The initiating action (whether it's a spell, a missile attack, a thrown pot of Alchemist's Fire, the blowing of a war horn etc) takes place. Combat has not begun, so this has no place in the initiative order at present (because there isn't one).
Roll initiative for all combatants.
Run a surprise round. Not all enemies may be surprised (for example, one of them may have the Alert feat).
If the initiating action was a Free Action or an Interact with Object action then, play through initiative as normal (e.g. it involved screaming "Attack!" or kicking down a door) . If the initiating action would have used an Action or a Bonus Action, the player who performed the initiating action is skipped during the surprise round.
Continue the combat in ordinary initiative order
The initiating player has to get skipped, otherwise it's entirely possible to cast Disintegrate, Immolation and then Lightning Bolt before an enemy gets a chance to take their turn, and remember - if the PCs can do it, the NPCs and monsters can too.
Clarification of the rule: there is no such thing called “surprise round”. There is only “surprised condition” (it's not an official condition because it can only happen in the first round, but mechanically I think they are similar).
What happens is that if two parties enter a combat and one party is being sneaky, role stealth check (could be individual or group check) against each creature’s passive perception in the other party. For each creature in the other party whose passive perception isn’t enough to perceive any stealthy foe, it gains “surprised” kinda-condition before the end of its first turn.
I've dealt with this situation as both a DM and as a player, both as an player setting an ambush and someone being ambushed by enemies. I've also played it both ways (the way OP played it and rules as written/RAW). Both have their benefits....
Benefits of the way OP played it:
Allows the low initiative roller to actually trigger combat for once. This is probably the biggest benefit of this method. The only way to mimic this in the other method is to have higher-initiative individuals use Readied actions to achieve a similar effect (though they wouldn't get to use their full turn).
Speed. It's much quicker to get into combat. 1 player does a thing, which kicks off combat, and THEN everyone rolls for initiative. Nothing prevents you from allowing the player to take a full turn (action + bonus action + movement), but I like to think that moving 30ft and getting that extra time to do a bonus action tends to have a chance to give away the ambush. If they are doing all of that, I typically have them roll another stealth check.
It's also just easier to imagine the entire party being ambushed. (You avoid individual Perception rolls for each person being surprised.)
I usually rule that there are no readied actions allowed with this method. Usually, the party will start discussing these grand plans of Readied actions and a chain of events that might play out... and I gently remind them that the same fate could happen against them -- or I just flat out rule against it, since we are already breaking the Rules as written. Everyone will get to take a full turn next round anyways.
Benefits of RAW/by the book:
Allows for some party members to be surprised, while others aren't. If one person succeeds on their Perception check, they get to act in response during the ambush, while the rest just get ambushed. Remember, when you are surprised you get no actions, no movement, and no reactions during that time.
Allows for multiple ambushing players to attack during the first round. However, I would also require each individual who is ambushing to make a Stealth check. The more people making Stealth checks, the higher the chances are that someone rolls low. And one low roll could ruin the entire ambush for the rest of the party.
Allows for the ambusher(s) to use their full turn. This opens up some really interesting possibilities, if you start to imagine a stealthy Fighter getting into position and unleashing Action Surge. Keep in mind that they will have to go in initiative order, so some higher-initiative players may have to skip their turn or Ready an action, if waiting on a lower-initiative player to trigger the effect.
This is exactly how I run this myself, as an example last session party arrived at the doorway to a room, all stealth checks had been high, the occupants had no idea they where there so I allowed the party to decide the order they did things in, who went through the door first etc. we then played out the first round in that order. Then I had them all roll initiative, in that case the bad guys rolled really high but that worked, they had been surprised but then reacted really quickly to the situation.
Would you run it the same way when monsters ambush the party?
If you would, what would be your response to the players complaining that the monsters all got to have two (or three, depending on surprise) turns before players got their first?
If the party has a plan the want to do, then I toss out the surprise rule, and instead let 1 player have 1 action to kick things off in place of the surprise mechanics.
