Sage Advice Compendium Update 1/30/2019

[Arial Black]

Just a point of clarity, you take your attacks later in your turn, not later in the round.

I stand corrected. I mis-typed.

 

[epithet]

...
If you were correct and you could drop a bonus action into the middle of an Attack Action, why wouldn't they have called this out, the way they called out movement? I mean, the movement rules are pretty clear - it's called out in a completely separate paragraph that if you have multiple attacks, you can move between attacks.
...

The rules say "You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn, unless the bonus action’s timing is specified..." which suggests that, absent other provisions, you can take your bonus action any time you please. There is no express provision allowing you to use a bonus action during your movement, but I don't see anyone suggesting that you can only break up your movement with your extra attacks.

 

[Arial Black]

I look at it slightly differently. While the resolution is handled sequentially, the effect isn't. From a design perspective, you have a choice- either tell the player to declare everything first and then resolve, or allow the player to resolve the action sequentially.

5e has gone with the player empowerment route of allowing the player to resolve sequentially. It makes for less "wasted" action as in, "I magic missile target A twice and B once. Oh, the first one killed Target A? Guess that second missile was pointless."

I agree with you that, from a game design perspective, you could handle it either way. My objection is not that it could not be handled that way in the rules; my objection is that it makes no sense to handle it that way in the fiction, given that the game rules should enable the fiction.

I don't think it is an unreasonable burden to expect the players to have to use their intellects to handle things they do know and things they don't. Coping with the uncertain is part of the challenge.

Will that first baddy be killed by one beam, or will it take more? How many will it take? These are things that neither the player nor their character would necessarily know for a fact, although each could have an educated guess.

In previous editions it was no hardship for the caster of scorching ray to choose the target for each beam before any are resolved, because that matched the fiction of an instantaneous effect and the player/PC has to make judgement calls. This is a good thing.

If both ways of resolving the instantaneous effect made sense then I would have no objection for a game design which chose one over the other. My problem here is that one option makes sense in the fiction while the other does not, and JC seems to have chosen the one that does not.

 

[FrogReaver]

Sorry, I assumed that's why he was talking about when the Attack action ended, as that's clearly important for the Shield Master shove (and not much else AFAIK).

The broader context of JC's ruling is that no bonus action can be done in between attacks granted by the attack action. That part of JC's ruling isn't specific to shield master. That broad ruling He and I both are basically calling out as terrible.

 

[FrogReaver]

[MENTION=6799649]Arial Black[/MENTION] - I agree, that the rules delineate what you can do.

However, nothing in the rules says that you can divide up an Attack Action with anything other than movement, and then only if you have multiple attacks. If you have a single attack, obviously you cannot divide up the Attack Action at all.

The only exception seems to be when you gain multiple attacks and you want to move.

If you were correct and you could drop a bonus action into the middle of an Attack Action, why wouldn't they have called this out, the way they called out movement? I mean, the movement rules are pretty clear - it's called out in a completely separate paragraph that if you have multiple attacks, you can move between attacks.

If the intent was to allow bonus actions the same latitude, wouldn't it be called out the same way?

Since it isn't called out and in fact the only thing about timing that is called out is that you can do it during your turn or at the time specified by the bonus action, why would you presume that you could bonus action during an attack action?

They did call out that "you choose when to use the bonus action on your turn, ***unless timing is specified"

I think that covers being able to use a bonus action like misty step between attacks granted by attack action and extra attack. Don't you?

 

[FrogReaver]

In every role playing game, whether on the tabletop or a video game, there is a conflict between the rule system and the fiction it is modeling. To create a rule system that was a realistic simulation wouldn't just be difficult, it would be a waste of time--no one wants that kind of granularity--but a complete abstraction is very unsatisfying. The happy medium is somewhere in the realm of having the player free to state what his character will do in a scenario, and for the most part how the character will do it, and then use the rule system to abstract that into something that can be resolved with a die roll.

