Can enemies not be flat footed?

[Cleftin Twain]

Title.

Even when I charge in on enemies still waiting to act I never see the flat footed bonus in the combat log. Not how it works for the player it seems, from my experience.

[Marcos_DS]

Might have to do with the time required for the animation and movement to play. I often get them flatfooted on my combat-opnening ranged sneak attacks...

[Matt]

Ennemies can be flat-footed (witnessed that many many times) if they roll a lower initiative check than the attacker and don't have the uncanny dodge feat.

[Eonwe]

Same here, i catch enemies flat footed often.

[Bob of Mage]

If I recall right someone is only flat-footed until they are aware of a threat and can act. So as soon as they get their first action they are no longer flat-footed, unless they are still unaware (such as being attacked from stealth).

[Cleftin Twain]

I've yet to catch an enemy flat footed, be it with my ranged or charge attacks that initiated combat. Doesn't matter what the initiative rolls are, yet my guys get the flat footed condition normally.

I have Pause on every round end and I check the combat log often just to see how dice rolls and such are playing out. Haven't seen anyone get it a single time. Other buffs and debuffs show accordingly though. Not sure what's going on tbh.

[Selvokaz]

in the first act you can sneak up on the a group of sleeping bandits, and kill one of them before he or she wakes up, getting the flat-footed bonus i believe.

[Matt]

Also (but that comes much later), when casting an AoE damage spell before combat starts, all ennemies are flat-footed, which does wonders with an AT surprise spells.

[Eonwe]

I've been looking at it more closely and what seems to happen is this :

If i win the initiative and i attack before an enemy can react, said enemy is "flat footed" in the sense that i can sneak attack him right away but he will still use his normal AC, not the "flat footed" AC.
So OP is right, in a sense you can't catch enemies flat footed.

[Matt]

No, OP isn't right.

It just took me 1 min to create a new adventurer and Flat-Foot the first encountered ennemy:

https://imgur.com/a/UA4ndVp

[=[NK]= Col. Jack O'Neil]

Maybe read what flat footed actually is, and the difference between touch ac. A person gaining all their ac from armour and no other sources will have the same total ac as they're flat footed ac.

[Eonwe]

Yeah my bad, i was in dungeon where you rescue Tristian when i checked and it just occurred to me that probably everything there has uncanny dodge.

[Cleftin Twain]

Originally posted by Matt:

No, OP isn't right.

It just took me 1 min to create a new adventurer and Flat-Foot the first encountered ennemy:

https://imgur.com/a/UA4ndVp

THANK YOU

I was getting so annoyed that I was not getting the bonus. I think one issue that lead me down this path is that sometimes initiating Combat with an attack doesn't show the attack roll in the combat log for me.

For example I did the spiders warm cave twice and initiated with Linzi from stealth and kept missing but the combat log wouldn't show the combat roll. I can't remember now if charge attacks did the same thing but I don't think they do.

My question now is at what point do you actually get the bonus? Because I know for a fact I've attacked enemies before they have performed a combat action outside of a move and still have not gotten it in the roll. Is it animation related by chance?

[Matt]

Originally posted by Lvl One Mage:

My question now is at what point do you actually get the bonus? Because I know for a fact I've attacked enemies before they have performed a combat action outside of a move and still have not gotten it in the roll. Is it animation related by chance?

It's not animation related.

At the start of the combat, everyone rolls an initiatice check.

Then, for each protagonist, there's a timer that indicates how long they need to wait before taking their first action. For that matter, moving isn't an action, so it's possible to move (but not charge) before your timer reaches 0.

The timer initial value is based on the initiative roll: The higher the initiative roll, the lower the initial value of the timer.

A protagonist is flat-footed until their timer reaches 0 (then they take their first action(s) and a new timer starts... but they can't be flat-footed anymore since it's no more the beginning of the combat).

Hope that helps :)

Edit: As it has been noted before, the Uncanny Dodge ability completely removes the possibility to get caught flat-footed. It's a Rogue ability but barbarians and archeologist can also have it (as well as a few other classes iirc)

[Cleftin Twain]

Aha it's the timer! Yes that helps tremendously thank you. I kept thinking they actually had to perform their actions first regardless of the timer.

God I feel dumb but this was driving me nuts.