This tends to speed up combat instead of the official rules where you have to compare stealth roles vs passive perception, and remember who is being skipped over.
If the party has a plan the want to do, then I toss out the surprise rule, and instead let 1 player have 1 action to kick things off in place of the surprise mechanics.
This tends to speed up combat instead of the official rules where you have to compare stealth roles vs passive perception, and remember who is being skipped over.
I kind of like this idea... it's an interesting challenge for the party, where they have to decide whether it's more beneficial to pull off one very specific move, or take advantage of surprise for one round
I just wanted to say I really appreciate the different takes and that people have taken the time to help me out with different ways to approach the situation. It has given me quite a bit to think about and new things to chat about with my players.
This is exactly how I run this myself, as an example last session party arrived at the doorway to a room, all stealth checks had been high, the occupants had no idea they where there so I allowed the party to decide the order they did things in, who went through the door first etc. we then played out the first round in that order. Then I had them all roll initiative, in that case the bad guys rolled really high but that worked, they had been surprised but then reacted really quickly to the situation.
Would you run it the same way when monsters ambush the party?
If you would, what would be your response to the players complaining that the monsters all got to have two (or three, depending on surprise) turns before players got their first?
I do and I have, for instance the party entered a room which had 3 poltergeists in it, as they are invisible the party had no idea they where there.
Poltergeists attacked the party, then we all rolled initiative.
Same happened with a wilo wisp attack, in this case only 1 wilo wisp actually got the surprise attack because it appeared next to a player the rest where all more than 5 feet away so went in normal initiative order.
The monsters will never get more than 2 turns, the attack happens and then we are into normal combat.
Taking the above situation if the party had not made the stealth checks then I would have allowed the player to kick the door open, and then rolled initiative before anyone moved or did anything, that "action" of kicking the door all that was allowed to happen.
I just wrote this houserule for this sort of thing, wonder how it looks to everyone!
It's called "Get behind me".
The players can nominate one player to take the lead in an attack. When the initiative is rolled, any players who roll higher than the nominated player reduce their initiative to 1 below that of the nominated player. If two or more players roll higher, they reduce their initiative to 1 below, 2 below and so forth to maintain the order rolled. If this initiative is shared by another player who rolled it, then that player is moved down 1 in the initiative.
So let's say 3 players, A B and C, face off against enemies 1, 2 and 3.
They are reliant on player A going first, so when they roll they ask if player A can go first, and I'll say yes - anyone who is higher initiative than player A has their initiative reduced so that they are below that of player A, but still in the same order that they were before. So if they rolled:
A: 5 B: 18 C:12
Then they can be adjusted to: A: 5 B: 4 C: 3
Now add the enemies in, who won't be doing so:
1: 17 3: 11 2: 7 A: 5 B: 4 C: 3
And you can see that they could have used their natural initiative to be faster than the enemies, but instead are following a plan. now the surprise round plays out, the enemies do nothing and the players pull off their ambush. Then the next round happens, after surprise, and the enemies all act. The result is that the combat takes place starting with the player they wanted to use, at a cost of the initiative. If there had been a fourth player who rolled 4 for initiative, they would have been shunted down to initiative 2 by the rule.
I'd only ever let it be done when they have time to plan the attack - stumbling upon enemies would stick to initiatives rolled!
Every single suggestion I have seen, including my own, has had the "virtue" of allowing ambushes to happen more easily. This is certainly a benefit to all player characters, it will allow for more tactical play and reward the use of abilities in combination that might not have been possible otherwise. That's really fantastic. Until you consider the cost. If you let the the monsters do this, they have the same fantastic advantage over the players. If you do not, you have made the challenge rating system even less reliable than it was. Have you noticed any complaints about the challenge rating system? I know I have.
Every single suggestion I have seen, including my own, has had the "virtue" of allowing ambushes to happen more easily. This is certainly a benefit to all player characters, it will allow for more tactical play and reward the use of abilities in combination that might not have been possible otherwise. That's really fantastic. Until you consider the cost. If you let the the monsters do this, they have the same fantastic advantage over the players. If you do not, you have made the challenge rating system even less reliable than it was. Have you noticed any complaints about the challenge rating system? I know I have.
