Arial Black
Adventurer
Also I challenge you to find anywhere in the book or eratta that states this ""no attack roll = not an attack" rule" that you reference.
Well, in a book proud of its 'natural language', then the quote:-
PHB p194 said:If there's ever any question whether something you're doing counts as an attack, the rule is simple: if you're making an attack roll, you're making an attack.
....combined with tweets from the guy that wrote that very line confirming that MM does not interact with MI for this very reason, it is against reason to believe that the rule is the opposite of what he said it is.
That line in the quote is in the PHB for a reason: to help us distinguish between 'attack' and 'not attack'. Read the way JC intends, it does just that. If you read it so that if there is no attack roll then you don't know if it's an attack or not, then that line is not fit for purpose.
The general principle is that if the words could be read in two ways, and one way makes sense and the other way doesn't, then the way that makes sense is the way the words are intended.
Looking for a mathematics-style proof is an unreasonable expectation in this 'natural language' edition of D&D.