Part of an ongoing (if occasional) series of D&D 5e Rules notes.

So something happened in the game the night before I wrote this up that, at the time, I kind of blew through, but  I wanted to give it some thought. This is, of course, just the sort of thing I have sometimes taken justified criticism for overthinking. But it’s a situation we’ve run into more than once, and I’d like to have figure out a rubric for myself to adjudicate against.

And, as a caveat, it’s always worth noting up front that time and combat in D&D are abstractions designed to turn the chaos of real-life combat into something manageable. While a level of verisimilitude is the goal, the manageability always trumps that. Just as D&D is not a physics simulator, it’s not a great combat simulator (falling somewhere between an FPS and Chess).

When the slow guy is supposed to lead off the attack

So, here was the sitch: as the party crept up stairs into the upper floor where the local BBEG had their throne room, the plan was that Theren the Sorcerer was going to begin combat by lobbing his Vitriolic Sphere into the center of the bad guys.

How should the combat have been sequenced? Even handwaving aside the question of whether anyone knew that Theren was going first (there was probably an excess of allowable coordination between the two subgroups, since you were going up two different sets of stairs and not using any sort of communication magic) …

• Did Theren’s action take place outside of the Initiative order? Did his executing the attack start the combat so that’s when everyone rolls Init?
  • (Short answer: no.)
• Did Theren’s Init get changed to the top of the Initiative order? Since he’s the one initiating the combat?
  • (Short answer: still no.)
• Did everyone with Init rolls before Theren sort of get skipped over? (That’s what I did, but it effectively means that those higher Init rolls become low Init rolls, which is “unfair”.)
  • (Short answer: it should have been “voluntary”)
• Did everyone before Theren in the Initiative order (ally and enemy) actually get go in some fashion before Theren did?
  • (Short answer: it should have been that way, yes.)(TL;DR: The ultimate
• And did it matter if the bad guys were surprised or not?
  • (Short answer: Yes and No. But in this case they were not — the Baroness had perceived you coming up the stairs and called for you to come in and play.)

In 5e, combat takes place with the Order of Combat:

1. Determine Surprise.
2. Establish positions.
3. Roll Initiative.
4. Take turns in rounds of combat.

In short:  Initiative is rolled when combat begins. You can not make an attack outside of Initiative. 

So, no, Theren doesn’t get to bypass the Initiative roll, or have his Init moved to the top of the order, or whatever. (Some folk have house rules for this, but they create their own problems.)

So let’s simplify the situation a bit and say that the top initiative order, when rolled, was (leaving out other players and bad guy mooks):

1. 20 – William
2. 15 – Baroness BBEG (the enemy)
3. 10 – Theren

The first question is: is there Surprise? This is determined before Initiative is rolled, technically, though I don’t think it makes a difference.

If you’re surprised, you can’t move or take an action on your first turn of the combat, and you can’t take a reaction until that turn ends. A member of a group can be surprised even if the other members aren’t.

So if Baroness BBEG were surprised by this attack out of nowhere in her throne room (ignoring the previous sounds of the battles below), it counters her Initiative to a large degree. The beginning of the combat can be handled this way:

1. William says he is choosing to Ready an attack if anyone runs up to the top of the stairwell before his next turn. He’s doing this to let Theren get that shot off as agreed, rather than running into the middle of the room and spoil the AoE plans. It’s essentially giving up his turn, but there you go.
2. Baroness BBEG is Surprised — she’ll effectively see Theren coming, but will be unable to act on her turn. After her turn occurs, she would be able to take a Reaction (if she had Counterspell, she could then use it against Theren’s impending attack), and she will be able to act normally at the beginning of her next turn.
3. Theren pops up and acid bombs everyone’s ass.

So Surprise mechanics make things simple(r), because they provide for higher-Init enemies to be locked in place (but ready to go next time).

But in the case of the game that triggered this discussion, there was no Surprise (the party simply wasn’t stealthy climbing those stairs). Which means that there is a disconnect between Intent (lob an Vitriolic Sphere before they can act) and Execution (oh, they acted before I could lob my Vitriolic Sphere, because they had better rolls on Initiative). Or, as one site I saw put it:

“If your player wants to stab the bandit in the face before he has time to act, that’s what a high Initiative roll is for, not a surprise round.”

Without Surprise, it’s Theren starting to move for his guns first, but the other folk outdrawing him.

