Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Let characters delay their turn

So with a shared turn of party members that are next to each other in the turn order the combat got 10 times better, but there is still something missing.
If party members could delay their turn you could get all of your members to share one turn, which would bring much more strategic choise to combat.

As of right now you cant really come up with a strategy based on this shared turn idea because its just rng which members will be next to each other.
Also it makes generally a lot of sense to be able to delay ones turn.

Please add this feature since these combat rules really need any kind of variance to not get boring quickly

It would also be logical to carry over the free bonus actions and actions to the next turn

I disagree with this. A round is supposed to represent what characters can do in 6sec. Everything is balanced arround this and being able to stack actions makes no sense.

I would be fine with delay turn but only if it cost a bonus action. If not, it's gonna be another "I do it each round" thing.

Time is supposed to be more or less flowing in combat, happening in a sort of simultaneity that is abstracted for functionality. If characters can delay their turns, then they can order themselves exactly as they want to in the initiative, which will cause them to inevitably group all together in the exact order and optimum rhythm they desire, every single combat, every time, without variation. At this point, initiative itself has become redundant and has no purpose to existing at all. Being able to delay your turns would make combat even more formulaic and boring than it already is.

Being able to wholesale delay your turn also has substantial ramifications for spell and ability abuse, many of which revolve around the timing of turns, which being able to slide your turn down the order past other enemies destroys the balance of.

In 5e, there exists the Ready action, which is limited and does not actually shift your turn in the initiative, and this is for very good reason.

I'm in support of 5e's ready action being properly implemented.... but that would also recall a proper implementation of reactions, so...

I disagree. As a general rule it would be bad practise, even though I know there are individual examples where it might make sense.

Carry-over would make more sense if it was an action point system rather than an... I dunno what to call it, let's say an "action type" system. But generally the "saving" of actions would interfer with the way DnD is trying to simulate and sequence events happening at the same time. Doing nothing for six seconds do not make you able to do twice as much in the next six seconds

I agree with every word

I am in total agreement as well and would love it if they could properly implement ready action.

I agree and disagree.

The part where I agree more is the risk that, without being forced to make do with a given turn order in each fights, some players could end up developing combos that they'll use all the time, making the combat a bit stale. There was also the risk of analysis-paralysis.

These are part of why Larian scrapped their initial plan of having all your team play, then all the enemies play, as I think Nick Pechenin explained in a video I watched at some point (btw, I wish Larian had Nick demo the game instead of Swen from now on ... showing off how you can win while having no clue about how the game works isn't the best way to sell the game to me ... though perhaps it's selling it well for different types of players).

Another part was probably that you could be exposed to taking a lot of damage on your fragile characters without a chance to react, and that whichever team would go first would have way too big an advantage.


I'm less convinced about the power/balance issue. Say that the turn order is Shadowheart, Enemy 1, Enemy 2, Enemy 3, Gale. If Shadowheart Delays her turn to next-to-Gale, this opens up combos. But maybe Shadowheart could have killed E1 (and perhaps E2, if dual-wielding of using AOE damage) on her turn. Not doing this means that by the time it's Gale+SH's turn, the team has perhaps received one more attack than it would have otherwise received. And this is a cost. Is that cost big enough to compensate to gain of having SH+Gale playing together instead of separately ? I don't know.

Also, if Delay was to exist, I think it should then probably cost a Bonus Action (or Action ?). This would increase the cost of Delay to "(B)A + allowing more enemy Actions". Perhaps it then becomes not-so-clear that Delay is obviously beneficial, all the time. Maybe the use of Delay becomes really situation-dependent. What I'm saying is : there are levers that could be pulled to try to balance a Delay action. Which may or may not be powerful enough, I don't know.

Anyway, all this is pure speculation.


But I would certainly welcome a Ready action.

For example, Shadowheart could Ready a Create Water spell and drop it when Gale's turn start. Basically, Ready is a form of Delay, but with an added cost : you forsake flexibility. If your plan was to cast Create Water + Ray Of Frost, with Delay, if Gale or Shadowheart died when the enemies played or they split or else, you can switch to making a new plan. With Ready, you cannot. Ready may also be more restrictive, I don't know if "When Gale starts moving" is allowed in 5E (PHB doesn't seem to forbid it). Anyway, I presume that 5E was play-tested more extensively than BG3, especially play-tested for combat, so maybe that's why the 5E designers had Delay/Ready be as it is in 5E.