I think that my suggestion offers a decent compromise for this, whichever way it goes. If the monsters want to bunch their initiatives up at the low end of the scale, they can fight in the order they want but sacrifice the most important part of the surprise to do so. How effective the ambush is relies on how well your leading character rolls on initiative, which is no different from now!
It also only applies to planned ambushes - usually necessitating scouting, returning, planning, and then attacking. I wouldn't let them do it on the fly!
If an ambush is planned at my table, one person is designated to set it off. That person does not roll initiative, they just go first. Then everyone else rolls initiative and the amusher is put at the top of the order but their turn has just ended. It plays out just like Thoruk's except you don't have a weird situation where the enemies have rolled initiative but don't know anything is happening and thus do nothing.
This might be more generous than the default RAW, but nearly every DM I've seen across multiple editions would play out an ambush by starting with an attack that then triggers initiative. That's typically how people seem to play it when they are just trying to simulate an ambush rather than reading through the absolutely unintuitive rules on the subject. This is still a downgrade from that, and to me seems the best compromise between fairness and common sense.
If an ambush is planned at my table, one person is designated to set it off. That person does not roll initiative, they just go first. Then everyone else rolls initiative and the amusher is put at the top of the order but their turn has just ended. It plays out just like Thoruk's except you don't have a weird situation where the enemies have rolled initiative but don't know anything is happening and thus do nothing.
This might be more generous than the default RAW, but nearly every DM I've seen across multiple editions would play out an ambush by starting with an attack that then triggers initiative. That's typically how people seem to play it when they are just trying to simulate an ambush rather than reading through the absolutely unintuitive rules on the subject. This is still a downgrade from that, and to me seems the best compromise between fairness and common sense.
I don’t know - the rules as written seem to provide a very simple, easy to follow rule set for ambush tactics? Why does giving one person the ability to set off an ambush and giving them an attack out of combat fix anything? What situation could possibly be ruined by using existing rules?
As much as I prefer to leave the rules as they stand, I do understand what the problem is, and why it's such a big deal. So I'm arguing against myself here in the short term.
The most clear example is with the Assassin subclass of Rogue. They have an ability called "Assassinate". This gives them two things; Advantage on any attack on anyone who hasn't taken a turn yet, and the ability to automatically crit if they hit. This is pretty much the only reason anyone takes an Assassin as their subclass, so they want to Assassinate as many people as they can.
So imagine they are in a dark alley, waiting to strike. Their target walks into the alley, fails their Passive Perception check, and walks on by. The moment is perfect, the Assassin tells the DM that they are going to strike... And the DM says "Roll for Initiative." The player says "What? Wait a minute, why?" Now the DM has to explain things. Combat goes in a very specific order. Once the attack has been declared the DM figures out where everyone is, checks to see if anyone is trying to Hide, and if so are they spotted, and those things have already been done, then Initiative is rolled.
"Ok fine" says the player, my Initiative is... (rolls d20) 12, total of 15. The DM says, ok, your target is just standing there, roll to hit. The best of the two rolls to hit comes up as an 16, adjusted up to 19, and their target isn't wearing any armor, so in their excitement, the player rolls a whole bunch of dice since they are certain they got a crit, they proudly announce their damage...
And the DM says "The moment you try to attack, the guy barks out some strange sounding words and makes a little gesture, your dagger bounces off something you can't see. You missed. That's the end of the turn. Now the guy blasts you with a spell on his Initiative..."
