Sage Advice Compendium Update 1/30/2019

[epithet]

No. No they aren't happening concurrently if you are taking the bonus action BEFORE you take the action. Imagine the following scenario. The DM has an enemy with a Hold Person spell readied to cast on your fighter if your fighter moves. On your turn you take the shove action and knock down the enemy in front of you, then you move 10 feet to take that Attack action, except the Hold Person spell goes off, you miss your save and cannot take the Attack action. They would be concurrent if you actually took the Attack action and at least one attack first, since you aren't even in the process of taking your Attack action until that first attack happens.

According to Hriston, time travel occurs and the bonus action somehow becomes the action, or we have Schrodinger's action where we don't know if the shove is alive or dead until the end of the turn.



Those mostly aren't time travel. Most of them make you use them before you know whether you've succeeded or failed, so no time travel is involved at all. Shield is the only one I can think of that can turn a hit into a miss, basically being time travel, and I have an issue with that part of the spell

Well, yeah, obviously in your scenario the character's shove should be considered an attack as part of the Attack Action if it somehow matters, but the only reason it would matter is if the character wanted to use a different bonus action, right? Otherwise, the character is held. Can't use bonus actions, can't use the rest of his movement, etc. I mean, you could rule that since he announced his sequence to include a bonus action shove, that he was committed for both his action and bonus action even though he was locked down, which is how I used to rule it. You, however, seem to place a lot of faith in Jeremy Crawford, and Jeremy has advised against a declaration having any weight, so you might not be inclined to adjudicate it that way.

 

[epithet]

If that's what he is saying I understand his interpretation. But he explicitly told me that his turn activities were sequential and not concurrent.

Right, activities (what a character actually does, eg make a melee weapon attack) are sequential. Actions (the game constructions, eg the Attack Action) happen "on your turn."

I probably shouldn't speak for him, though--he's perfectly well able to explain himself.

 

[5ekyu]

No. No they aren't happening concurrently if you are taking the bonus action BEFORE you take the action. Imagine the following scenario. The DM has an enemy with a Hold Person spell readied to cast on your fighter if your fighter moves. On your turn you take the shove action and knock down the enemy in front of you, then you move 10 feet to take that Attack action, except the Hold Person spell goes off, you miss your save and cannot take the Attack action. They would be concurrent if you actually took the Attack action and at least one attack first, since you aren't even in the process of taking your Attack action until that first attack happens.

According to Hriston, time travel occurs and the bonus action somehow becomes the action, or we have Schrodinger's action where we don't know if the shove is alive or dead until the end of the turn.



Those mostly aren't time travel. Most of them make you use them before you know whether you've succeeded or failed, so no time travel is involved at all. Shield is the only one I can think of that can turn a hit into a miss, basically being time travel, and I have an issue with that part of the spell

meh - i dont get into time travel mechanics and nonsense - thats too easy letting someone else define the field.

Portent - declare before the roll
Bardic inspires - declare after roll but before result
Shield - declare after result

To me those just represent differing levels of "reactiveness" and "accuracy".
Portents are vague enough and slow enough you only know how to get the one outcome, not what the other chances were.

Bardics you have more skill or its quicker into effect so you can at least figure out enough to pin down the "wild misses" and "sure things" before you commit.

But Shield, hey man, shield is dead spot accurate - you can wait til that last nano-jiffy to then still kick it in when you get that final starting "umphhh".

No time travel at all, just better more reactive and faster vs slower and less precise and mechanics that put that into play by giving you more or less info at the point you have to decide.

 

[FrogReaver]

No, there is no need to go back in time for that, because the action and bonus action occur concurrently. They both occur "on your turn." Besides, time travel already exists in the D&D rules--see as an example the many features and feats that let you change the result of a die you've already rolled.

In the concurrent bonus action and attack action concept what prevents a player from ignoring all timing requirements on a bonus action. For example if you have an ability that said when you take the attack action on your turn and attack you can make a bonus action to do X. If everything is concurrent then would you also be able to take that kind of bonus action before the attack action?

