30
The rules take a chaotic, simultaneous situation and break it up with the initiative roll, with each PC/NPC acting on their 'turn'.
This is what gives the battle a logical consistency; otherwise, it would be madness.
So, although each PC/NPC isn't really waiting in a nice orderly line to state their actions, that is the way it is handled. Without that the ...
19
These aren't mutually exclusive strategies
The options you have laid out aren't simply exclusive of each other. Each one has different "costs" associated with it. Let's look at them in turn:
Switching to plate armour will give you +2 to AC, but disadvantage to Dexterity (Stealth) checks and if you have a Strength below 15 reduce your speed by 10 ft.
...
16
Spells are the exception
The Ready action states:
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....
15
So then which of these apply:
It's this one, definitely this one:
DM - "OK roll for your heal spell"
Also, the answer to this question is emphatically yes:
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?"
Everyone takes their six second turn based on the ...
15
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 ...
5
Other answers cover the question itself in more detail, but for completeness: yes, each creature knows the results* of all previous turns before they make their choices.
But I think one thing that's confusing you is that six second turn detail.
The way I'd look at it is this: it's six seconds from the start of a creature's turn to the start of that ...
3
As written, but it’s dumb—the empowering is permanent
RAW, you can enter Deadhand Style, and then spend a ki point to empower your unarmed strikes to cause the shaken condition, and that’s it, end of the rules. Nothing there ever ends the empowering of your unarmed strikes—so it’s permanent. Any effect using ki is presumably supernatural, which means this ...
3
Überchargers deal vastly more damage than will ever be necessary—having more overkill damage doesn’t make you “better at being a fighter,” it’s just theoretical optimization. Statements that CoDzilla is better at being a fighter than a fighter are simply saying that both are capable of one-round kills against anything they can full-attack—and thanks to ...
2
Give them the fight you're paying them for.
You played these NPCs by standard companion rules, I'm assuming, and deducted their XP from the encounter payout before you gave it to the PCs. This represents the expected amount that NPC will contribute to the fight.
Instead of playing it out, you could just make that assumption directly, and only budget the ...
1
Just do it with a sentence: "The last three orcs scream and die as you all finish them off. Everyone around you is dead. What do you do?"
As for loss of resources: Just have the players spend enough resources to win the encounter. After they've won it don't force them to spend more just because some npcs are still alive according to the mechanics. When the ...
1
Let them play the NPC's, for the most parts.
In a recent Warhammer Fantasy game, we played on a ship. So the GM had us make a bunch of NPC crewmembers. Officer Ranks mostly - Captain, Doctor, Master Gunner, Ship Carpenter, Cook, etc. - the idea was to always have someone for people to play, if their characters are off-screen at any time. We never really ...
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