[RPG] What do you do when there’s nothing to do in combat

actionscombatdnd-3.5e

There are a lot of situations in D&D combat where characters seem to be left without anything to do that round. For example, a bard out of inspires and without slashing weapons beset by zombies, or a melee fighter trapped behind a rank of party members and not able to reach your opponents, or a very weak wizard being out of spells, where you just end up saying "I pass."

What actions are available when a character cannot make any effective physical attacks, has nowhere to move for any tactical advantage, and has no more spells to cast?

Best Answer

Seeing as the combat is in hand the bard could focus on doing something non combat related. Some suggestions are:

  1. Start searching the room (you never know when you might turn up a secret door)
  2. Search/loot the fallen opponents if any
  3. Peer into the next room

Otherwise as others have said Ready an Action, Delay etc and hope the situation changes. In our party if the bard had nothing to do he would start singing of our great achievements and how we are going to win this battle or some other roleplaying colour.

Sometimes you just need to accept that there is nothing constructive this turn you can do, try and set yourself up for a better position next time, think about what would have been useful to have with you now and make sure that you have it with next time. In 3.5 sometimes the best thing you can do in a combat is pass your turn so that the combat gets finished faster and you can move on to something more interesting.