Obviously, your game rules must have a lot of constraints built into them. Constraints are necessary for a number of reasons, including making sure everyone gets a turn and that the game flows along, and also so that your character has limitations that can be overcome as it gains power. In broad terms, then, when your character can't do something the limit should be either in service to the gameplay or to the fiction. Arbitrary limitations and restrictions on what your character can do in the game are a disservice to both causes, mucking up the gameplay while you figure it out and bringing your awareness back to the books and character sheets instead of the monsters and magic your character is dealing with. There's not much you can do about it when your RPG is a video game, you just deal with the arbitrary limitations and watch your cooldown timer. It is what it is. When you're playing on a tabletop (physical or virtual) with a live Dungeon Master, though, everything changes. The player is liberated to come up with the zaniest free-form swing-from-the-chandelier Jackie Chan sequence he can imagine, and the Dungeon Master will parse it into one or more rolls of the dice and tell him how it turned out.

So, when you maintain that an action in combat must be resolved in accordance with strict timing requirements which are implied rather than expressly enumerated, and that a character's turn should be resolved according to rigid procedure such that an action must be completed in its entirety before you can consider a bonus action it enables, I disagree. There is no difference between the shove you get as a bonus action and a shove you can make as part of the Attack Action, and making a timing distinction serves neither the gameplay nor the fantasy. Only if you adhere to an inflexible, procedural, meta-gamist approach to a character's turn in combat will you gain any benefit from using Jeremy's new restrictive approach to timing, and I do not.

To put it another way, the Dungeon Master can interpret the Shield Master feat in a couple of different ways. The first, which I'll call the Hriston approach, emphasises role-play by giving the DM the flexibility to adjudicate the entire sequence of a character's turn as a whole. The second, which I'll call the Crawford approach, emphasizes most emphatically roll-playing by demanding an iterative procedural resolution of the turn without regard for fantasy verisimilitude. Your position doesn't sway me because you favor the roll-play of the Crawford approach, while I strongly prefer the role-play of the Hriston approach. I will, almost every time, choose role-play over roll-play.

So basically you don't actually care how the rules actually say to resolve something. Basically you ignore all requirements on abilities that you think are arbitrary restrictions that you think don't go with the fiction being modeled. I get it now. I want to say 1 thing and then you can have the last word as I don't think continuing a rules conversation with someone that holds those beliefs is going to be productive.

1. Consider how the shield shove attack followed by an attack is modeled in the featless game. To me everything you want about the fiction is already present in a game without feats and by virtue also in a game with feats. All shield master does is give a mechanical benefit in a particular situation. Everything else involving shield shoving can already be modeled by the other rules of the game. Are you sure the issue isn't just that none of those other models allow you to get a sweet mechanical benefit when performing the shield shove then attack sequence? Because even a level 1 fighter is capable of shield shoving then attacking (he just has to do it over 2 rounds).

 

[Maxperson]

You know he's not confused, you're just being snide. His point, which is valid in my opinion, is that being a DM ideally involves taking what a player wants his character to do and resolving it using the rules, not setting out arbitrary limitations and conjuring extra timing constraints. If a shield master character shoves first, then takes all the attacks granted by an attack action, then both the attack action and the bonus action from Shield Master were used. If one or more of those attacks is frustrated before it is taken, then it was just the attack action. Hriston's point, if I may speak for him, seems to be that as a human being running a tabletop RPG (and not as a computer,) we are perfectly capable of looking at the character's entire turn instead of constraining ourselves to consider each action, attack, flourish, or 5 feet of movement individually, in isolation, with rigid attention to what must come first.

The problem is that you cannot resolve it with the rules. The rule is that the shove is a bonus action, that means that per the rules, it is not an action. If he wants to house rule that it becomes an action, turning into some sort of paradox where the bonus actions gives itself the ability to be a bonus action, that's fine. He's free to do as he likes for his game. What he can't do, though, is make the claim that the shove is the action as he did. That's a statement of fact about the rules that just isn't true.

I think one of the clearest indications that this new and revised Shield Master comment from Jeremy Crawford is bad advice is that across the dozens of pages of this thread, it seems that most of the people who defend his new interpretation of the rule do so only in theory, while 'confessing' that they would not adhere to it in their own game. Whether 'allowing' the shove to come between attacks, or whenever the character wants, or declaring by house rule that the attack action itself is unnecessary, there don't seem to be a lot of commenters who are eager to use Jeremy's new Shield Master advice in their own game. And why would they? At no point during the years when Jeremy's advice (whether because he was drunk in line at the grocer's or not) was to "take your bonus shove whenever you want it" did the Shield Master feat dominate the game. I think most of us need a much better reason to tell a player he can't string his attacks together the way he wants to on his turn than "Well, see, Jeremy changed his mind, so... sorry."

