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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zaruthustran" data-source="post: 3875730" data-attributes="member: 1457">No, because there's no "tick" of gametime between the beginning and end of the Fireball spell. Once the [cast fireball] action is initiated, it can't be stopped or interrupted by the Ready action.Think of each action as a line of code in BASIC (or some other programming language). Each action is "executed" by the game in order, one at a time. Once the action is begun, it runs all the way through to the end.See above. From the D&D game engine's point of view, casting and detonation are one and the same. It takes no time for the bead to streak to the target. That is, according to the rules. This is the rules forum, after all. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> Personally, I think an occasional houserule allowing someone to dodge a fireball for cinematic effect would be fun. But there's a separate forum for that discussion. So, you can ready an action to pre-empt the casting. But once the casting has actually begun, the D&D game does not allow the Ready action to interrupt it. You can't "ready to move once the bead starts to move from the wizard's hand" because that specific instant of time does not exist in D&D. You can only ready to preempt the entire action, not just a particular part of an action. *I'm not an expert on the immediate action. The wording is that an immediate action can be performed "at any time -- even if it's not your turn." So by my reading, you could take an immediate while some other creature's action is executing. You could take that action in the non-time between the fireball bead emerging from the wizard's hand and it detonating on target. -z* Interestingly, it seems that you can ready to pre-empt part of a move action. You could ready an action to attack if a creature enters a room, for example. I think the D&D game engine interprets a single 30' move action as a series of six consecutive 5' square moves.  So if someone with a 30' move entered a room that's 10' away, you would attack after the creature moved 10', and then he'd get to complete the other 20' of movement--an example of using Ready to interrupt, as opposed to preempt, an action. But I think movement is definitely an exception to the rule.</blockquote>

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