Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Does 5E allow delay turn or ready attack?

I've never played tabletop but coming to BG from playing Solastia (also based on 5e), they have the option to ready an attack (ranged, melee or cantrip) but unless I'm missing something, BG3 requires you to use your action when your turn comes up or end your turn.

Does BG3 have some option to delay your turn in the initiative order and/or ready an action? If not, has anything been said about plans to add this? Is this supposed to be an option in 5E?

5e allows it, but it isn't implemented (yet?) in BG3.

Fingers crossed. The game NEEDS more 5e elements like this.

Yes please!

...Ready attack, and if an enemy comes in range, then you get to finish your turn manually.

really? i can play just fine: experience the story; play alone or as a 4 group: play bard or wizard or barbarian or fighter: can do the missions explore the lands: why do you think it NEEDS this element?

Unfortunately those are not in the game. As to why, I couldn’t begin to guess.

BG3's current implementation of the 5E ruleset is heavily skewed towards offensive tactics, especially surprise round alpha strikes. A lot of the defensive tools such as ready actions and reactions don't exist right now. As it is currently, I've found myself having greater success approaching each fight as if I was playing DOS2, instead of utilizing tactics that I would in Solasta.

I consider the lack of ready actions and reactions to be something like missing a literal third of the combat system. Is BG3 still a 5E game without them? Yes, but only by the most vague definitions possible.

Even then, I can't imagine anyone being against the implementation of ready actions. Dodge I can understand, and there are debates about how proper reactions would work, but ready actions have literally none of those downsides and it would give characters something to do if there are no other viable options. There's a lot of uselessly hitting 'End Turn' without doing anything in BG3 for melee-focused characters (if you don't want to risk swapping to a bow to make an attack that turn, which means you also lose your opportunity attack) right now.

Ready actions can be exceedingly complicated. So unless they want to narrow it down to just a few parameters theres no way they could implement it in a way thats even remotely close to what it is in pnp. Just impolementing the combat part though should be easily done, right? We already have attack of op in the game. So making a 'hold attack until enemy in range' function shouldnt be that complicated to do right?

Im just guessing here honestly. I cant code so wouldnt know. But it seems to me that alot of the code for attack of op could be reverse engineered here.

Honestly just allow people to delay their turn, permanently moving lower in the initiative order at the cost of their reaction. It's vastly similar and fulfills a similar function.
- Doesn't require any action/bonus action/movement-lost considerations that Readying does require
- Doesn't require any automation/decision tree to cover possible readied actions: attack first enemy seen? attack a specific enemy? under what conditions?
- Already basically implemented in DOSII

Failing that, Ready should temporarily move you in initiative order (hopefully to a place of your choosing) and remove all your bonus actions and movement and reaction, leaving only your action. Having specified triggers would almost certainly be either way too limiting (e.g., Solasta), way too complicated (full decision tree for the conditions you'd use your readied action), or too intrusive (pop-up promts: "Do you want to use your readied action now?")

Non really. They are conceptually simpler than reactions.
And once again Solasta managed to implement both just fine with an overall budget that wouldn’t cover for BG3’s launch trailer.

@mrfuji3 delaying actions would NOT serve the same tactical purpose of Ready Actions.
A RA melee attack for instance is something you’d spare for when your melee fighter is dealing with a flying creature that needs to come down at you to be hit. Or when a phase spider (a genuine one, not the ranged spitters we currently have in the game) would attempt to stalk you.

A delayed turn here wouldn’t really cover the same function.

Readied Action is an Action in Solasta: Crown of the Magister. Actions in Solasta: Crown of the Magister are limited movements per turn a character can perform. Actions can be used for movement and combat to maneuver across a combat area usually to prepare to attack, aid, use an item or fall back. The actions that a Character can perform are based on their Class and Equipment.

READIED ACTION INFORMATION
Action Type: Reaction
Effect: Use your Readied Action
Readied Action is triggered once conditions are met.

Players must use the Ready Action for this to occur during the player's turn. It will use both an Action and Reaction.

Source: wiki

- Yes, we need ready action, together with proper reactions.

- No, ready action is not the same as delay turn.
Ready means you use your action and say: "When this happens I will do that action as reaction." Usually you select "When an enemy moves to a position I can target then I attack it with my equipped weapon or a spell I have selected." So you act first when the conditions are met and maybe you can kill an enemy once he enters the room before he can do anything.