The same thing applies to any ambush. If things depend on someone going first, there isn't any legal by the rules way to assure that it happens. I personally think that's just fine, because anything that players can do, monsters can do, and as a DM I use a lot of ambushes. If an Assassin fails to Assassinate their target every time, if an ambush goes wrong because it was based around someone casting Spike Growth, that's a pretty good simulation of how combat works in reality. Very few plans survive contact with the enemy. Plain old Dumb Luck and Murphy's Law are against anything ever coming out as planned, and if the stars should align and everything really does go at planned, that's a glorious moment the players should be overjoyed to see happen, not "Ok. I use <neato ability>, I go first" Yawn. It may or may not be a big deal, the DM can always work around it, but if the DM is having to do extra work for something that's really less fun in the end, why bother?
“The same thing applies to any ambush. If things depend on someone going first, there isn't any legal by the rules way to assure that it happens. I personally think that's just fine, because anything that players can do, monsters can do, and as a DM I use a lot of ambushes. If an Assassin fails to Assassinate their target every time, if an ambush goes wrong because it was based around someone casting Spike Growth, that's a pretty good simulation of how combat works in reality. Very few plans survive contact with the enemy. Plain old Dumb Luck and Murphy's Law are against anything ever coming out as planned, and if the stars should align and everything really does go at planned, that's a glorious moment the players should be overjoyed to see happen, not "Ok. I use <neato ability>, I go first" Yawn. It may or may not be a big deal, the DM can always work around it, but if the DM is having to do extra work for something that's really less fun in the end, why bother?”
I agree with this whole paragraph. If that Assassin wants more auto crits, they better get their initiative score higher, or rely on some “advantage on initiative” feats if they want to strike first in the initiative order. I’ve never DMed a game where my first reaction was “how do I ensure my players always get to do that thing that they always want to do, repeatedly”.
I control the environment and monsters and they follow the same general rules as the PCs. If I set ambushes, will my players think it’s fair that a group of 4 CR8 Assassin baddies does 10d6 damage x 4 (total 40d6 = Average 140 damage), regardless of how fast the PCs react? No.
…they better get their initiative score higher, or rely on some “advantage on initiative” feats if they want to strike first in the initiative order.
And to all those players who say "why would I cast bless?" and "guidance is a waste of a cantrip" and "bardic inspiration is pointless"; point this out and yell THIS! THIS IS WHY THOSE THINGS EXIST!!!!
(Sorry for yelling, but my players have all said all of these things in the past year and a half)
Yes, I know bless doesn't help ability score rolls but I'm lumping it together with that I like to call "metadata features"; in-game things that attect at-the-table things. Things my players all feel have no value.
I've considered trying out two ways of dealing with this. For the first, everyone rolls initiative, then the players can reassign those rolls however they want. This allows them to decide who gets to go in what order, but someone is still getting stuck with the low rolls.
The second is letting people delay their entire turn, moving them back in the initiative order for all subsequent turns. The downside of this is that it requires some fiddling with spell durations and such, haven't figured out exact wording but the idea is to minimize the difference in effect from shifting turn order.
While I agree that allowing ambushes to go off too easily is not the greatest idea. The rules by the book have "too many moving parts", the more special circumstances required, the harder the success of any plan becomes. The game creator's claim they want to provide a cinematic experience with a minimum of rule inefficiency. I feel the Surprise rules fall flat on this goal. Even looking to real life battles, ambushes have been one of the most successful tactics ever employed so, they must be reasonably feasible. If one side or another gets totally wiped out by a surprise round, maybe you aren't planning encounters very pragmatically. This is really not much different than if one side rolled higher initiative on a whole and acted with rolling crit damage by sheer luck, and that happens quite a lot in my experience.
In life, even the most simple ambush can go wrong. It's just how life works. If you want a reasonably accurate depiction of life, there has to be a risk. A DM can sort things however they like, but just giving away something that should be earned is rarely a good idea. There is no feeling of victory if you just get given something. That's the whole problem with "everybody wins" deals. If there is no chance to lose, there is no chance to win either.
I've commented about how I don't set out to kill characters, and that I don't have monsters focus on characters that are down. I hold to that. Does that mean I don't require death checks? No. I let things happen. I just don't *push*.
