Which should be fine in the vast majority of cases unless they have a LOT more movement speed than you do.
Which they might; a lot of melee specialist monsters have a lot of movement. Of course, you could have just dashed away on your turn and done the same thing, so all it's actually getting you is the potential to bait movement that wouldn't otherwise happen.
Which they might; a lot of melee specialist monsters have a lot of movement. Of course, you could have just dashed away on your turn and done the same thing, so all it's actually getting you is the potential to bait movement that wouldn't otherwise happen.
Yes, it's bait. It's obviously bait. That's the whole point. That's what Readying is used for in 99% of cases. Jeez, I feel like I'm conversing with Eeyore.
Which they might; a lot of melee specialist monsters have a lot of movement. Of course, you could have just dashed away on your turn and done the same thing, so all it's actually getting you is the potential to bait movement that wouldn't otherwise happen.
Yes, it's bait. It's obviously bait. That's the whole point. That's what Readying is used for in 99% of cases.
Remember there's also a rule about unseen attackers and targets, that says that if your target isn't there when you hit, your attack automatically misses.
If all you were trying to do with the Readied Action is bait more movement, then why bring damage and attacks missing into the conversation at all?
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Yes, that's what we've been saying. But thanks for summarizing it I guess. At least, there are other ways to use the Ready action to avoid getting attacked, which are much more obvious: - Readying a teleportation ability or spell as soon as an enemy comes into melee range (it works because it's triggered before any attack is made). - Readying a movement as soon as an enemy is less than 10 ft away from you (so before they can make an attack of opportunity).
The second assumes the creature approaching doesn't have a 10' reach.
However, I think there is another aspect to the Ready action that the discussion hasn't touched on.
"First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your Reaction."
The rules for the Ready action (as opposed to the specific rules for shield and others that can interrupt an attack) require that the trigger be a perceivable circumstance, not a game mechanic.
In terms of mechanics, we roll a to hit die roll followed by a damage die roll - these are separate mechanical actions but they don't represent different perceivable circumstances. When an attack hits, it does damage. There is no perceivable circumstance between an attack hitting and inflicting its damage which could be used as the trigger for a Ready action. So trying to teleport away, move away, or take some other readied action in response to being hit, before the damage is applied, isn't (in my opinion) a perceivable circumstance that could be used as a trigger for a Readied action.
Some one could Ready an action based on a creature attacking them, or they could ready an action based on being hit since both are perceivable circumstances (the Ready action is resolved after the completion of the trigger) but the Readied action could not be triggered between the hit and the damage resolution since there isn't anything perceivable ... if an attack hits it does damage, if an attack misses, it doesn't.
I'd agree with David42, the key limitation on Readying is to be able to perceive the trigger. TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point. Your character can't percieve whether an attack hits them or not until after they are hit by it and thus taking damage. You could have a reaction to trigger on getting attacked, or an monster approaching and still avoid damage, but not after the attack has hit or not hit. Honestly there's not much difference for purposes of baiting between those three situations.
Yes, that's what we've been saying. But thanks for summarizing it I guess. At least, there are other ways to use the Ready action to avoid getting attacked, which are much more obvious: - Readying a teleportation ability or spell as soon as an enemy comes into melee range (it works because it's triggered before any attack is made). - Readying a movement as soon as an enemy is less than 10 ft away from you (so before they can make an attack of opportunity).
The second assumes the creature approaching doesn't have a 10' reach.
However, I think there is another aspect to the Ready action that the discussion hasn't touched on.
"First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your Reaction."
The rules for the Ready action (as opposed to the specific rules for shield and others that can interrupt an attack) require that the trigger be a perceivable circumstance, not a game mechanic.
In terms of mechanics, we roll a to hit die roll followed by a damage die roll - these are separate mechanical actions but they don't represent different perceivable circumstances. When an attack hits, it does damage. There is no perceivable circumstance between an attack hitting and inflicting its damage which could be used as the trigger for a Ready action. So trying to teleport away, move away, or take some other readied action in response to being hit, before the damage is applied, isn't (in my opinion) a perceivable circumstance that could be used as a trigger for a Readied action.
Some one could Ready an action based on a creature attacking them, or they could ready an action based on being hit since both are perceivable circumstances (the Ready action is resolved after the completion of the trigger) but the Readied action could not be triggered between the hit and the damage resolution since there isn't anything perceivable ... if an attack hits it does damage, if an attack misses, it doesn't.
This is what I was thinking when reading this, Attack Rolls are not Perceivable Circumstances in my opinion and thus would not work with the Ready Action to begin with. Ready Action has a clear defined trigger and so how other reactions are triggered is irrelevant to this, it doesn't matter if the Shield Spell or Silvery Barbs are activated by different triggers since those aren't applicable to the Ready Action itself.
