can still do 2 things, the same as the dude who won initiative."
(sorry, not sure how to do that fancy quote stuff, I'll figure it out though)

...You're right, losing initiative is no big deal, because you actually have exactly the same amount of time as the guy who won initiative, if you're counting from your last action to your next action rather than using the arbitrary partition between rounds. the simplest answer to that question is in the book, everyone acts at the same time, thus everyone finishes and starts the next round's actions at the same time.
To throw an idea out that just came to mind, maybe a progressive experience system, where everyone declares the first round's actions as initiative is rolled, but from that point switches over to..say..initiative points, which start at 0 and go up every time you declare an action. different actions would add a different number of points (say if a free action would add 3, move action would add 6, spell takes 3+spell level, etc. until you've assigned values you like to each type of action, maybe different values for different classes or weapons or whatnot, depending on how complicated you want to get in the name of accuracy). After the first round, the DM starts counting up from 1, whenever he gets to a number that is equal to someone's initiative point pool, they can declare another action and add the appropriate points and wait their turn again (solving ties with initiative roll). That might give a more concrete foundation to a combat system, which I think is the problem with the book's action system-it's just too abstract for most people to grasp easily.

I hope I helped, and good luck with your game

 

[Len]

2. Initiative - ok, the PH outlines the roll d20, add dex bonus to get initiative order. This seems to indicate that, in game, if I get a 19 and you get a 12, I am going first. Flip to the DMG (pg 24 to be exact) and it states that the activity in a round is simultaneous! So why add dex bonus and implement feats such as improved initiative? Either I am going first, or I am not.

In the middle of combat it doesn't matter who's "first" - it only matters which order the characters act in.

But in the first round it makes a big difference. Everyone is flat-footed until their first action, so initiative determines whether my rogue's first attack does 1d6 or 5d6.

 

[Lamoni]

Regarding initiative, Rather than focusing on the first round with some people having less time in their round, I only focus on the order. I know that in the rules that it says everything happens simultaneously, but I still think there has to be some sequence to it. Therefore, I think of it like this...

Time Action
0:00 Rogue wins initiative and moves first and attacks.
0:02 Fighter goes next and shoots a few arrows.
0:04 Wizard finally goes and casts wall of fire then moves.
0:06 Rogue just finished with his attack and starts his next action
0:08 Fighter just finished shooting his arrows and starts his next action
0:10 Wizard just finished his move and starts his second action.

This way, everyone is moving and doing things simultaneously, there still is order so having a higher initiative really means you go sooner, and everyone still has 6 second rounds. Of course there can still always be cases where it doesn't work like the example hypersmurf showed. It makes more sense to me to think of it this way rather than having everyone start their first action at time 0:00 If that was the case, delaying your action wouldn't be much of a delay. "I think I want to wait a bit until after my buddy goes so I won't do my action for another 0 seconds."

 

[knifespeaks]

Thanks for the responses folks

To answer my own questions, this is what I have been doing:

1. Sunder - exists, but if an attacker gets exactly one less than needed on the 'to hit' number, (ie, a close shave, but nonetheless a miss) I sometimes roll an old item saving throw from 1st edition DMG. The sometimes is more frequently for wooden/poorly made shields and progressively less frequently for better equipment.

2. Initiative is rolled on a d6, and indicates on which segment you act. So, 6 segments to a round, hence each segment is one second. Spell casters don't roll initiative, they simply state before initiative is rolled what spell they are going to cast. I have re-instituted casting times from the first edition PH.

3. Is solved due to #2.

Bear in mind I am using the bulk of first edition combat rules, so that all works out OK. But some of the feats had to go :\

I was just curious to see if these issues had crept up before, and get some feedback from folks about their solutions.

 

[Spatula]

3(biggie)-This problem is one I've been faced with on countless occasions since 3.0 came out, and I'm 98% certain that there's no way to fix it.

Fix what? I don't understand why this is a problem, and it's never come up in the games I've been in. Initiative is the order that PCs and NPCs act in. Exactly when they act within the round isn't necessary for anything that I can think of.

knifespeaks, if your players aren't enamored with the tactical aspects of combat, I don't see why they'd be interested in keeping track of how long each action takes in such an exact manner.

 

[irdeggman]

1. Sunder - exists, but if an attacker gets exactly one less than needed on the 'to hit' number, (ie, a close shave, but nonetheless a miss) I sometimes roll an old item saving throw from 1st edition DMG. The sometimes is more frequently for wooden/poorly made shields and progressively less frequently for better equipment.

Why? Why not use the hit points and hardness rules of 3.5? They make a lot of sense and you don't have to worry about any sort of saving throw for items. Remember there are only 3 types of saving throws in 3.5 (Fort, Reflex and Will) - a tremndous improvement over the wide range of saving throws from earlier editions.

2. Initiative is rolled on a d6, and indicates on which segment you act. So, 6 segments to a round, hence each segment is one second. Spell casters don't roll initiative, they simply state before initiative is rolled what spell they are going to cast. I have re-instituted casting times from the first edition PH.

This is real similar to the combat system from 2nd ed Player's Option: Combat and Tactics.

The intiative round was divided into phases (Very Fast, Fast, Average, Slow, Very Slow and slower than Very Slow (i.e., last).

Player's rolled a d10 for intiative (1-2 being VF, etc.), all weapons had a weapon speed (in phase terms), all spells had a phase based on casting time IIRC 1-3 segments was VF. The character went in either his initiative roll phase or the phase of his spell or weapon, whichever was slower.

3. Is solved due to #2.

See above for how spells were handled.

Bear in mind I am using the bulk of first edition combat rules, so that all works out OK. But some of the feats had to go

I was just curious to see if these issues had crept up before, and get some feedback from folks about their solutions

No solutions. You either play 1st ed (or 2nd ed rules) or 3.5 rules. They are not compatable systems. Mixing them together will yield a less than acceptable game from a mechanics system since too many things will be changed to allow the advantages of either system to survive.

One of the biggest improvements made in 3.5 (and PO C&T) was to speed up the combat. Instead of taking an hour or more to resolve a combat (I try to forget the countless nights of flipping the segment cards over to figure out who went when in 2nd ed) it is generally much quicker and thus more things can be done in a gaming session than resolve a single combat.