People want to make ambushes easier. Next, people want to stop having to roll to hit. If their enemy didn't see them coming, why should they need to? It's not like the enemy can avoid something they don't know is happening, and you have made it so they know they are going to hit first. Then they don't want to roll for damage either, because if their ambush is perfect and unavoidable, then it should do maximum damage should it not?
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This is how I play it:
The initiating player has to get skipped, otherwise it's entirely possible to cast Disintegrate, Immolation and then Lightning Bolt before an enemy gets a chance to take their turn, and remember - if the PCs can do it, the NPCs and monsters can too.
This is a video I used to base m ruling for a surprise works as well as how initiative order played into it. It's worth a view.
Note: I played it at x2 speed and could follow along just fine.
Clarification of the rule: there is no such thing called “surprise round”. There is only “surprised condition” (it's not an official condition because it can only happen in the first round, but mechanically I think they are similar).
What happens is that if two parties enter a combat and one party is being sneaky, role stealth check (could be individual or group check) against each creature’s passive perception in the other party. For each creature in the other party whose passive perception isn’t enough to perceive any stealthy foe, it gains “surprised” kinda-condition before the end of its first turn.
I've dealt with this situation as both a DM and as a player, both as an player setting an ambush and someone being ambushed by enemies. I've also played it both ways (the way OP played it and rules as written/RAW). Both have their benefits....
Benefits of the way OP played it:
Benefits of RAW/by the book:
Would you run it the same way when monsters ambush the party?
If you would, what would be your response to the players complaining that the monsters all got to have two (or three, depending on surprise) turns before players got their first?
If the party has a plan the want to do, then I toss out the surprise rule, and instead let 1 player have 1 action to kick things off in place of the surprise mechanics.
This tends to speed up combat instead of the official rules where you have to compare stealth roles vs passive perception, and remember who is being skipped over.
I kind of like this idea... it's an interesting challenge for the party, where they have to decide whether it's more beneficial to pull off one very specific move, or take advantage of surprise for one round
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Hey all,
I just wanted to say I really appreciate the different takes and that people have taken the time to help me out with different ways to approach the situation. It has given me quite a bit to think about and new things to chat about with my players.
Thank you all!
I do and I have, for instance the party entered a room which had 3 poltergeists in it, as they are invisible the party had no idea they where there.
Poltergeists attacked the party, then we all rolled initiative.
Same happened with a wilo wisp attack, in this case only 1 wilo wisp actually got the surprise attack because it appeared next to a player the rest where all more than 5 feet away so went in normal initiative order.
The monsters will never get more than 2 turns, the attack happens and then we are into normal combat.
Taking the above situation if the party had not made the stealth checks then I would have allowed the player to kick the door open, and then rolled initiative before anyone moved or did anything, that "action" of kicking the door all that was allowed to happen.
I just wrote this houserule for this sort of thing, wonder how it looks to everyone!
It's called "Get behind me".
The players can nominate one player to take the lead in an attack. When the initiative is rolled, any players who roll higher than the nominated player reduce their initiative to 1 below that of the nominated player. If two or more players roll higher, they reduce their initiative to 1 below, 2 below and so forth to maintain the order rolled. If this initiative is shared by another player who rolled it, then that player is moved down 1 in the initiative.
So let's say 3 players, A B and C, face off against enemies 1, 2 and 3.
They are reliant on player A going first, so when they roll they ask if player A can go first, and I'll say yes - anyone who is higher initiative than player A has their initiative reduced so that they are below that of player A, but still in the same order that they were before. So if they rolled:
A: 5
B: 18
C:12
Then they can be adjusted to:
A: 5
B: 4
C: 3
Now add the enemies in, who won't be doing so:
1: 17
3: 11
2: 7
A: 5
B: 4
C: 3
And you can see that they could have used their natural initiative to be faster than the enemies, but instead are following a plan. now the surprise round plays out, the enemies do nothing and the players pull off their ambush. Then the next round happens, after surprise, and the enemies all act. The result is that the combat takes place starting with the player they wanted to use, at a cost of the initiative. If there had been a fourth player who rolled 4 for initiative, they would have been shunted down to initiative 2 by the rule.