“But Dave,” you may say, “she couldn’t see Theren before he came up the stairs.” That’s true, but because she isn’t Surprised (i.e., she was aware of a threat, and so ready to act/react), she still is able to act first as she chooses, because her Initiative is higher.

This gets into the whole idea that 6-second Rounds are themselves an abstraction — if there are six people in the room it’s not that Person 1 literally goes in the first second, Person 2 in the second second, etc. It means that within that six second timeframe, Person 1 acts before Person 2, who acts before Person 3, etc. That doesn’t completely match reality, because not everyone is declaring their actions before they happen as in some games (so that higher Initiative folk know what is coming), but it is essentially how 5e abstracts “People running around and into each other with intent to do mayhem.”

So here’s what should happen (should have happened in this simplification of last night):

1. William does whatever he’s doing — Dodging, Readying an action, casting Spike Growth in the middle of the room to make sure that nobody runs away before Theren can act, whatever. He’s choosing to back Theren’s play, but still moves faster/before Theren does, because he has higher Initiative.
2. Baroness BBEG “Readies an action.” Because I’m the GM, you don’t get to know what it is (“Chuck my spear at the first person atop the stairs over there”). Neener-neener. But she does this before Theren because she isn’t surprised and has higher Initiative.
3. Theren reaches the top of the stairs and turns to cast his spell …
   … and Baroness BBEG executes her Readied action (throwing her spear at the first person atop the stairs, Theren, which hits) …
   … and, if still alive, Theren throws his Vitriolic Sphere.

(Note: one of the players reminded me afterwards that Theren was Invisible. This gets into Perception checks, Active vs Passive, etc., to deal with his footsteps and verbal components, etc.  In which case she might have been Surprised or she might have been aware something screwing was going on and still chucked her spear with Disadvantage against an Invisible foe before Theren could cast his spell (which would then drop his Invis).

Note that Theren could have said, “Well, heck, they aren’t Surprised so someone might plan to attack me” and change his plans from what had been intended. Or maybe, despite his intent and the team’s plans, William might have taken an action to attack or distract the Baroness, which might have led to another change of plans by Theren. While Initiative lets people act first, the structure of the game from that point means that people are aware of the actions taken previously by people with better Init, and can revise their plans accordingly.

(In the Action Economy, there’s a significant advantage in going first … but after that, Initiative is, like Time: just a way to keep everything from happening at once.)

The bottom line is, you can’t easily plan your way into something that is the equivalent of Surprise (“I go before anyone else does”) if there is no Surprise present and you roll a low Initiative. That’s what Initiative is kind of for — if you roll poorly, you go later in the round. If the other players who would have gone first want to effectively skip their turn (do a Dodge or a Ready or maybe even a Help), that’s their prerogative for the tactical situation. The enemy is under no such obligation, and if any of them have higher Init than the “this is how I am starting this combat,” they get to do their thing first (which may be standing there in Surprise, or may be shooting you under the table).

Here are some articles that touch on this — which, given the volume, shows this is something a lot of GMs fret about, though most of the scenarios here involve Surprise, which, as noted, simplifies the question a lot.

• https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/72889/what-happens-when-initiative-allows-a-player-to-act-before-the-player-that-start
• https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/190811/if-i-start-combat-by-making-an-attack-does-a-high-initiative-enemy-see-it-comin
• https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/115800/how-to-resolve-surprise-and-instant-actioning-initiating-combat
• https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/154283/how-does-attacking-during-a-conversation-affect-initiative
• https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/149283/what-to-do-when-surprise-and-a-high-initiative-roll-conflict-with-the-narrative

“We get ready to enter the room”

So there’s one more area where this kind of thing has come frequently into play, the “We arrange ourselves at the door and charge in” scenario, when the Doughty Fighters at front roll crap Init (because they used Dex as a dump stat) and everyone queued up behind them roll sbetter than them and basically have to:

• Move through the Doughty Fighters (as Difficult Terrain, and potentially exposing themselves to attack, which is kind of why you wanted the Doughty Fighters to run in first).
• Ready an Action to move in when the Doughty Fighters have and the space is clear (but not then being able to attack or anything, because Ready only lets you take a single action or move).
• Fire ranged attacks past the Doughty Fighters.
• Waste their turn.

The bottom line there is: yup, those are kind of your choices when everyone in front of you is slower. Hopefully the bad guys inside the room are Surprised!