Ready Action

[chomskola]

IF i understand the ready action right, you take it between the turn you just had and your turn in the next round. DO I understand this right that you only get one action SA or MA in the ready action round as the penalty for choosing when to take your action? its a little confusing.

[deuxhero]

You can choose to hold a standard action, doing so uses up your standard action, your move and swift, plus any bonus actions remain.

[Bahamut Omega]

Take a look here: http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/specialInitiativeActions.htm#ready

Readying an action takes a Standard Action. In other words, you can move and then ready an action.

When you ready an action, you specify what will trigger it. Should that trigger condition occur before your next turn, your action will execute just before the trigger. For example, if you run up to a caster and make a readied action to attack them should they start casting a spell, that will happen just before they cast.

Once your triggered action occurs, your character's initiative changes to that you always go on the new initiative. For example, say you have an initiative of 21 and your opponent caster has an initiative of 14. You run up to them, declare your readied action. Once 14 comes around, the enemy begins casting, your readied action triggers. Your initiative is now 14A and theirs is 14B from now on. Assuming your readied action did not trigger then your initiative would remain at 21.

[Curmudgeon]

You can choose to hold a standard action, doing so uses up your standard action, your move and swift, plus any bonus actions remain.
That's not quite right. Ready is really just a triggering condition and your plan of what action you will execute when you detect that trigger. Ready doesn't "use up" anything other than the standard action that's required. What it does do is prevent you from taking any actions other than those you've planned. But you could use a swift action, a move action, various free actions, and then Ready anything that's permitted.

[Lonely Tylenol]

That's not quite right. Ready is really just a triggering condition and your plan of what action you will execute when you detect that trigger. Ready doesn't "use up" anything other than the standard action that's required. What it does do is prevent you from taking any actions other than those you've planned. But you could use a swift action, a move action, various free actions, and then Ready anything that's permitted.


You can choose to hold a standard action. Doing so uses up your standard action; your move and swift, plus any bonus actions remain.

Fixed. Hope that clears everything up for everybody.

Normally, I try to avoid being a Grammar Nazi, but in this case, doing so creates understanding where there isn't, so it's a necessity.

[Curmudgeon]

Fixed. Hope that clears everything up for everybody.

Normally, I try to avoid being a Grammar Nazi, but in this case, doing so creates understanding where there isn't, so it's a necessity.
Thank you. Clearly I made the wrong guess about what corrections were necessary, since I assumed the principal error was a typo with "remain" instead of "remaining".

Hooray for semicolons!

[chomskola]

Actually i'm curious about DM's who use ready actions, and how useful they find them? I mean for monsters

[Curmudgeon]

Ready is of middling use, and that applies to enemies as well as PCs. As a DM I mainly have enemies use Ready for two purposes:

Attack spellcasters once they start casting. Having a dozen archers firing every time a PC starts using verbal or somatic components can lead to failed Concentration checks and wasted spells.
Foil PCs when they're attempting a charge. (There's no magic in Ready to detect use of the Charge special full-round action, so the trigger is PCs who "have moved 10' in a straight line toward <an important enemy>, and are attempting to continue moving".) This is great for minions whose job it is to protect the important NPC enemies. Most any minions can simply interrupt the movement and get into a blocking position, but you know what works really well here? Zombies. They can Ready a partial charge because of their Single Actions Only limitation, so not only do they intercept, they also get to attack. And all it takes is a bunch of corpses and a single spell to whip up some blockers.
It's good to have minions. :smallbiggrin: A whole bunch of CR ½ or CR 1 enemies can make encounters more interesting without increasing the difficulty significantly, and Ready is one way to leverage minions for greater effectiveness. Level 1 Warriors will only get a single attack in a full attack anyway, so moving to cover and then readying a ranged attack is more effective for them, whereas for higher-level PCs Ready often makes them less effective.

My goal is for every battle to go 20+ rounds ─ if the PCs live that long, that is ─ with reasonable encounter levels. So my encounters are generally against groups with a smart leader rather than 1-2 monsters. Smart leaders don't bunch up their forces where they can be taken out with area effect spells. Instead they have them spread out, take individual cover (ideally, in locations where PCs will suffer AoOs if they try to get at the important enemies directly), and maybe half of the level 1 Warriors use Ready with various triggers while the other half maintain harassing fire. This lets the more important enemies get on with their magical attacks, sneaky infiltration to take out PC spellcasters, and (if things go badly) make their escape to cast Animate Dead again and come back with a better ambush plan.

[chomskola]

I think the question might have been misunderstood, what i was asking was, once you take your ready action, do you also get the rest of the actions in that turn which has now become the new place in the initiative order. e.g. I ready an action to attack first enemy through door, enemy triggers, I attack..now before my next turn I also move 20 ft away?

[Curmudgeon]

I think the question might have been misunderstood, what i was asking was, once you take your ready action, do you also get the rest of the actions in that turn
No.
Readying an Action

You can ready a standard action, a move action, or a free action. To do so, specify the action you will take and the conditions under which you will take it. Then, any time before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition. The action occurs just before the action that triggers it. If the triggered action is part of another character’s activities, you interrupt the other character. Assuming he is still capable of doing so, he continues his actions once you complete your readied action. Your initiative result changes. For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately ahead of the character whose action triggered your readied action.
Your turn ends after the readied action; that's why the other character continues their turn, and your changed initiative means you don't get to act again until the next round.