Of course this now hinges on what is considered a "Perceivable Circumstance". If you believe that an attack roll is a Perceivable Circumstance then it is still questionable why you would want to move after being hit? If you're hit, you're still hit even if you move between rolls and so at that point why not just trigger on the damage roll or if trying to move out of attack range, why not use a trigger based off another creatures' movement. Such as, "I will ready an action to move when a creature walks towards me and is about to place me within attack range." Since then you can avoid the obvious Opportunity Attack you'd get anyway and if that Opportunity Attack was used to grapple, you'd lose all your movement anyways and still be left in range of the creature.
Personally I'd say the Perceivable Circumstance is that an attack was made against you (either it missed or it hit and thus dealt damage), the only relevant thing I see in SAC is a description of using the Ready Action to trigger after an attack but that is not a definitive answer to what counts as a Perceivable Circumstance.
TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
So what's stopping a player from Readying an action to be triggered at that same moment, and say "if an enemy attacks me, I step back 5 feet"
I'd say:
You can. But you're not moving quickly enough to avoid the strike.
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Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
I'd agree with David42, the key limitation on Readying is to be able to perceive the trigger. TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point. Your character can't percieve whether an attack hits them or not until after they are hit by it and thus taking damage. You could have a reaction to trigger on getting attacked, or an monster approaching and still avoid damage, but not after the attack has hit or not hit. Honestly there's not much difference for purposes of baiting between those three situations.
Shield, Silvery Barbs, etc, are weird because they interact with the game mechanics. To do the things they do, they have to operate outside the fiction. In the fiction, the wizard casts Shield just before the ogre's club crushes their fragile brain, but to actually make that work, and be neither useless (cast beforehand, wasting your scarce spell slots) or too good (cast beforehand, and it lasts more than a round), it needs to do the weird meta-thing.
Which isn't a mechanical problem, but it's not generalizable.
TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
That's interesting, I don't think that I've ever seen anyone attempt to play it that way. Typically, the player keeps track of his own AC, and a DM asks something like "does an 18 hit you?" If you wanted to declare a hit or miss without revealing the value of the attack roll, you'd instead have to ask something like "what's your AC?" But then of course, it should work the other way as well. If a PC attacks a monster, the player would have to ask the DM "what's the monster's AC?" and that might not be something that a DM wants to reveal.
Whether or not the above interpretation about how the Shield spell is supposed to work is accurate should probably be its own thread discussion, but I think that it would come down to the interpretation of these few rules:
Making an Attack:
Resolve the Attack. Make the attack roll, as detailed earlier in this chapter. On a hit, you roll damage unless the particular attack has rules that specify otherwise.
Earlier:
Attack Rolls:
An attack roll determines whether an attack hits a target. An attack roll hits if the roll equals or exceeds the target’s Armor Class.
And also:
When the outcome of an action is uncertain, the game uses a d20 roll to determine success or failure. These rolls are called D20 Tests, and they come in three kinds: ability checks, saving throws, and attack rolls. They follow these steps:
. . .
Roll 1d20. You always want to roll high . . .
Add Modifiers. Add these modifiers to the number rolled on the d20 . . .
Compare the Total to a Target Number.If the total of the d20 and its modifiers equals or exceeds the target number, the D20 Test succeeds. Otherwise, it fails. The Dungeon Master determines target numbers and tells players whether their rolls are successful . . . The target number for an attack roll is called an Armor Class (AC), which appears on a character sheet or in a stat block
Based on these mechanics, my interpretation is that the value of the attack roll is known at the moment when it is determined whether or not the attack hits (a creature can tell "how good" of an attack is incoming and/or "how well" they were just hit) and therefore the player can and should use that information to decide whether or not their creature should cast the Shield spell or not.
As for the question in this thread, the recent posts make an excellent point that the trigger for a Ready action must be perceivable. Note that that's not the general rule for any and all Reactions, which the text for the Shield spell uses:
A Reaction is an instant response to a trigger of some kind, which can occur on your turn or on someone else’s.
So, the Ready action trigger must adhere to a more restrictive rule than the set of triggers that are possible in the general rules.
TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
That's interesting, I don't think that I've ever seen anyone attempt to play it that way. Typically, the player keeps track of his own AC, and a DM asks something like "does an 18 hit you?" If you wanted to declare a hit or miss without revealing the value of the attack roll, you'd instead have to ask something like "what's your AC?" But then of course, it should work the other way as well. If a PC attacks a monster, the player would have to ask the DM "what's the monster's AC?" and that might not be something that a DM wants to reveal.
