And if surprise doesn't give a significant advantage, is it worth tracking to begin with?
Surprise can give a significant advantage without being "turn hard fight into a cakewalk or unavoidable TPK". Winning initiative is more than sufficient.
And if surprise doesn't give a significant advantage, is it worth tracking to begin with?
Surprise can give a significant advantage without being "turn hard fight into a cakewalk or unavoidable TPK". Winning initiative is more than sufficient.
How? If both sides are just clumped up in turn order, it maybe makes the fight marginally easier on the PCs if they were the winners but also imo reduces the sense of various players reacting to events if everyone is more or less moving at once- that's part of the reason enemies built to fight solo typically have Legendary Actions and at one point Lair Actions to help break up the turns.
In my experience, unless you're a full caster with a control spell the board is set up to favor, winning initiative is a boondoggle rather than an actual accomplishment or edge. And the PCs winning a fight should be considered to be a given most of the time, so them winning the fight a little faster because they managed to pull off an effective ambush is not a flaw, that's the combat system working as designed.
Agreed. With the boons of Dex, players often invest in it at least a bit and so, in my experience, it's fairly consistent that all but one or two players beat the monsters just on normal Initiative rules. Having one player, maybe two, get to go ahead of the monsters when they otherwise wouldn't isn't really that big of a reward for engaging with the game and thinking about things. Especially when you consider that almost half the time, a player's attack is likely to miss.
If I had the choice between 2024e Surprise rules or not bothering to have Suprise be a thing, I just wouldn't bother. Just RP it - it's not worth the hassle of doing the stealth checks. Initiative already slows things down too much. I'm open to watering down 2014e rules a bit (perhaps giving them the ability to move), but merely reshuffling Initiative makes it too inconsequential to be adding those rolls and rule negotiations.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I think the problem comes in when half the party ends up getting TWO turns before they enemy gets to take an action at all. That definitely turned some fights that should have been epic and memorable into something where I'm scrounging as the DM to make it seem like a fight at all. Sure, I could have just gone with enemies always having an Alarm spell or something active, but eventually PCs would just give up on stealth altogether then. So, yes, I feel the 2014 rules were too lopsided, but I definitely don't feel they "fixed" it with 2024 ones.
In my experience, unless you're a full caster with a control spell the board is set up to favor, winning initiative is a boondoggle rather than an actual accomplishment or edge. And the PCs winning a fight should be considered to be a given most of the time, so them winning the fight a little faster because they managed to pull off an effective ambush is not a flaw, that's the combat system working as designed.
If winning initiative is a disadvantage, you built your character wrong. And going twice before the monsters go once isn't "winning the fight a little faster", for an average encounter it's "winning the fight before the monsters do anything at all" and for a fight that would otherwise be hard enough to worry the PCs it becomes faceroll easy.
I already posted my house rules on this. They're a lot simpler to use (no roll stealth to figure out if you had surprise, then roll initiative, it's all a single roll), avoid weird outcomes, and give a reasonable but not overwhelming advantage.
Generally speaking PCs aren't going to be wiped out by one extra round of enemy action unless this was a seriously high difficulty encounter, and if the party manages to pull off a successful ambush they should get a notable payoff.
1) See above, it's still "notable."
2) An extra round for the whole enemy team without even reactions to fall back on is the equivalent of a no-save party-wide stun effect. That may not wipe the players out on its own (though it certainly can), but it can put them at such a disadvantage that they burn through far more resources recovering from it than they would have in the 2024 version. There's no reason for Surprise to be that swingy.
What I meant by winning imitative being a disadvantage is if you're going off the 2024 rules, and you don't know your attacker is even there, and you somehow still win initiative despite it being disadvantaged, you end up going first but having no idea what to attack or why you even had to roll. If you roll a low roll, you'll likely at least get to go after an attacker's actions, so at least you can target something.
And I like your rules and plan to adopt them myself, but until they're officially accepted and published in an errata, I think it's still worth talking about ideas on the subject.
Surprise can give a significant advantage without being "turn hard fight into a cakewalk or unavoidable TPK". Winning initiative is more than sufficient.
How? If both sides are just clumped up in turn order, it maybe makes the fight marginally easier on the PCs if they were the winners but also imo reduces the sense of various players reacting to events if everyone is more or less moving at once- that's part of the reason enemies built to fight solo typically have Legendary Actions and at one point Lair Actions to help break up the turns.
In my experience, unless you're a full caster with a control spell the board is set up to favor, winning initiative is a boondoggle rather than an actual accomplishment or edge. And the PCs winning a fight should be considered to be a given most of the time, so them winning the fight a little faster because they managed to pull off an effective ambush is not a flaw, that's the combat system working as designed.
Agreed. With the boons of Dex, players often invest in it at least a bit and so, in my experience, it's fairly consistent that all but one or two players beat the monsters just on normal Initiative rules. Having one player, maybe two, get to go ahead of the monsters when they otherwise wouldn't isn't really that big of a reward for engaging with the game and thinking about things. Especially when you consider that almost half the time, a player's attack is likely to miss.
If I had the choice between 2024e Surprise rules or not bothering to have Suprise be a thing, I just wouldn't bother. Just RP it - it's not worth the hassle of doing the stealth checks. Initiative already slows things down too much. I'm open to watering down 2014e rules a bit (perhaps giving them the ability to move), but merely reshuffling Initiative makes it too inconsequential to be adding those rolls and rule negotiations.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I think the problem comes in when half the party ends up getting TWO turns before they enemy gets to take an action at all. That definitely turned some fights that should have been epic and memorable into something where I'm scrounging as the DM to make it seem like a fight at all. Sure, I could have just gone with enemies always having an Alarm spell or something active, but eventually PCs would just give up on stealth altogether then. So, yes, I feel the 2014 rules were too lopsided, but I definitely don't feel they "fixed" it with 2024 ones.
If winning initiative is a disadvantage, you built your character wrong. And going twice before the monsters go once isn't "winning the fight a little faster", for an average encounter it's "winning the fight before the monsters do anything at all" and for a fight that would otherwise be hard enough to worry the PCs it becomes faceroll easy.
I already posted my house rules on this. They're a lot simpler to use (no roll stealth to figure out if you had surprise, then roll initiative, it's all a single roll), avoid weird outcomes, and give a reasonable but not overwhelming advantage.
Disadvantage on Initiative is still significant, it just doesn't warp entire encounters around it anymore.
1) See above, it's still "notable."
2) An extra round for the whole enemy team without even reactions to fall back on is the equivalent of a no-save party-wide stun effect. That may not wipe the players out on its own (though it certainly can), but it can put them at such a disadvantage that they burn through far more resources recovering from it than they would have in the 2024 version. There's no reason for Surprise to be that swingy.
@Pantagruel666:
What I meant by winning imitative being a disadvantage is if you're going off the 2024 rules, and you don't know your attacker is even there, and you somehow still win initiative despite it being disadvantaged, you end up going first but having no idea what to attack or why you even had to roll. If you roll a low roll, you'll likely at least get to go after an attacker's actions, so at least you can target something.
And I like your rules and plan to adopt them myself, but until they're officially accepted and published in an errata, I think it's still worth talking about ideas on the subject.