[RPG] How specific does the Action for Ready need to be

dnd-5ereadied-action

Starting with the rules for the Ready action:

Sometimes you want to get the jump on a foe or wait for a particular circumstance before you act. To do so, you can take the Ready action on your turn, which lets you act using your reaction before the start of your next turn.

First, you decide what perceivable circumstance will trigger your reaction. Then, you choose the action you will take in response to that trigger, or you choose to move up to your speed in response to it. Examples include "If the cultist steps on the trapdoor, I'll pull the lever that opens it," and "If the goblin steps next to me, I move away."

When the trigger occurs, you can either take your reaction right after the trigger finishes or ignore the trigger. Remember that you can take only one reaction per round.

My question centers around the "choose the action you will take". How specific does this need to be? Are you literally just choosing one of the standard action choices ("Attack", "Help", "Hide", etc.), or do you need to specify any "parameters" or "targets" or the like for the action you will take?

To try to make this a bit more concrete, could I ready an action for "When the Goblin moves, I Attack", and then when the trigger happens I can choose whether to attack the Goblin or the Bugbear, and what weapon I'm using? Or do I have to give those details up front as part of specifying the Ready action? Other actions like Search and Help similarly have details that need to be given in order to really be, well, actionable, and it may be useful on occasion to defer the specifics until the trigger actually happens.

Shedding some light and some confusion on the issue is that Cast a Spell has its own special rules for being readied, but I don't know whether to treat that as a precedent for specifying details up front (since presumably you need to at least specify which spell to be able to "hold its energy", though I don't know about details like spell slot or targets), or whether it's a case where it's a specific rule specifically because because it's different from the general rule.

Related but different questions:

Best Answer

You must choose an action or movement, but you can omit other information.

Then, you choose the action you will take in response to that trigger, or you choose to move up to your speed in response to it.

As we can see from this sentence, the minimum requirement is to choose an action or movement. I believe "the action" in this context is anything from Actions in Combat which includes:

one of the actions presented here, an action you gained from your class or a special feature, or an action that you improvise. Many monsters have action options of their own in their stat blocks.
When you describe an action not detailed elsewhere in the rules, the GM tells you whether that action is possible and what kind of roll you need to make, if any, to determine success or failure.

So for instance "If X happens, I attack" and "If X happens, I use channel divinity" meet this requirement, whereas "If X happens, I do something" is not specific enough.

The PHB also gives us some examples from which we can make additional inferences:

  1. If the cultist steps on the trapdoor, I'll pull the lever that opens it
  2. If the goblin steps next to me, I move away

The first example is very specific.

In fact, there isn't any relevant information that we could add to "I'll pull the lever that opens it" to make the Ready action more specific: we can pull that one lever that opens the trapdoor mentioned in the trigger, and even if other levers were present we wouldn't be allowed to pull them.

The first example also shows us that we can choose an action implicitly, because in this example we chose the Use an Object action without naming it explicitly.

The second example is very vague.

There is plenty of relevant information that is missing from "I move away", such as whether we will walk, swim, or fly, and which path we will take. Therefore, the second example confirms that we can be vague and omit relevant information.

However, even this example is not completely devoid of relevant information, as "away" implies a general direction. This suggests that it's best to include at least some relevant information.

Moreover, eventually we must choose whether to walk, swim, or fly, and which path to take. So if our Ready action is vague we can make decisions during the reaction.

Your example.

You can ready an action for "When the Goblin moves, I Attack" as this meets the minimum requirement for the Ready action.
Because that Ready action omits relevant information, you must make decisions during your reaction, such as who to target with your attack(s) and which weapon to attack with.

In particular, you could choose to attack a Goblin, a Bugbear, or anyone else for that matter. However, you cannot unsheathe a weapon during your reaction because you can only use your free object interaction "during either your move or your action", which means that your choice is limited to the weapon(s) that you are wielding when the Goblin moves.

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