As we saw during last week’s Arena Practice, the movement rules for 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons expressly allow combatants to use part of their available movement on their initiative, to attack, and then to use more or all of their remaining movement.
On page 190 of the Player’s Handbook, the Rules As Written (RAW) for Movement and Position read as follows:
Breaking Up Your Movement
You can break up your movement on your turn, using some of your speed before and after your action. For example, if you have a speed of 30 feet, you can move 10 feet, take your action, and then move 20 feet.Moving Between Attacks
If you take an action that includes more than one weapon attack, you can break up your movement even further by moving between those attacks. For example, a fighter who can make two attacks with the Extra Attack feature and who has a speed of 25 feet could move 10 feet, make an attack, move 15 feet, and then attack again.
The Move-Attack-Move Tactic
Clearly, this popular move-attack-move tactic means attackers can begin their turn with the benefit of Full Cover, use part of their movement to take a position in order to make an attack, execute that attack, and then use the remainder of their movement to return to the protection of Full Cover.
Enter the Ready Action!
The most obvious counter to this tactic is use one’s Ready action—stating that an attack will be triggered when the attacker emerges from their position of Full Cover. While the emerging attacker could still have the benefit of Half Cover (+2 AC and Dexterity saving throws) or Three-Quarters Cover (+5), at least there’s still some chance for the defender to counterattack.
The Can of Worms
IMHO, the RAW for these mechanics introduce major complications.
As we also saw during last week’s Arena Practice, if a character is hiding in the protection of Full Cover (completely invulnerable to most attacks) and knows that an attacker has prepared a Ready action, the player can simply choose to not expose the character at all on any turn where they’ve lost initiative. Players or DM’s can just wait until they actually do win initiative, and when they do, they can move-attack-move—returning to Full Cover, thereby never being vulnerable to attack.
And that completely breaks the game.
Finding Solutions
While part of the problem under consideration is simply another example of metagaming on the part of the players, I’m more interested in finding a reasonable solution to the overarching problem.
Going forward, I think that all of the DM’s Initiative rolls should be made in secret. This will help by reducing the amount of information players have about any given combat.
But even this isn’t a complete solution. Concealing initiative rolls still allows players to forgo taking movement which would expose their characters simply because they suspect that they have rolled a failing initiative roll. And that’s still metagaming.
No Holding Ready
In thinking this all through—and being particularly careful to keep existing rules for Surprise in mind—, I’ve searched for existing rules which would allow Ready actions to be held over to following rounds.
Unfortunately, allowing a combatant who has declared a Ready action to hold that action over until the next turn isn’t actually an option in the RAW. Jeremy Crawford specifically addresses this in his 2015 Sage Advice column:
COMBAT
Can you delay your turn and take it later in the round? Nope. When it’s your turn, either you do something or you don’t. If you don’t want to do anything, consider taking the Dodge action so that you’ll, at least, have some extra protection. If you want to wait to act in response to something, take the Ready action, which lets you take part of your turn later.For a variety of reasons, we didn’t include the option to delay your turn:
- Your turn involves several decisions, including where to move and what action to take. If you could delay your turn, your decision-making would possibly become slower, since you would have to consider whether you wanted to take your turn at all. Multiply that extra analysis by the number of characters and monsters in a combat, and you have the potential for many slowdowns in play.
- The ability to delay your turn can make initiative meaningless, as characters and monsters bounce around in the initiative order. If combatants can change their place in the initiative order at will, why use initiative at all? On top of that, changing initiative can easily turn into an unwelcome chore, especially for the DM, who might have to change the initiative list over and over during a fight.
- Being able to delay your turn can let you wreak havoc on the durations of spells and other effects, particularly any of them that last until your next turn. Simply by changing when your turn happens, you could change the length of certain spells. The way to guard against such abuse would be to create a set of additional rules that would limit your ability to change durations. The net effect? More complexity would be added to the game, and with more complexity, there is greater potential for slower play.
Two of our goals for combat were for it to be speedy and for initiative to matter. We didn’t want to start every combat by rolling initiative and then undermine turn order with a delay option. Moreover, we felt that toying with initiative wasn’t where the focus should be in battle. Instead, the dramatic actions of the combatants should be the focus, with turns that could happen as quickly as possible. Plus, the faster your turn ends, the sooner you get to take your next turn.
“Faster” combat? As extreme as it sounds, short of having players clearly declare both their character’s Movement and Actions before Initiative is rolled at the beginning of each turn, I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to fully address this problem.
No Solution
I’m not sure what the right solution is at this point; it’s a big enough problem that it’s going to be on my mind. I think there must be a less burdensome solution than forcing all players to declare and track their intended movement and actions at the beginning of each round of combat.