 

[FrogReaver]

Right, activities (what a character actually does, eg make a melee weapon attack) are sequential. Actions (the game constructions, eg the Attack Action) happen "on your turn."

I probably shouldn't speak for him, though--he's perfectly well able to explain himself.

That's what I was asking when he replied that way. So I dunno...

 

[epithet]

meh - i dont get into time travel mechanics and nonsense - thats too easy letting someone else define the field.

Portent - declare before the roll
Bardic inspires - declare after roll but before result
Shield - declare after result

To me those just represent differing levels of "reactiveness" and "accuracy".
Portents are vague enough and slow enough you only know how to get the one outcome, not what the other chances were.

Bardics you have more skill or its quicker into effect so you can at least figure out enough to pin down the "wild misses" and "sure things" before you commit.

But Shield, hey man, shield is dead spot accurate - you can wait til that last nano-jiffy to then still kick it in when you get that final starting "umphhh".

No time travel at all, just better more reactive and faster vs slower and less precise and mechanics that put that into play by giving you more or less info at the point you have to decide.

Consider the monk, who you can hit with a ranged weapon attack and roll your damage, only to have him undo the whole thing. He might even throw your arrow back at you. Sure, in the fiction of the game world his reaction happened at the same moment as your attack because he's just that fast. In the game mechanics metagame, though, he went back in time and undid your attack for you to make you grind your molars a little bit.

 

[5ekyu]

Well, yeah, obviously in your scenario the character's shove should be considered an attack as part of the Attack Action if it somehow matters, but the only reason it would matter is if the character wanted to use a different bonus action, right? Otherwise, the character is held. Can't use bonus actions, can't use the rest of his movement, etc. I mean, you could rule that since he announced his sequence to include a bonus action shove, that he was committed for both his action and bonus action even though he was locked down, which is how I used to rule it. You, however, seem to place a lot of faith in Jeremy Crawford, and Jeremy has advised against a declaration having any weight, so you might not be inclined to adjudicate it that way.

Consider this sequence... say i have a cleric with shield master and bonus action healing spells -

i rush up and shove someone with the shield trying to knock them prone.
Thats as far as i have chosen... because what i do next is dependent on what the result is...

if they fall, maybe i attack with my wonder mace with advantage and risk burning its expendables.
if they stay up, maybe i use healing word as bonus on my comrade or move away to strike or spell someone else or use my spiritual weapon and so on.

if, the "action type" of the shield bash is not set until *after* i do other stuff in my turn yet what i do in the turn is determined by the result of the shield bash - that is indeed some quantum schoedinger stuffing going on there.

I just go with take an attack action means make an attack and then let stuff flow from there.

leave the quantum actions for Hank and Janet.

 

[epithet]

My take-away is that movement is limited to being before or after an action as the rule I cited expresses. Do you have a different rule that says you can move in the middle of an action?

Of course you continue to duck and weave. It's just ducking and weaving is not concurrent with taking the disengage action. You take the disengage action, then you duck and weave for the rest of your turn. Ducking and weaving for the rest of your turn isn't mutually exclusive with the disengage action being instantaneous with it's effects following the taking of the action.

Well that's precisely the argument I'm making against non-instantaneous actions. That having actions be non-instantaneous leads inexorably to some kind of super-gamey ridiculous nonsense that takes a steaming dump on the verisimilitude of the fictional world and therefore I propose instantaneous actions as the different interpretation.

So, you're a regular human, and your movement is 30 feet for a 6 second turn, right? That means you jog along at 5 feet per second.

If you take the dash action, your movement doubles. Now you're running at 10 feet per second.

The dash action effects all of your movement for the entire round, regardless of when on the round you decide to take the dash action. The dash action doubles your speed "on your turn." It doesn't just add another 30 feet, it doubles your existing speed, so "If your speed of 30 feet is reduced to 15 feet, for instance, you can move up to 30 feet this turn if you dash." What that means is that if you decide to take the dash action after you've already moved on your turn, well... you've been running all along.

