Ready swift as swift houserule?

[rrwoods]

So last session, I ruled on the fly that a player could spend a swift action to ready a swift action, which seems logical to me.

The immediate (heh) consequences of this of course need to be considered. As I understand the RAW, when a character takes a readied action in response to the trigger, they are not taking a turn (even though their initiative count changes). Thus, if the only houserule in place is that you can ready a swift action as a swift action, to me that means that if the character takes an immediate action in the time between readying the action and resolving it, they don't have their swift/immediate available *after* resolving it, until their next turn comes.

Have other folks allowed players to spend a swift to ready a swift in their games? Is there something broken here I'm not considering?

[dascarletm]

I don't think it is any more broken then using a standard to ready a standard. Question:
Can you ready both a standard and a swift on the same turn?
If so, do they go off simultaneously or can they have different trigger conditions?

[KillianHawkeye]

Thus, if the only houserule in place is that you can ready a swift action as a swift action, to me that means that if the character takes an immediate action in the time between readying the action and resolving it, they don't have their swift/immediate available *after* resolving it, until their next turn comes.

This is correct, a readied action is merely a part of your current turn that happens later on in the round. The swift/immediate action would not be refreshed until the start of their NEXT turn.



Although personally, using a swift action to ready another swift action seems too good to me. There's not really any cost to doing so. If you have a swift action ability that's likely to be useful but isn't useful immediately on your turn, you'd basically always ready it. I would probably let my players ready a swift action using the normal standard action readying rules, though. That's more like a real choice with substantial pros and cons.

On the other hand, I feel like the immediate action already covers this, and whatever "once per turn free action" abilities have already been sorted into ones you can do on your turn and ones you can do between turns just by being given the swift or the immediate qualifier.

[rrwoods]

This is correct, a readied action is merely a part of your current turn that happens later on in the round. The swift/immediate action would not be refreshed until the start of their NEXT turn.



Although personally, using a swift action to ready another swift action seems too good to me. There's not really any cost to doing so. If you have a swift action ability that's likely to be useful but isn't useful immediately on your turn, you'd basically always ready it. I would probably let my players ready a swift action using the normal standard action readying rules, though. That's more like a real choice with substantial pros and cons.

On the other hand, I feel like the immediate action already covers this, and whatever "once per turn free action" abilities have already been sorted into ones you can do on your turn and ones you can do between turns just by being given the swift or the immediate qualifier.
Hm. Maybe in exchange for the readied swift, the player can't take immediate actions. I'll have to think about that.

The situation where this came up was that the player in question wanted to use Distracting Ember on an ally's turn to help that ally flank, which can't be done as an immediate action.

EDIT: Yes, you can ready a standard and a swift. Essentially I'm adding a new action the players can take that readies a swift action. They could use their swift action on that, and their standard action to ready a standard action, specifying a separate set of conditions for each.