So we are playing last night and we run it to a problem with delay action. One of the PC declares a delayed action waiting to see what and adversary is going to do.

So which of these is the correct interpretation of a delayed action?

1) Delaying PC gets to go just before another character and must interrupt before the other character declares his action.
2) Delaying PC gets to go just before another character, but can wait until that character has declared his action.
3) Delaying PC gets interrupt another character at any point in their action.

In my opinion the first seem that best. The other two versions seem to possibly give the delaying character knowledge he could not have.

Example:

Bad dude standing there with a knife and the PC has gun draw on the Bad Dude (BD). The round starts and the PC wins initiative. Not wanting to shoot the BD unless he has to he delays his actions. BD decides he’s not going down with out a fight and declares he is going to run at the PC and stab him with his knife. The PC of course wants to shoot BD before he gets to him and stabs him. When in BD action does PC interrupt? In this case it conceivable that the PC could interrupt BD’s action as it will take a measurable amount of time to cover the distance and make his stabbing attack.

More extreme Example:

Same situation as the first example but both the PC and BD have a firearm, Mexican standoff. The PC again does not want to kill the BD unless his has to and delays his action. BD declares his is firing his gun. It would seem unrealistic, if not impossible, in this situation for the PC to even perceive that BD was firing his weapon let alone interrupt the action to act first. He would have to be a mind reader to know that BD was going to fire and not surrender.

The examples are sort of kludged but I hope you guys can give us some help on working out how to use delay actions. The book is not real clear about when in another characters action you can interrupt if you have a delayed action.

Thanks for the help
mcb

one i think is the most fitting. the person holds back on a hairtrigger waiting for a hint of action from the enemy. the moment he moves its action time.

I would declare it a surprise round in the standoff situation use of combat pool to win reaction test detracts as per a normal combat action, winner gets to shoot first.

In general, I'd say you go with option #1.

In my games when a character who has delayed his action wants to interrupt the guy acting, they make reaction tests. Usually the guy acting gets some bonus, but in your knife example he'd obviously be penalized.

I typically go with option 2. If there was significant reason for one character not to be able to respond to an action, I'd break it, but otherwise held actions 0wnz0r j00.

~J

mcb, I agree with your assessment that in the knife case the guy with Delay Action should be able to interrupt, but not in the gun case, but that the rules don't help us very much in making it happen this way. To accomplish this we allow the GM to simply decide the order things happen, despite the canon rules.

To help out the GM, as a general house rule, a character in our game may state what he/she is delaying for. For example, a samurai can state "I Delay Action with my SMG pointed at the doorway, waiting for someone to move into it." If the specified event occurs, the delaying character is allowed to interrupt another's action. Otherwise delaying characters take an action after someone else is done. A delaying character taking movement has that movement occur at the same time as the interrupted character.

This house rule allows one PC to delay till another PC starts moving up to an opponent, and move with the other PC such that both attack at the same time. Both get the Friends in Melee bonus.

Our house rules allow a Delaying character to take half walking movement. This allows a PC to move slowly down a hallway continually covering the door at the far end.

OutTeam, I like your house rule I think I will suggest that to our GM. As usual it seems you just have to use common sense to reason out weather a PC could or could not interupt another character.

You can house rule it to whatever you want, but the actual game rule is that if youre delaying an action, you get to see what everyone else is declaring before you choose to act.

So in your example, PC goes, declares a delay, BD goes, declares the knife charge, PC uses his delayed action to fire (presumably twice if hes holding a pistol, as that is a simple action).

I'll go with Option 2. Canon seems to suggest that you can delay in order to see who does what. But in the first place, the slowest guy declares his action first! So by Canon, the BD's action will be resolved first although he declares later than the PC, if the BD had higher initiative. But if PC had higher initiative, it doesn't matter, the BD has to decalre his action before but resolve it later than the PC.

I'd only require reaction to be rolled if something unexpected happened to the holding character.

IE: Character A is holding his action, scanning his AR down the an alley he knows character B is down. Character B's action is to stick his hand out with his SMG and spray some suppressive fire towards the alley entrance. I'd let character A roll reaction to dive out of the way as part of his action rather than needing dodge straight away.

Other than that the holding character can interrupt at any point within reason.

There can be, easily. If someone is on the sidelines of a battle they might be unwilling to get involved until someone forces them to, holding their action the whole time. They may even have lost initiative and simply be holding their action while the opponent does other things. If they get shot at, I don't want them to automatically get first licks.


The thing is, it makes metagaming strategy beat character speed. According to the rules I can have a reaction of 100 and some putz with a reaction of 2 can go between when I draw and when I fire, provided they carefully calculate when everyone is going and the appropriate time to delay their action and all that.

Right. Because they have a better initiative score in that Pass. The part you quoted refers specifically to delaying actions within a specific Initiative Pass. Your score is always going to be higher than the person you are interrupting.

The rules for delaying cross-pass don't contradict or limit them, though. They use the same rules.

The rules you mentioned, however, ("The person with the higher initiative roll for the Turn will go first, whether it be the Delayer, or the person whose action it happens to be. If those are tied, then it goes to augmented reaction, then unagmented reaction, then if all those are tied, you do a single D6 roll off.") appear nowhere.

Ok, going to summarize and include page references to clear up all the confusion. Ive reread the section carefully and noticed the specific wording means it was slightly different from what the above posters, myself included, have said.

For the example, there will be guys A, B, and C. They have respective Initiatives of 30, 20, 15, and reactions of 5, 5, 10.