Ready Action is already a thing on D&D. At least at my table though pur DM makes us describe what we are waiting for to happen. If it happens the attack is used "like an enemy entering the room" and such.

I agree with Ready Action. That is a 5e rule, and it is a pain in the butt when one character is blocking your path and you have to just skip a character's turn because they can't do what you need them to do.

Easy fix: Let me click on my character's icon in the initiative order and drag it to the initiative slot I want them to take their turn in. I may have already taken an action or moved, but if I move my initiative to another spot in the order, that is when I will resume my turn. The system would need to leave a placeholder to save their original initiative spot so that on the next round they go back to that same initiative slot.

Bam.

It may not be perfect, but it's close. Trying to implement a true Ready Action function in a game like this is difficult. Solasta has something in place, but it isn't perfect either. The game limits you to what type of action you can truly Ready. Implementing something like what Solasta has, however, would at least be better than no ability to Ready Action at all.

Different easy fix (at least for the situation you mention): Use the 5e rule that lets you move through your ally's space (considered difficult terrain).

The power issue comes up in a slightly more nuanced way than the' team has an optimal play that they then will always use' boring combat problem. Most commonly the abuses and breaks that arise from being able to move yourself in the initiative order are to do with spell and ability timing, and getting more value for them than intended. Here's an example:

I'm a monk, and there's a big bad in front of me. The turn order goes: Monk, BBEG, Fighter, Barb, Wizard.

I hit the Big bad and stun him. Huzzah. He's now stunned until the *end of my next turn*, giving everyone one round to wail on him, and have advantage on things or to have him auto-fail some types of saves.
Everyone else takes their turns, and then it's me again; "I delay my turn until after Wizard!" Now everyone gets a SECOND full round of that stun, and the BBEG can't do anything about it, and has to skip a *second* turn, because it still hasn't been the end of my next turn because I ducked to delay until after him. And it's cost zero extra resources.

There are other examples as well, but most of them are to do with the timing and duration of spells and class abilities that are balanced around being active for a specific amount of time, metered by the initiative order. Begin able to change it at will, round to round, does a lot more than people realise at first glance.

Ah, that's a very good example. I had thought about combos, and there are probably ways to balance the gains with costs. But this is about extending effect durations.

So if Ready gets implemented (or any form of Delay), it should be implemented well. When using the Ready action, the character doesn't move in the initiative track. They just do their thing later, using their Reaction. But their turn ends when it should.

You can only delay your on your turn, so the effect will already have ended when you delay it :P

It realy depend on implementation.
You can put decision to delay befor the "start" of your turn.
You can make it so your turn isn't "ending" when you delay it.
Or any other way.

Dungeon master guide contains a variant rule to reroll initiative every round. Haven't had experience using that rule, because it increase bookkeeping. Though in that case randomness will probably balance this problem more in favor of monsters (just cause there are much more of them than players).

The "next turn" rule is a tabletop mechanic anyway. In a video game, we can go with the more intuitive model of "same point in time during the next round".

But if you do use the next turn rule then yes. Like Dexal said, the rule would just be that you can only delay your turn after starting your turn so that particular exploit wouldn't work (but what if someone uses a spell to reduce your initiative? XD).

I think there should be a "delay turn" option, but ideally I'd like to combine this with overhauling the whole initiative / turn order system in DnD. I'm not really a fan of it. But I understand changing that would make people unhappy. XD

For the reasons stated there is actually a potential strategy behind having your entire (or most of) your party with deliberately low initiative so that you can exploit the turn order to get combos (eg sitting out of range during the opponents turns before charging in to attack en masse all at once). This effect is compounded in BG3: currently when you have multiple characters who are adjacent in the turn order, you then get to choose the order they take their turns.

So being able to delay your turn at least means that there's no disadvantage to having high initiative.

I think you and Dex both missed the part where the stun doesn't end until the *End* of your next turn. If you delay your turn, then you are not ending your turn and your turn hasn't ended. If it has ended, then what you're doing later isn't a delayed turn, it's a second turn, or it's a held reaction... in which case we're back to the ready action needing to be properly implemented.

Aaaah. Lol, yeah.