When D20 first started, a number of the players were brand new to D&D, so the DM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) tended to keep track of things like their AC himself, and he did most of his rolls behind the screen -- so it really was a case of him saying, "He swings at you and hits", the player responding "I cast shield!", and BLM describing it as, "You throw a shield spell in the way of his sword, but the attack still crashes through it. You take... " (rolls damage dice)
On something like a VTT where the attack rolls are generally public, it would be really difficult to play it that way
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
That's interesting, I don't think that I've ever seen anyone attempt to play it that way. Typically, the player keeps track of his own AC, and a DM asks something like "does an 18 hit you?" If you wanted to declare a hit or miss without revealing the value of the attack roll, you'd instead have to ask something like "what's your AC?" But then of course, it should work the other way as well. If a PC attacks a monster, the player would have to ask the DM "what's the monster's AC?" and that might not be something that a DM wants to reveal.
When D20 first started, a number of the players were brand new to D&D, so the DM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) tended to keep track of things like their AC himself, and he did most of his rolls behind the screen -- so it really was a case of him saying, "He swings at you and hits", the player responding "I cast shield!", and BLM describing it as, "You throw a shield spell in the way of his sword, but the attack still crashes through it. You take... " (rolls damage dice)
On something like a VTT where the attack rolls are generally public, it would be really difficult to play it that way
I only use FoundryVTT but that very much allows for private DM rolls, so you'd have no idea how much it hit by.
Whether you know your opponent's attack roll is really up to the table, despite the fact that it makes a significant difference for a number of abilities.
TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
That's interesting, I don't think that I've ever seen anyone attempt to play it that way. Typically, the player keeps track of his own AC, and a DM asks something like "does an 18 hit you?" If you wanted to declare a hit or miss without revealing the value of the attack roll, you'd instead have to ask something like "what's your AC?" But then of course, it should work the other way as well. If a PC attacks a monster, the player would have to ask the DM "what's the monster's AC?" and that might not be something that a DM wants to reveal.
I don't think you'd have to be so symmetric with it. The DM has WAY more information and only shares what they deem appropriate given circumstances. Player's really shouldn't be complaining if the DM asks, "What's your AC?" and then denies the player's request for the monster's AC.
Many spells, feats, and other abilities in this game trigger such a reaction.
Silvery Barbs, Shield, Defensive Duelist, all of these trigger a reaction after an attack roll is made, but before the damage is dealt.
So what's stopping a player from Readying an action to be triggered at that same moment, and say "if an enemy attacks me, I step back 5 feet"?
The game already has many reactions that are triggered this way, and there doesn't seem to be a limit to when a Ready action can be triggered.
That movement will still trigger an opportunity attack anyway. So you are still going to get attacked anyway, unless you have Zephyr spell, which doesn’t trigger OA for movement. So that would be a wasted ready action anyway because of the OA it provokes.
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Which should be fine in the vast majority of cases unless they have a LOT more movement speed than you do.
Which they might; a lot of melee specialist monsters have a lot of movement. Of course, you could have just dashed away on your turn and done the same thing, so all it's actually getting you is the potential to bait movement that wouldn't otherwise happen.
Yes, it's bait. It's obviously bait. That's the whole point. That's what Readying is used for in 99% of cases.
Jeez, I feel like I'm conversing with Eeyore.
And I feel like you're trying to twist RAW into a pretzel against RAI to argue for a very minor advantage.
If all you were trying to do with the Readied Action is bait more movement, then why bring damage and attacks missing into the conversation at all?
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
IME readying is pretty rare, and is primarily used for creatures that cannot be targeted on your turn for one reason or another.
Another common usage of Ready is when not sure if creature(s) encountered will attack or not.
The second assumes the creature approaching doesn't have a 10' reach.
However, I think there is another aspect to the Ready action that the discussion hasn't touched on.
"First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your Reaction."
The rules for the Ready action (as opposed to the specific rules for shield and others that can interrupt an attack) require that the trigger be a perceivable circumstance, not a game mechanic.
In terms of mechanics, we roll a to hit die roll followed by a damage die roll - these are separate mechanical actions but they don't represent different perceivable circumstances. When an attack hits, it does damage. There is no perceivable circumstance between an attack hitting and inflicting its damage which could be used as the trigger for a Ready action. So trying to teleport away, move away, or take some other readied action in response to being hit, before the damage is applied, isn't (in my opinion) a perceivable circumstance that could be used as a trigger for a Readied action.
Some one could Ready an action based on a creature attacking them, or they could ready an action based on being hit since both are perceivable circumstances (the Ready action is resolved after the completion of the trigger) but the Readied action could not be triggered between the hit and the damage resolution since there isn't anything perceivable ... if an attack hits it does damage, if an attack misses, it doesn't.
