New use for Feint

[jebob]

Is it possible to use a feint to prematurely trigger a Ready action? E.g., Gil the fighter readies an attack for when Bob the Rogue comes within one square of Gil. Can Bob Feint and prematurely trigger the attack on thin air?

[Siosilvar]

Not as far as I know.

It seems a decent enough use of the Bluff skill though.

[MammonAzrael]

Not by RAW, as far as I am aware. Feinting is a single specific action that denies a Dex bonus. While it makes sense that you could feint someone to waste a readied action, I don't believe DnD rules allow for it.

[Etrivar]

Plus, the problem with doing what you suggest is knowing when someone has readied an action. That hobgoblin hasn't acted yet, but does that mean he has a readied action, or does it mean he hasn't come up yet in the initiative order? Cuz if you guess 'readied action' and it was just 'hasn't come up yet', you've wasted your action (and made yourself look really stoopid). Plus, if I was DM'ing, I would say that you have to not only determine that he had a readied action, but that you had to determine what that action was.

If you could, say, make a successful Sense Motive check, then I would say you could make the Bluff check to ruin the action, but without knowing what they were about to do, it would be extremely difficult to muck it up.

[Forged Fury]

A related use (also not RAW) could be to allow a character that threatens an opponent to feint as a move action (opposed by Sense Motive) and then allow them to perform an action that otherwise would generate an AoO (trip, disarm, move-equivalent actions that generate AoOs like sheathing a weapon). It would be a pretty niche deal, but I could see it having some utility.