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I found an old, 500+ post thread on this topic that had 130+ nominations for a FAQ and, in the end, am still confused.
Situation is this:
A. Player readies a spell (Cause Fear) if NPC takes an attack action.
B. NPC declares attack action, triggering the readied action.
C. NPC fails save and is frightened, requiring them to flee the source of the spell.
Question: Did the NPC ever actually use his standard action?
Readying an Action: You can ready a standard action, a move action, a swift action, or a free action. To do so, specify the action you will take and the conditions under which you will take it. Then, anytime before your next action, you may take the readied action in response to that condition. The action occurs just before the action that triggers it. If the triggered action is part of another character’s activities, you interrupt the other character. Assuming he is still capable of doing so, he continues his actions once you complete your readied action. Your initiative result changes. For the rest of the encounter, your initiative result is the count on which you took the readied action, and you act immediately ahead of the character whose action triggered your readied action.
One way I read this is the NPC never actually took his standard action, the spell went off before it, so he is able to take a full round action to withdraw. However, if the readied action "is part of another character's activities", then the NPC simply loses his standard action and is only able to take a move action.
Thoughts? (And thanks in advance.)
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The attempted action is lost.
Take a look at counterspelling. This is a readied action and makes the triggering spell go away.
Take a look at readying to attack a caster. A hit forces a concentration check and a failure of that check ruins the spell.
Can you find any counter examples where the rules state that the triggering action never actually happened and is not consumed?
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Thanks, thorin. Maybe it's just a huge brainfart on my part. Your examples make sense, more so the Counterspell example (to my mind). Funny thing is when I presented this scenario to my F2F table for their input (literally linking to this), one player said, "This is so obscure it will never happen again."
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To be fair, counterspelling is a rarely occurring thing because why wait to see if an opponent casts a spell that *might* be on your list when you can cast a spell that will disable the caster and maybe some of his friends as well?
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To be fair, counterspelling is a rarely occurring thing because why wait to see if an opponent casts a spell that *might* be on your list when you can cast a spell that will disable the caster and maybe some of his friends as well?
counterspelling works well to ok but mostly with arcanist, and mostly by laser focus on the dispel magic spell.
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It can be a good NPC tactic. BBEG has lower level minions ready to counterspell with dispel magic or, if they have knowledge of the PCs they can have specific spells readied. In our Iron Gods campaign we had an encounter with the Technic League leader and his numerous lower level League members. My wizard was known for flinging fireballs, so many of them had memorized fireball just to shut him down. Also summoned monsters with Dispel magic SLA can be useful in this regards, it is like having multiple quickened dispel magics at the ready.
500 post FAQ threads usually have the most painfully obvious answer that is given two posts in.