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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 6679162" data-attributes="member: 6787503">Hi. Thanks for asking. The short answer is yes, in my game surprise is "use it or lose it." Once surprise has been determined at the start of the encounter it can't be extended into subsequent rounds by holding off the attack.The way I'd handle the situation above, just for clarity, is this:Before the encounter, the party has told me they are moving slowly and stealthily toward the location. I have decided conditions allow them to hide when they arrive, so when they come within encounter distance of their opponents, I ask them for stealth checks. If they are successful then their opponents are surprised. Assuming their opponents are not also trying to conceal themselves, I tell the party about the presence of their opponents, how many, how far, and in what direction. I do not tell the party, however, whether their opponents have noticed them, so the players don't yet know if they have surprised their opponents or not. Of course, they do know what their die rolls were, which should give them some indication as to their success, and I also don't describe the opponents as having noticed them, but they don't know for sure that they are hidden.Then I ask everyone to roll initiative, and I roll initiative for the opponents. Once initiative order has been established, we proceed to round one. I ask the players what they want to do. If they attack it will be with surprise, and I will describe their opponents as being caught off guard, taking reactions when appropriate, but not attacking or making any significant movements.If they decide to not attack, for whatever reason, they can do whatever they'd like to with their turns, and as long as they don't make a bunch of noise or reveal themselves in some way, they will remain hidden into round two. I will describe their opponents as doing pretty much nothing, having conversations or performing whatever mundane tasks they were doing when the party arrived. Keep in mind, though, that my players know they can only surprise in this round, so the decision to not attack isn't taken lightly if that is what they are trying to do.If for some reason the players wait until round two to attack, which hasn't actually come up for us to tell the truth, then the party's opponents would not be surprised and would get to react to the attack normally, with full actions and movement on their initiative. If one of the opponents happens to have a higher initiative than the player that makes the initial attack, however, then that character would be "initiative purged", the idea being that he had already devoted his action on that turn to whatever he was doing before the attack. So there could be some strategy to delaying a second round attack until later in the initiative order, but like I said, it really hasn't come up for my group.  To help make some narrative sense of this I can provide a quote from Prussian general and military theorist, Carl von Clausewitz.The idea is that if you wait too long you lose the element of surprise, but how long is that? In the case of D&D, the time-limit is built in. Surprise only happens in the first round.To understand this from the perspective of the surprised opponents, you have to ask what surprise actually is. I would say that narratively being surprised is not being unable to act or move when you want to. To me that makes no narrative sense. To me it seems that surprise is being a little behind because your attacker got a head start on you. They know they're in an encounter and you don't. The game imposes a mechanical advantage to simulate this fiction. You can act and they can't, but only for their first turn.So, from the gamist perspective now, having surprise gives you a one-turn head start against your opponents. You can choose to do whatever you want with that head start. If you choose not to attack, that doesn't mean you didn't get the head start. Your opponents were still unable to do anything with their turns. If you make that choice it would probably be for a very good reason, like taking a turn to get buffed before the fight, or moving into a position that would give you advantage for the entire fight, or escaping with your life if you deem your opponents are too strong now that you've had a look at them. So you're still getting something for having surprised your opponents. I don't believe that delaying the attack should give you endless rounds of your opponents doing nothing. That would break the fiction in another way. You could set a limit on how long a stealth check was good for, but to me that's just messy unless there's a fictional reason like your opponents have set a watch that comes around periodically, forcing the fiction to conform to a rather gamist agenda that doesn't really work for a lot of situations. Since we have a defined benefit for surprising your opponents, then (one free round of movement and action), I like to put the choice in front of my players right at the start of combat. Either use it to attack, or  to get a head start in some other way.</blockquote>

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