The argument you're making, though, is that you can't move during the dash action. You argue that you stop, dash, then move again, and the dash action just lets you move some more at the same pace you've been moving. That's nonsensical, and means in essence that the dash action adds another 6 seconds of magical time to your turn in which you can stroll about the place. There is no way that can have more verisimilitude than to simply say "you were running instead of jogging this turn." Similarly, you can't say on the one hand that you can take the Disengage Action in a single moment then duck and weave for the rest of the turn, while insisting that you cannot possibly take the Attack Action in a single moment then make your melee or range weapon attack across the rest of the turn. Either the activity associated with an Action in Combat is part of that Action and the Action continues until that activity is concluded, or it bloody isn't. If you can take the Disengage Action in an instant, you can take the Attack Action in an instant, too. That, of course, would trigger your shove bonus action before you took your first attack.

Jeremy has said that according to his interpretation and advice, you can't separate the Attack Action from the attacks (because there is no 'declaration phase.') To be consistent, you can't therefore separate the Dash Action from dashing movement, nor the Disengage Action from disengaging from each opponent you're selfishly refusing to grant an attack of opportunity to. It's one way, or the other.

 

[FrogReaver]

So, you're a regular human, and your movement is 30 feet for a 6 second turn, right? That means you jog along at 5 feet per second.

If you take the dash action, your movement doubles. Now you're running at 10 feet per second.

The dash action effect all of your movement for the entire round, regardless of when on the round you decide to take the dash action. The dash action doubles your speed "on your turn." It doesn't just add another 30 feet, it doubles your existing speed, so "If your speed of 30 feet is reduced to 15 feet, for instance, you can move up to 30 feet this turn if you dash." What that means is that if you decide to take the dash action after you've already moved on your turn, well... you've been running all along.

The argument you're making, though, is that you can't move during the dash action. You argue that you stop, dash, then move again, and the dash action just lets you move some more at the same pace you've been moving. That's nonsensical, and means in essence that the dash action adds another 6 seconds of magical time to your turn in which you can stroll about the place. There is no way that can have more verisimilitude than to simply say "you were running instead of jogging this turn." Similarly, you can't say on the one hand that you can take the Disengage Action in a single moment then duck and weave for the rest of the turn, while insisting that you cannot possibly take the Attack Action in a single moment then make your melee or range weapon attack across the rest of the turn. Either the activity associated with an Action in Combat is part of that Action and the Action continues until that activity is concluded, or it bloody isn't. If you can take the Disengage Action in an instant, you can take the Attack Action in an instant, too. That, of course, would trigger your shove bonus action before you took your first attack.

Jeremy has said that according to his interpretation and advice, you can't separate the Attack Action from the attacks (because there is no 'declaration phase.') To be consistent, you can therefore separate the Dash Action from dashing movement, nor the Disengage Action from disengaging from each opponent you're selfishly refusing to grant an attack of opportunity to. It's one way, or the other.

Way to misconstrue my position. Have fun role playing Don Quixote...

 

[Maxperson]

Well, yeah, obviously in your scenario the character's shove should be considered an attack as part of the Attack Action if it somehow matters, but the only reason it would matter is if the character wanted to use a different bonus action, right?

That's not how the game works, though. You very specifically use actions and bonus actions when you do something. If you use shove as a bonus action before the action, then it was used as a bonus action and not an action, and vice versa. The type you use it for doesn't change. If you have a situation like I describe causing problems that you have to solve via time travel or Schrodinger's actions, either how you play it is wrong, or the game is broken, and I don't think the game is broken. Especially given the Sage Advice.

Otherwise, the character is held. Can't use bonus actions, can't use the rest of his movement, etc. I mean, you could rule that since he announced his sequence to include a bonus action shove, that he was committed for both his action and bonus action even though he was locked down, which is how I used to rule it. You, however, seem to place a lot of faith in Jeremy Crawford, and Jeremy has advised against a declaration having any weight, so you might not be inclined to adjudicate it that way.

Or I could rule it as it reads and how it was intended, which is that you have to take the Attack action in order to trigger the bonus action. I will be allowing it after the first swing, since only at that point are you taking the Attack action.