Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9759691" data-attributes="member: 42582">These are good posts. the D&D rules simply aren't drafted with sufficient precision to support the intricacate readings that some posters/RPGers are attempting.Ready began its life in 3E, as a Standard Action (PHB p 128) that is a "Special Initiative Action" (PHB p 133). It "lets you prepare to take an action later, after your turn is over" - but, "Only partial actions can be readied" (PHB p 134). So you perform an action when you Ready an action; and then you perform an action when you take your readied action.In 4e, Ready is also a Standard Action (Rules Compendium p 247). It lets you read a standard, move or minor action, but "Whichever action is chosen, the act of readying it is a standard action" (RC p 247). When your chosen trigger occurs, you "can use the readied action" - but "Using a readied action is an immediate reaction" (RC p 247). So you perform an action when you Ready an action; you then perform an Immediate Reaction when you take your readied action; but your readied action is also a Standard, Move or Minor action.This is all a bit garbled, in both editions, as a result of the attempt to integrate a system for delayed/responsive actions into a metronomic framework of turns and action economy. In 4e, for instance, the Immediate Reaction bit is there to tell us how to handle the timing of the readied action. But it's not meant to change other rules features of the readied action that might depend on the action's classification. As an example: the Timeless Locket has a Daily power that allows taking a Standard Action as a Minor Action. Suppose that - for whatever reason - a character Readies the use of their Timeless Locket to cast a spell (I know this would be unusual, but there are a lot of baroque effects that can affect a character in 4e, so let's suppose that, for whatever reason, this is a sensible thing for the character's player to choose to do.) They use a Standard Action to ready a Minor Action. When their trigger is satisfied, they can perform an Immediate Reaction but that then involves performing an out-of-turn Minor Action, which further means that they can perform an out-of-turn Standard Action. If, in the circumstances, there are consequences for performing an Immediate Reaction, the character suffers those. If there are consequences for performing a Minor Action, the character is subject to those too (eg maybe they have an ability that lets them spend a Healing Surge as a free action when they perform a Minor Action). If there are consequences for performing a Standard Action, the character is subject to those too.I haven't worked out the best way to describe all this, but one thing that is clear is that, when a 4e PC performs an action, it might fall under multiple classifications - here the Immediate Reaction is a Minor Action, and that Minor Action is the performance of a Standard Action. (Another way this can come up: if a character is dazed, and so limited to one action, they can still use their Timeless Locket to perform a Standard Action as a Minor Action - that does not count as two actions, but rather as one action that is classified as Minor for the rationing purposes of the action economy, but as Standard for the power/potentiality purposes of the action economy.)I don't know 5e D&D all that well (either 2014 or 2024), but looking at both versions on D&D beyond there is the same sot of garbled wording:You take the Ready action to wait for a particular circumstance before you act. To do so, you take this action on your turn, which lets you act by taking a Reaction before the start of your next turn. First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your Reaction. Then, you choose the action you will take in response to that trigger, or you choose to move up to your Speed in response to it. Examples include “If the cultist steps on the trapdoor, I’ll pull the lever that opens it,” and “If the zombie steps next to me, I move away.” When the trigger occurs, you can either take your Reaction right after the trigger finishes or ignore the trigger.The first paragraph says that you take the Readied action on your turn. The second paragraph says that you take an "action" (or movement) in response to your chosen trigger. The third paragraph says that when the trigger occurs you take your reaction. So the thing you do, in response to the trigger, is both a reaction and an action (or movement). So once again we have an action falling under multiple labels - it is both a reaction (analogous to the 4e Immediate Reaction) and an action (as in 4e).When it comes to spells, it is even more baroque - but the idea that casting a typical spell ceases to be a Magic action and becomes some other type of action simply because of the metagame framework of turn-taking and action economy is a bit weird. Though the Action Surge rule also seems to be about that metagame framework as much as anything else!So it's all a bit of a mess. But it seems like the most straightforward ruling is that Action Surge is meant for fighter-y things rather than caster-y things, that it expresses that by excluding the Magic Action, and hence that readying a spell, or the use of a device that is normally triggered by using the Magic Action, is out of bounds.</blockquote>

Verification