Delay Consequence and Grab / Swallow

[Cascade]

Odd thing came up in a game the other night:
A wizard was hit by a monster and then a follow up grab was successful.
A cleric used delay consequence on the wizard on the grab attack.
The wizard then moved away and cast Freedom of movement.

The round is now over...
So, does the wizard get moved back to the monster and resolve the grab or does the grab fail without moving leaving the wizard at his new location? ..or something else?

To further complicate the issue, the monster has swallow whole...so could the monster resolve swallow whole on it's original turn or does it require the grab condition to be active as in the delay consequence had, well delayed it?

We ruled it the later in favor of the players but we were not sure...

[shroudb]

I had this happen to my own game once.

The way I resolved it was like that:

Delay makes the hit basically not register till next round.

Even though in the monster blocks they are written as such (I guess for simplicity?), if you read the actual abilities of Grab/Knockdown/Push, they are not "part of the hit" but they are either Actions that you can use when you hit, or in the case of Improved, Free Actions with a Trigger when they hit.

Since the hit has not happened "yet" the creature can't use said Actions yet.

But if the creature is in reach when the Hit eventually registers, (in my case it was Improved Grab, so Free Action with a Trigger) so it CAN use the Free Action since the Trigger happens at that point.

[Finoan]

The spell effect doesn't really cover this type of edge case very well.

It says that other effects of the attack are delayed until the spell's effect ends. And that the effects are applied at that point.

So by strictest letter of the rules, the wizard wouldn't have the grabbed condition immediately and so wouldn't be a valid target for swallow whole, but when the spell ends the wizard would be grabbed by the creature in their current and distant location away from the monster.

So... yeah. The way that you ran it at your table is probably fine.

[shroudb]

Finoan wrote:

The spell effect doesn't really cover this type of edge case very well.

It says that other effects of the attack are delayed until the spell's effect ends. And that the effects are applied at that point.

So by strictest letter of the rules, the wizard wouldn't have the grabbed condition immediately and so wouldn't be a valid target for swallow whole, but when the spell ends the wizard would be grabbed by the creature in their current and distant location away from the monster.

So... yeah. The way that you ran it at your table is probably fine.

The creature couldn't have used the Grab ability to begin with since the hit hasn't register yet though, right?

[Finoan]

shroudb wrote:

The creature couldn't have used the Grab ability to begin with since the hit hasn't register yet though, right?

Yeah. I think you are right. Since regular Grab is a second action with a requirement of successfully hitting with the Strike, it wouldn't be a valid action during the creature's turn. And they wouldn't have the action to use on it when the hit was applied when the spell duration wore off.

Improved Grab being a free action with a trigger could be used.

If it was an automatic effect as part of the attack - some sort of 'on a successful hit, the target is immobilized' - then it would be applied when the spell ends.