Originally Posted by JaceEthaniel
Something that should be touched on, I think, is player characters/npcs and how they act out of combat.

Currently, once combat starts, everyone involved slows down to turn-by-turn limitations, but everyone else acts normally; this leads to some rather glaring exploits.

For one, you can have one person go and initiate combat and just sit there and never move their turn forward, while having the other three party members go around and do several rounds worth of preparations.

Secondly, warlocks can cast find familiar for free and the familiar can get into combat without dragging the warlock along with it. Flaming Sphere also has its own initiative. Using the Warlock's find familiar ability to summon an imp, and another party member summoning a flaming sphere, the warlock can sit back and spam find familiar; the imp's invisibility ensures that it enters combat only when the warlock wants it to.
Now imagine this: The Warlock summons an imp and gets it real close and has it initiate combat, then the wizard summons a flaming sphere and does the same with it... but does not end the flaming sphere's turn (effectively halting combat). Neither the wizard nor the warlock are in combat. The Warlock's imp runs out of actions, so the warlock summons a new one and rinses/repeats until all the enemies are dead; the enemies never get their own turns, because the warlock is not in combat and keeps adding a new combatant, and the wizard never finishes the flaming sphere's turn.

Even if the wizard did finish the flaming sphere's turn, and combat progressed normally, the warlock would not have to wait for the imp's turn. He could simply summon a new imp and attack.

A way to mitigate that would be to force turn-by-turn limitations globally, even those out of combat. As for how it would work with the initiative order, I'd say that party members out of combat would all act on the same turn as the one who started combat, until they roll initiative themselves, and non-party-non-combatants would act on the same turn as the person with the highest initiative (or would act on a predetermined, never changing, global base initiative like 10 or something).


TL;DR: Global turn-by-turn limitations are needed in order to mitigate spamming of spells/summons, that can act on their own initiative, by out of combat wizards/warlocks.


PS: It is also weird to see the world around the limited characters move normally, while those in combat are all effectively frozen in time.
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