[RPG] Are creatures in combat aware of the effects of others turns’ in the same round before they begin their own turn

combatdnd-5einitiative

I have never played tabletop D&D before. Lots of NWN and BG on my PC though, so I know the basics. I got a 5e D&D "Essentials Kit" for my birthday and I'm going to try to run a beginner module for my family.

I am confused on the mechanics of combat. Everyone rolls for initiative and takes a 6 second turn in that order. I don't think that means every creature in the encounter takes a consecutive 6 second turn (does it?).

I am envisaging this:

Fighter – I run the length of the room and attack the nearest kobold with my sword (dice rolls, resolved)

Paladin – I do the same thing (dice rolls, resolved)

NPC Kobold – (roll to see who it attacks) attacks Paladin (dice rolls, scores some damage on the Paladin)

Cleric – I cast Healing Word on Paladin, then I go hide round the corner

So then which of these apply:

  1. DM – "OK roll for your heal spell"

or:

  1. DM – "Wait a minute, when you started your heal, neither of the PCs were even in combat yet, how did you know which one to start healing? I am going to rule you chose one at random and will toss a D2 to decide if you guessed right."

or even worse:

  1. "You heal the Paladin and your spell lands just as he closes with the kobold, but since he was at full HP at the time…nothing happens."

It's a question of "do the creatures in combat see the effect of prior creature's six seconds of activity before they commence their own?"

Best Answer

The Combat section of the SRD (System Reference Document - to summarize greatly, the SRD is the "open source"-ish rules of the game without content that is specifically copyrighted outside of the SRD: fluff text, proper names, a handful of specific monsters, etc.) goes into greater detail, but the salient piece is this:

The game organizes the chaos of combat into a cycle of rounds and turns. A round represents about 6 seconds in the game world. During a round, each participant in a battle takes a turn. The order of turns is determined at the beginning of a combat encounter, when everyone rolls initiative. Once everyone has taken a turn, the fight continues to the next round if neither side has defeated the other.

(emphasis mine)

That is, when the cleric casts Healing Word, the kobold's blow has already landed and the paladin has been injured. Healing Word then heals some of the damage the kobold inflicted.

D&D (with, probably, a couple of exceptions) doesn't force anyone to maintain any "game state" other than the way things are "right now" - at the beginning of the cleric's turn, the paladin and fighter have closed with the kobold and the kobold has dealt damage to the paladin "right now". But, the game doesn't look backwards to see what the state was like prior to the current creature's turn when the "active" creature is determining what it can do.

This is why Readying exists: they allow characters to respond to things that happen while it's not their turn, tweaking the order of events in combat at the cost of doing something "now" and the possibility of losing the action altogether. Were it the case that the cleric went first, they could have readied Healing Word to affect whichever ally was first injured, but they couldn't also have hidden behind the corner (since they wouldn't be able to target either of their allies) and their allies might not have been injured, so the spell might have been lost with no effect. Note that there are definitely times when readying an action is a good call; this specific instance just wasn't one of those times.

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