We are a highly limited pool of very experienced DM's. I don't think what is happening in this thread is an indicator that the new ruling is bad advice. I think it's more an indicator that we like to tinker with the game a lot. I know I do. I've highly edited every edition I've played. That doesn't make the rules I change bad ones. It just makes them ones that I think I can do better for my game.

Ultimately, the rules are best when they are at their most flexible. There is no way for a set of rules to contemplate every situation in every game, and the magic of tabletop RPGs is that they don't have to. The DM can apply the rules to resolve the acts and efforts of the player characters without having to look at the Actions in Combat section like an instruction manual from Ikea.

This I totally agree with. D&D is a very flexible system and that's one of the main reasons I've been with it since 1983.

If, at the end of a shield master's turn, the Attack Action has been taken and a bonus action shove was taken, the conditional described in the feat has been satisfied regardless of the sequence of attacks. The ability to reconcile complex behavior during a combat turn into movement, action, bonus action, and flourish is part of what makes a live D&D game better than playing Baldur's Gate on your PC.

With a house rule, sure. I don't have any problem with a DM running it this way. It's just not how the feat is written, or the official ruling has been made.

 

[FrogReaver]

I still can't believe JC said this:

No general rule allows you to insert a bonus action between attacks in a single action. You can interrupt a multiple-attack action with a bonus action/reaction only if the trigger of the bonus action/reaction is an attack, rather than the action.

The rule JC apparently forgot about was:

You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn, unless the bonus action's timing is specified, and anything that deprives you of your ability to take actions also prevents you from taking a bonus action.

Absolutely terrible ruling from JC!

 

[epithet]

So basically you don't actually care how the rules actually say to resolve something. Basically you ignore all requirements on abilities that you think are arbitrary restrictions that you think don't go with the fiction being modeled. I get it now. I want to say 1 thing and then you can have the last word as I don't think continuing a rules conversation with someone that holds those beliefs is going to be productive.

1. Consider how the shield shove attack followed by an attack is modeled in the featless game. To me everything you want about the fiction is already present in a game without feats and by virtue also in a game with feats. All shield master does is give a mechanical benefit in a particular situation. Everything else involving shield shoving can already be modeled by the other rules of the game. Are you sure the issue isn't just that none of those other models allow you to get a sweet mechanical benefit when performing the shield shove then attack sequence? Because even a level 1 fighter is capable of shield shoving then attacking (he just has to do it over 2 rounds).

I do care how the rules say to resolve something, certainly. Your group comes together to play a particular game, and you should generally follow the rules of that game unless you agree to modifications of them. What I'm saying is that in circumstances where there is ambiguity, I will choose the reasonable interpretation that is flexible and in accordance with the fiction over a gamist interpretation that imposes arbitrary restrictions. I'm of the opinion that, among the reasonable ways to read and interpret the rules presently being discussed, Jeremy Crawford has chosen the worst. He is prioritising consistency, and trying to make sure that his interpretation can be applied to every rule the same way, but while I see the reason someone in his position would feel the need to do that I fundamentally disagree with that approach. Screw consistency; the right way to read and interpret a rule might not be the same from one group to the next, or one combat to the next, and certainly not from one page of the rules to the next. Flexibility is the reason you have a Dungeon Master instead of a choose-your-own-adventure book, and to discount that (as I feel Crawford has done) is a disservice to those DMs who look to him for guidance in the Sage Advice publication.

What you say about a featless game is certainly true. Now, consider the fact that the feat is intended to add something of significance, to empower your character in some way. To take the feat, you are giving up two stat points, which translates to +1 to hit and damage and +1 to your saves and ability checks for the stat. By taking a feat you are refining and defining your character, foregoing that strong general benefit for one that is more specific but potentially more powerful. Given that, as you say, the ability to shove and attack is already established in the rules and the fiction, don't you agree that the feat should enhance that ability rather than arbitrarily complicate it?

 

[Maxperson]

This is the 'argument from ignorance' fallacy. Here you are asserting, without support, that there are ONLY two options, just because you don't know of other options. There is at least one more option, and there may be more:-

3) Play the Rules As Written. What JEC says or means is irrelevant to RAW.

That's not really a third option as RAW ignores what JC said and you are doing what wasn't intended, which is option 1. It's just the reason why you are doing number 1.