I'd agree with David42, the key limitation on Readying is to be able to perceive the trigger. TBH even Shield and other such abilities should follow the same rules in terms of game-immersion but that's beside the point. Your character can't percieve whether an attack hits them or not until after they are hit by it and thus taking damage. You could have a reaction to trigger on getting attacked, or an monster approaching and still avoid damage, but not after the attack has hit or not hit. Honestly there's not much difference for purposes of baiting between those three situations.
This is what I was thinking when reading this, Attack Rolls are not Perceivable Circumstances in my opinion and thus would not work with the Ready Action to begin with. Ready Action has a clear defined trigger and so how other reactions are triggered is irrelevant to this, it doesn't matter if the Shield Spell or Silvery Barbs are activated by different triggers since those aren't applicable to the Ready Action itself.
Of course this now hinges on what is considered a "Perceivable Circumstance". If you believe that an attack roll is a Perceivable Circumstance then it is still questionable why you would want to move after being hit? If you're hit, you're still hit even if you move between rolls and so at that point why not just trigger on the damage roll or if trying to move out of attack range, why not use a trigger based off another creatures' movement. Such as, "I will ready an action to move when a creature walks towards me and is about to place me within attack range." Since then you can avoid the obvious Opportunity Attack you'd get anyway and if that Opportunity Attack was used to grapple, you'd lose all your movement anyways and still be left in range of the creature.
Personally I'd say the Perceivable Circumstance is that an attack was made against you (either it missed or it hit and thus dealt damage), the only relevant thing I see in SAC is a description of using the Ready Action to trigger after an attack but that is not a definitive answer to what counts as a Perceivable Circumstance.
To me perceivable circumstances is something that the character can perceive which rule out any product of metagame.
A strict RAW reading of shield is that you cast it when you are hit by an attack (the perceivable part), without knowing the actual attack roll (the meta part) -- so the attack could still go through even after you add 5 to your AC
Notably, the Dimension 20 table plays this way. I can think of a number of times a character has cast shield, and it turned out to be a wasted spell slot
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I'd say:
You can. But you're not moving quickly enough to avoid the strike.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Shield, Silvery Barbs, etc, are weird because they interact with the game mechanics. To do the things they do, they have to operate outside the fiction. In the fiction, the wizard casts Shield just before the ogre's club crushes their fragile brain, but to actually make that work, and be neither useless (cast beforehand, wasting your scarce spell slots) or too good (cast beforehand, and it lasts more than a round), it needs to do the weird meta-thing.
Which isn't a mechanical problem, but it's not generalizable.
That's interesting, I don't think that I've ever seen anyone attempt to play it that way. Typically, the player keeps track of his own AC, and a DM asks something like "does an 18 hit you?" If you wanted to declare a hit or miss without revealing the value of the attack roll, you'd instead have to ask something like "what's your AC?" But then of course, it should work the other way as well. If a PC attacks a monster, the player would have to ask the DM "what's the monster's AC?" and that might not be something that a DM wants to reveal.
Whether or not the above interpretation about how the Shield spell is supposed to work is accurate should probably be its own thread discussion, but I think that it would come down to the interpretation of these few rules:
Earlier:
And also:
Based on these mechanics, my interpretation is that the value of the attack roll is known at the moment when it is determined whether or not the attack hits (a creature can tell "how good" of an attack is incoming and/or "how well" they were just hit) and therefore the player can and should use that information to decide whether or not their creature should cast the Shield spell or not.
As for the question in this thread, the recent posts make an excellent point that the trigger for a Ready action must be perceivable. Note that that's not the general rule for any and all Reactions, which the text for the Shield spell uses:
So, the Ready action trigger must adhere to a more restrictive rule than the set of triggers that are possible in the general rules.
When D20 first started, a number of the players were brand new to D&D, so the DM (Brennan Lee Mulligan) tended to keep track of things like their AC himself, and he did most of his rolls behind the screen -- so it really was a case of him saying, "He swings at you and hits", the player responding "I cast shield!", and BLM describing it as, "You throw a shield spell in the way of his sword, but the attack still crashes through it. You take... " (rolls damage dice)
On something like a VTT where the attack rolls are generally public, it would be really difficult to play it that way
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I only use FoundryVTT but that very much allows for private DM rolls, so you'd have no idea how much it hit by.
Whether you know your opponent's attack roll is really up to the table, despite the fact that it makes a significant difference for a number of abilities.
I don't think you'd have to be so symmetric with it. The DM has WAY more information and only shares what they deem appropriate given circumstances. Player's really shouldn't be complaining if the DM asks, "What's your AC?" and then denies the player's request for the monster's AC.
That movement will still trigger an opportunity attack anyway. So you are still going to get attacked anyway, unless you have Zephyr spell, which doesn’t trigger OA for movement. So that would be a wasted ready action anyway because of the OA it provokes.