I'd only ever let it be done when they have time to plan the attack - stumbling upon enemies would stick to initiatives rolled!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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Every single suggestion I have seen, including my own, has had the "virtue" of allowing ambushes to happen more easily. This is certainly a benefit to all player characters, it will allow for more tactical play and reward the use of abilities in combination that might not have been possible otherwise. That's really fantastic. Until you consider the cost. If you let the the monsters do this, they have the same fantastic advantage over the players. If you do not, you have made the challenge rating system even less reliable than it was. Have you noticed any complaints about the challenge rating system? I know I have.
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I think that my suggestion offers a decent compromise for this, whichever way it goes. If the monsters want to bunch their initiatives up at the low end of the scale, they can fight in the order they want but sacrifice the most important part of the surprise to do so. How effective the ambush is relies on how well your leading character rolls on initiative, which is no different from now!
It also only applies to planned ambushes - usually necessitating scouting, returning, planning, and then attacking. I wouldn't let them do it on the fly!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
If an ambush is planned at my table, one person is designated to set it off. That person does not roll initiative, they just go first. Then everyone else rolls initiative and the amusher is put at the top of the order but their turn has just ended. It plays out just like Thoruk's except you don't have a weird situation where the enemies have rolled initiative but don't know anything is happening and thus do nothing.
This might be more generous than the default RAW, but nearly every DM I've seen across multiple editions would play out an ambush by starting with an attack that then triggers initiative. That's typically how people seem to play it when they are just trying to simulate an ambush rather than reading through the absolutely unintuitive rules on the subject. This is still a downgrade from that, and to me seems the best compromise between fairness and common sense.
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(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I don’t know - the rules as written seem to provide a very simple, easy to follow rule set for ambush tactics? Why does giving one person the ability to set off an ambush and giving them an attack out of combat fix anything? What situation could possibly be ruined by using existing rules?
As much as I prefer to leave the rules as they stand, I do understand what the problem is, and why it's such a big deal. So I'm arguing against myself here in the short term.
The most clear example is with the Assassin subclass of Rogue. They have an ability called "Assassinate". This gives them two things; Advantage on any attack on anyone who hasn't taken a turn yet, and the ability to automatically crit if they hit. This is pretty much the only reason anyone takes an Assassin as their subclass, so they want to Assassinate as many people as they can.
So imagine they are in a dark alley, waiting to strike. Their target walks into the alley, fails their Passive Perception check, and walks on by. The moment is perfect, the Assassin tells the DM that they are going to strike... And the DM says "Roll for Initiative." The player says "What? Wait a minute, why?" Now the DM has to explain things. Combat goes in a very specific order. Once the attack has been declared the DM figures out where everyone is, checks to see if anyone is trying to Hide, and if so are they spotted, and those things have already been done, then Initiative is rolled.
"Ok fine" says the player, my Initiative is... (rolls d20) 12, total of 15. The DM says, ok, your target is just standing there, roll to hit. The best of the two rolls to hit comes up as an 16, adjusted up to 19, and their target isn't wearing any armor, so in their excitement, the player rolls a whole bunch of dice since they are certain they got a crit, they proudly announce their damage...
And the DM says "The moment you try to attack, the guy barks out some strange sounding words and makes a little gesture, your dagger bounces off something you can't see. You missed. That's the end of the turn. Now the guy blasts you with a spell on his Initiative..."
The same thing applies to any ambush. If things depend on someone going first, there isn't any legal by the rules way to assure that it happens. I personally think that's just fine, because anything that players can do, monsters can do, and as a DM I use a lot of ambushes. If an Assassin fails to Assassinate their target every time, if an ambush goes wrong because it was based around someone casting Spike Growth, that's a pretty good simulation of how combat works in reality. Very few plans survive contact with the enemy. Plain old Dumb Luck and Murphy's Law are against anything ever coming out as planned, and if the stars should align and everything really does go at planned, that's a glorious moment the players should be overjoyed to see happen, not "Ok. I use <neato ability>, I go first" Yawn. It may or may not be a big deal, the DM can always work around it, but if the DM is having to do extra work for something that's really less fun in the end, why bother?
