Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Actions not on your turn
There are 3 types of actions that take place not on your own turn, which must be triggered. p268
Readied Actions p291
You ready an action by setting its trigger on your turn as a standard action. You can ready a minor, move, or standard action, but readying it will cost you a standard regardless. If the trigger is sprung, you perform the action as an immediate reaction. So generally, you cannot say "I'll attack the mage if he starts to cast," like in 3rd. But if you were anticipating for the enemy to move in and attack you, or even to charge, you could say "If the enemy enters an adjacent square to me, I'll attack it," or "If the enemy enters an adjacent square to me, I'll use Positioning Strike" and your attack will happen first since the enemy's move triggered the immediate reaction. In the case of Positioning Strike, you will even thwart his melee attack. In the case of a charge, he will simply lose his action since the attack portion of his action is invalidated. If he was simply moving and using an at-will, he would have the opportunity to use a different (longer-range) power or weapon.
- opportunity action - opportunity attacks. You can make only one on a given opponent's turn. You may, however, make multiple OAs upon multiple invoking targets (no feat required). OAs resolve before the action which invoked(triggered) them - if a bowman attacks while adjacent to a swordsman and the swordsman's resulting OA slays him, the shot is not successfully fired.
- immediate interrupt - Like an OA, it gets resolved before the triggering action. This may thwart the triggering action, if for example the immediate interrupt allows movement the melee attack which triggers it will fail if you use that movement to move out of the attacker's weapon range. The PHB is unclear on if this consumes an encounter/daily power, so I'm going to arbirtarily say it does. Go go shield push (p 200)! Unlike OAs, you only get one immediate action per turn, be it an interrupt or a reaction.
- immediate reaction - gets resolved after its trigger. May thwart an action but is less likely to: let's say you have a power which lets you shift as an immediate reaction. If the trigger is someone attacking you, you don't get to move away until you already take the hit. If the trigger is someone moving next to you, they'd be unable to approach you and hit you without you getting the opportunity to shift away. This goes for combined actions like charge as well.
Readied Actions p291
You ready an action by setting its trigger on your turn as a standard action. You can ready a minor, move, or standard action, but readying it will cost you a standard regardless. If the trigger is sprung, you perform the action as an immediate reaction. So generally, you cannot say "I'll attack the mage if he starts to cast," like in 3rd. But if you were anticipating for the enemy to move in and attack you, or even to charge, you could say "If the enemy enters an adjacent square to me, I'll attack it," or "If the enemy enters an adjacent square to me, I'll use Positioning Strike" and your attack will happen first since the enemy's move triggered the immediate reaction. In the case of Positioning Strike, you will even thwart his melee attack. In the case of a charge, he will simply lose his action since the attack portion of his action is invalidated. If he was simply moving and using an at-will, he would have the opportunity to use a different (longer-range) power or weapon.
# posted by Scott @ 1:36 PM 