Guy A wins initiative, and chooses to delay, on 30.
Guy B acts, shooting at guy C, on 20.
Guy C is next, but A declares he is going to shoot C first using his held action. However, he is going to wait until C pops out from behind his cover, to make the shot easier.

Now, according to BBB p.103 under "delayed actions" in paragraph 2 in the second and third sentences: Someone delaying must declare on the phase theyre acting *before* anyone else. Guy A has done this, by declaring before C. However, according to BBB p.103 under "delayed actions" in paragraph 2 in the last sentence, he can choose to act *after* C because he normally would have gone before.

Note: The delayer (guy A) *cannot* wait until C declares and then decide to use his action, he must declare first.
Note: He *can* act anytime before or after C because he had a higher initiative value, he just has to declare he is acting first.

Now on to pass 2.
Guy A acts, shooting at B this time, on 20.
Guy B chooses to delay, on 10.
Guy C also chooses to delay, on 5.
Pass 3.
Guy A is next, but B declares he will act to avoid losing his held action. However Guy C also declares he will act because he wants to shoot B before he acts.

Now, according to BBB p.103 under "delayed actions" in paragraph 2 in the second to last sentence, it says to resolve multiple people delaying as if resolving an initiative tie.

Now at the bottom of BBB p.102 under "initiative ties" appear the guidlines for doing that. The order is: higher initiative value, higher adjusted reaction, higher unadjusted reaction, highest d6 rolloff. In this case, B would win due to his higher iniative roll. *If* their rolls were tied, C would win, because he has a higher reaction.

Soooo, as to the very first post, its more of a combination of Options 1 and 3.

To use your example, the Player could choose to delay until the Bad Dudes turn, but would have to declare his action *before* the Bad Dude. However, his declared action could take place during *any* point in the Bad Dude's turn. So the player can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, but *cannot* see what the npc is doing before he makes his decision. The only way to wait and see what someone is doing is to simply go after them.

The way i read and perhaps im being a little simple in this.

Character A wins iniative and delays.
Character B declear's their action, Character A inturpts with his full action chossing that action at this point. If that action happens to be run 10 meters out of los to waste the other guys action then thats it.

At least that how i understand the turn of events on pg 104

Thank The White Dwarf,

After carefully reading the book again and your post I have to agree with you. But just to clarify it for myself lets look again at my second example the Mexican standoff.

Both characters in a protracted combat come around cover with guns ready and run into each other a short distance apart, ie Mexican standoff. This has happened on initiative, at the end of the previous round, since its been and ongoing combat. They roll for initiative and the PC wins the initiative. The PC does not want to kill the BD unless his has to and declares he is delaying his action hoping BD will surrender rather than continue the fight. It now comes to BD's turn and PC is now required to declare that he is going to interrupt BD’s turn if he want to before BD declares his action. PC does not have to declare his action yet but does have to declare he will interrupt BD‘s turn. Now since BD has the lower initiative he declares his action first and he is firing his gun. Then PC declares he is also going to fire his weapon in self-defense and since he has the higher initiative he decide when during the turn he will take his action. Obviously he will chose to fire first.

Does this sound correct?
mcb

Like I said, though, there's no check to see that his number is higher for "who goes first" rights. He just gets it because he delayed, that's all. If he needed to have a certain stat or score or something, it would have said so because that's what the examples are for. They explicitly indicate where to check for scores and stats and such.


I think this is getting complicated because we can't even seem to agree on what SR3 says, let alone what should happen. If you already use house rules (or different interpretations of canon or whatever else we can call it to be as diplomatic as possible ), then obviously my suggestion of a reaction roll is unecessary. I think that's all I really need to say about it.

Doooods read my previous post, its always crystal clear who goes first after a careful reading of the rules. The only situation calling for a check to break a tie has a specific procedure to follow, and in all cases the guy who wins is the guy who normally wouldve gone first anyhow, unless they really are completley tied and it comes to a roll off. If you delay cross pass to 'interrupt' someone acting before you in the first pass (and thus before you in the second pass as well), you are faced with the same situation as below. You can choose to act first, or during, the turn if you state you will do so. Only if someone else delaying were to also try to act would you even get to the 'tiebreaker' scenario. There is no real "interrupting" in SR, only stating what reaction will occur if an action takes place.

To MCB:
Close. The PC will have to not only delcare he is interrupting, but also state is action, before the NPC does anything at all. He can declare that his stated action will occur after the NPC, but he must state what that action will be before seeing what the NPC will do.

So it would go like, whip around the corner, mexican standoff, roll initiative. PC wins. PC delays hoping NPC will surrender. NPCs turn to act comes up. PC has a choice: choose to act this combat phase, stating his action and its time of occurance; or choose to let the NPC take his turn. He cannot wait to see what the NPC will do at all before declaring his intention to act, and what action he will take, and when it will occur.

If the PC wanted to wait on a surrender, he would likley declare something along the lines of "I will use a simple action to draw, a free action to say 'surrender!', and then delay my second simple action to shoot the NPC if he does anything but surrender." So hes stated his intent to act, the actions, and the time of the actions, all without seeing what NPC will do at all. Then NPC will act, drawing to fire, and the PC will intervene by shooting; not because he can interrupt but because he declared he would use his speed advantage to wait until the last possible second to fire, all before the NPC acted.

Make sense?

Excellent, that make more sense then my interpretation. That has the correct feel to me and does not give the higher inititive/delaying character foreknowledge of the NPCs action before the delaying character states his.

Thanks again
mcb

That's what the example on page 103 says, too.