<Insert clever signature here>
“The same thing applies to any ambush. If things depend on someone going first, there isn't any legal by the rules way to assure that it happens. I personally think that's just fine, because anything that players can do, monsters can do, and as a DM I use a lot of ambushes. If an Assassin fails to Assassinate their target every time, if an ambush goes wrong because it was based around someone casting Spike Growth, that's a pretty good simulation of how combat works in reality. Very few plans survive contact with the enemy. Plain old Dumb Luck and Murphy's Law are against anything ever coming out as planned, and if the stars should align and everything really does go at planned, that's a glorious moment the players should be overjoyed to see happen, not "Ok. I use <neato ability>, I go first" Yawn. It may or may not be a big deal, the DM can always work around it, but if the DM is having to do extra work for something that's really less fun in the end, why bother?”
I agree with this whole paragraph. If that Assassin wants more auto crits, they better get their initiative score higher, or rely on some “advantage on initiative” feats if they want to strike first in the initiative order. I’ve never DMed a game where my first reaction was “how do I ensure my players always get to do that thing that they always want to do, repeatedly”.
I control the environment and monsters and they follow the same general rules as the PCs. If I set ambushes, will my players think it’s fair that a group of 4 CR8 Assassin baddies does 10d6 damage x 4 (total 40d6 = Average 140 damage), regardless of how fast the PCs react? No.
And to all those players who say "why would I cast bless?" and "guidance is a waste of a cantrip" and "bardic inspiration is pointless"; point this out and yell THIS! THIS IS WHY THOSE THINGS EXIST!!!!
(Sorry for yelling, but my players have all said all of these things in the past year and a half)
Yes, I know bless doesn't help ability score rolls but I'm lumping it together with that I like to call "metadata features"; in-game things that attect at-the-table things. Things my players all feel have no value.
I've considered trying out two ways of dealing with this. For the first, everyone rolls initiative, then the players can reassign those rolls however they want. This allows them to decide who gets to go in what order, but someone is still getting stuck with the low rolls.
The second is letting people delay their entire turn, moving them back in the initiative order for all subsequent turns. The downside of this is that it requires some fiddling with spell durations and such, haven't figured out exact wording but the idea is to minimize the difference in effect from shifting turn order.
While I agree that allowing ambushes to go off too easily is not the greatest idea. The rules by the book have "too many moving parts", the more special circumstances required, the harder the success of any plan becomes. The game creator's claim they want to provide a cinematic experience with a minimum of rule inefficiency. I feel the Surprise rules fall flat on this goal. Even looking to real life battles, ambushes have been one of the most successful tactics ever employed so, they must be reasonably feasible. If one side or another gets totally wiped out by a surprise round, maybe you aren't planning encounters very pragmatically. This is really not much different than if one side rolled higher initiative on a whole and acted with rolling crit damage by sheer luck, and that happens quite a lot in my experience.
In life, even the most simple ambush can go wrong. It's just how life works. If you want a reasonably accurate depiction of life, there has to be a risk. A DM can sort things however they like, but just giving away something that should be earned is rarely a good idea. There is no feeling of victory if you just get given something. That's the whole problem with "everybody wins" deals. If there is no chance to lose, there is no chance to win either.
I've commented about how I don't set out to kill characters, and that I don't have monsters focus on characters that are down. I hold to that. Does that mean I don't require death checks? No. I let things happen. I just don't *push*.
People want to make ambushes easier. Next, people want to stop having to roll to hit. If their enemy didn't see them coming, why should they need to? It's not like the enemy can avoid something they don't know is happening, and you have made it so they know they are going to hit first. Then they don't want to roll for damage either, because if their ambush is perfect and unavoidable, then it should do maximum damage should it not?
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