Imagine an enemy mage is in the next room (low HP and AC, powerful spells). You can:
- Walk in the next room and end your turn because he is too far away. He will kill or CC you on his next turn.
- Delay your turn. The enemy will enter the room and kill or CC you on his next turn.
- Move to the door so you can only be seen from within the room and ready your attack. When the enemy enters the room you attack him before he can act.

Hey Guys,

Haven't really had the time to be actively involved in the discussions very much the past 6 months but, let me add my 2 cents. While the game plays 'fine' from a game standpoint, it does not really implement an awful lot of 5e in its current state. I am aware of course that a lot is probably still in development or just shielded from us at present. But the game could use a lof of DnD elements in my opinion.

Not holding my breath on it but, onde of the most important thing being class restrictions on learning spells (I read somewhere wizards can no longer learn healing spells so that is a start of sorts), so no wizzies learning any druid or cleric spell unless it is a part of their proficiency or subclass (some spells like flaming sphere overlap as I recall, or at least they do in Solasta).

And ready action/ proper reactions is another thing that could indeed add a tactical element which is currently missing from the game. I mean who here wouldn't want to put your ranger, wizard or other class on, for example, ready ranged or cantrip atack so that when a enemy moves into range he or she automatically attacks it.

One could argue that it slows the flow of combat down to a degree I guess, but I don't think we want BG 3 to be a simple action romp with no tactics whatsoever (well aside from positioning and laying traps currently). Does 5e also allow something akin to hmm let's say x-com 2's overwatch? e.g. you say the ranger readies a ranged attack and watches intently over a certain section of the room they are in currently.

And please inform me, how faithful to 5e is solasta's reaction system in regards to PHB functionality? Why doesn't Larian simply look at how solasta coded it and work out a system that fits BG3 ?

It iss kinda weird that they haven't added more subclasses to existing classes so far so they can be tested (we are +/- ayear away from release now and 1,5 years into EA). Not sure how problematic this will be but classes like wizard have a great many subclasses (unless they cut that down compared to 3.5 e). Would be nice to be able to roll something different than what we have now. But I fear this will be left out until full release sadly.

HA! You think BG3 will have truly flying creatures!? Or genuine phase spiders?! Good one XD

My worry is that even Solasta (super-faithful D&D) implemented readied actions as: base attack, base ranged attack, base *cantrip*, that procs on the first thing that moves within range. A simple but kind-of poor system, that also wouldn't necessarily help in your examples. A melee enemy could enter said melee fighter's range before said flying creature or phase spider and the automatic readied action would go off then.

My bet is that few enough things in BG3 will have specific movesets and be important enough enemies that readied actions as opposed to delays will be needed. E.g., this:
is unlikely. That the enemy will be in a situation where your one attack *will* kill him, and your entire party will be in a situation where one attack from the mage *will* TPK or CC all of them, and the turn order and environment is as you described such that you can't reach the enemy in your move but they will come within your attackable range in order to AoE your party.

Again, I'm not against readied actions in general. But if I had to choose between a generic Delay and a Solasta-esqe Ready, I'd probably choose the former for the greater control over character actions. Or my explained-above Ready system where you choose a latter initiative spot and get to take a single action there, but your initiative spot goes back to the original spot next round. If you have a better implementation, please explain; I'd be happy to hear it.

I wish they would allow to delay initiative, even dragging your active initiative characters card at the top, dragging only to the right or left only to skip this turn to get higher initiative in next round. this allows for strategic battles

While strategic, it's worth noting that DOS2 had something similar (IIRC it allowed you to delay your actions until the end of the turn), and in actual practice it ended up being rather abusable in the sense that you could just turtle up somewhere on high ground, delay and wait for an enemy to come to you, and then effectively unleash 2 turns worth of actions before most of the enemies get to do anything. (I say 'most' instead of 'all' because that game had round robin initiative.)

Then again, it's still an extra defensive tactic to consider regardless, of which BG3 is very lacking in terms of general defensive options outside of pre-position cheese right now. And utilizing this type of tactic for this specific type of cheese isn't exactly compatible with the current popular strategy of stealth alpha strike surprise rounds. The ability to delay your turn would definitely help melee characters if they have nothing in range that they can swing at.