DatsyukianDeke's page

As a general rule, you cannot delay to put off an involuntary thing.

Turns are actually sequential from a perspective of how the game is run, but it's supposed to be a simulation of fluid time. Obviously it's not, because a creature can be knocked unconscious before their turn in a round and get to take no actions

Likewise, I share your perspective on this. I'm not the GM in this case, however, so I don't have the final say. I like your description of Pathfinder as turn-based strategy rather than real-time strategy.

Thank you all for your input!

The turn sequence is an abstract representation of time, so there are parts of it that don't translate perfectly to real life. What it does is give us a guideline for how to run a turn-based simulation of real-time events.

This is a more eloquent rendition of how I interpreted the round mechanics. Thank you for putting it so clearly. It's nice to have some assurance that, at the very least, I'm not crazy.

Hello! I am a relatively new Pathfinder player, and I am in a group with several much more experienced players. The other day, we had a disagreement about a rather complicated situation that boiled down to a fairly simple conceptual rules question: do all player turns in a round occur simultaneously or is there some discernible amount of time that elapses between the various initiative orders in a round? I feel that the latter is more accurate, but one of the other players in the group said that this is not the case. Can anyone shed light on this?

For some background on why this was relevant to our game, the aforementioned player failed their save against the Command spell, which states

You give the subject a single command, which it obeys to the best of its ability at its earliest opportunity. You may select from the following options…

The spell has a duration of 1 round. On his subsequent turn, the player who failed his save chose to delay his action until after the spell caster, claiming that since “Effects that last a certain number of rounds end just before the same initiative count that they began on,” the one round duration of Command had expired and he was no longer required to obey the order. When someone else in the group pointed out that the spell specifically states that the target must obey “at its earliest opportunity”, he said that since all turns in a round occur simultaneously, he had not violated the edict of the spell because no time had elapsed between his original initiative position and the new one he assumed after delaying his action.

I disputed this with him, specifically citing the text of the Delay action, which states that

You never get back the time you spend waiting to see what’s going to happen.

To me, this implies that some amount of time must lapse while you are waiting. He, in turn, pointed out that it would be impossible for all the actions in a turn to occur sequentially and still fit within the 6 second window of a round. After a couple of discussions on the subject, neither of us are convinced by the other's viewpoint, and I have decided to not push the issue further. After all, rules are not worth friends getting upset at each other, and the game is still very fun either way. This doesn’t change the fact, however, that I am very curious about the actual answer. If a similar issue crops up down the line or with a different group of players, I’d like to have a better understanding of how it should work. I appreciate your responses in advance.