Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General How to delay my turn?

For the life of me I cannot figure out the mechanism to move a character to later in the turn. The rogue keeps getting high initiative, but then can never get a "backstab" because the other characters move later.

Going by 5E rules you should be able to hold your action rather than your full turn, but I can't see how to do that either. If it's not on the roadmap then it should be, as it's a basic part of D&D combat tactics.

I don't believe there's any way to do so at the moment. Definitely should be added to the list.

I wondered about this a while back when they announced the change from party initiative to individual.

They’d made it so that if your characters are next to each other in the turn order you can switch freely between them, and that seems to have definite advantages.

I’m not sure if being able to freely delay whenever you like to group them together would become OP. Maybe a special action you can use once per combat or something?

The problem here is not the initiative but the lack of correct rogue implementation. A rogue going first would just move -> stealth -> sneak attack. I don't think that's currently possible.

Delaying your turn is a base combat rule in D&D 5e. It should be implemented at some point before release.

Simple answer: you can't.

In most cases in the tabletop game, holding your action is going to be along the lines of "attack the first enemy that comes within my range". To that end, even a 'Guard' option in BG3 would be a fair compromise. Maybe 'Ranged guard' and 'Melee guard' to distinguish between the two. I can see that there is a danger that it could be overcomplicated.

I think a simple delay with no reaction would suffice. You just get down the line of action during the present turn, like halving your initiative roll for the turn. Because I agree implementing reaction delay would be tricky.

That's "readying" an action. That may be a bit too complicated.

I just want to hold my turn for later in the round so I can make better use of it. It must just not be implemented yet because that is HUGE in D&D.

That would arguably be a bit OP. In D&D 5E there is no option to delay your turn in the rules as written, just readying your action.

I guess you could opt to hold your turn but only get to use your action if you do so?

Yeah, in 5E you can't move initiative due to spell duration timings. Not being able to at least hold on to your action though *really* takes a lot of wind out of the rogue. A bit nasty for wizards too. I'd wait 2 seconds for you to take a step before I cast this fireball, but I can't soooo.... buh bye.

Delaying your turn is not allowed in 5th edition, though it was in previous editions.

What you are thinking about is taking the Ready Action, which is to say you decide what to do and how it will trigger (such as I ready an action to attack the goblin as soon as an ally is within 5' of them). Then, when conditions are met, you may use your reaction to trigger this readied action.

Since it's EA and such they were never going to manage to implement this right now - so I suspect it'll be 3 months minimum before they can decide how to do this (because RAW is not possible in a video game, so they will have to alter the rules to implement it).

Yeah, you can delay your action, but you explicitly cannot delay your movement. All movement must be done on your turn. So if on your turn you say you're readying an action, you can do that, but you don't get to move when the trigger for your action happens.