I agree with Claxon. Paladin should be able to target themselves when using LoH as a standard action because they count as an ally for targeting purposes.
This should make most of the need to play shenanigans with the ready action moot, and while we can argue about RAW, a lot of it will come down to individual DMs.
My personal ruling would be to allow a player to use a standard to ready a swift action even if they had already used one in the current turn, with some caveats.
- The triggering condition must relate to actions taken by other characters (and cannot be too generic, etc.)
- The readied action must be relevant to the triggering condition. That is, it must have some plausible interaction with the trigger to justify interrupting the other character's action.
- If the readied swift action is taken after being triggered, the player does not have a swift action available to use on their next turn, just as if they had used an immediate action.
Effectively, this allows a player to use a standard action to convert one of their swift action abilities into an immediate action but with the additional downside of changing their place in the initiative order. I can't think of many reasons why you might want to do this though.
Man, this thread got crazy.Very swiftly, too.
Toshy and others gave the RAW, legalistic interpretation for the original question.
RAW arguments aside, there are probably swift actions that should not be available as standard or move actions, and others that it probably won't be an issue to allow. Smite evil is the ability that probably should have just been made a free action (like rage). But here we are, reminding paladins that they are LG, and shouldn't be looking for workarounds.
I actually quite agree that we generally shouldn't allow swift actions to be done as standard actions.
However, LOH is a special case because the default usage of it is as a standard action, with a caveat of being able to do it as a swift action on one's self. Unfortunately they didn't use a slightly more permissive wording to say "may use lay on hands on self as a swift action", which I believe to be the intent.
Also because it doesn't make sense that you could touch someone else as a standard action, but can only touch yourself as a swift action.
I've been thinking about this for a while now, and the only problematic swift actions I could think of were from mythic sources. Those are the only swift actions that can be more powerful than the standard actions they are inspired by.
There are also some perks to a being a swift action that the standard doesn't get, like ignoring most AoOs. So, I'd probably create a houserule like this.
"A swift action from a non-mythic source can be performed as a standard action. This is still a standard action and does not benefit from general qualities of swift actions, such as avoiding Attacks of Opportunity"
If you are using mythic rules, you should be comparing a mythic swift action to a mythic standard action instead of a normal standard action. The problem is not the exchanging of a standard action for a swift action; it is exchanging a standard action for any mythic action. Just about every mythic action is more powerful than a standard action.