Sage Advice Compendium Update 1/30/2019

[FrogReaver]

I think most designers building rules that are easy for new players to understand try to keep in mind that while the game might not be emulating a fantasy world, it is modelling it. Thus, trying to have your rules make sense and carry a level of verisimilitude helps the new player get into character and understand the range of what's possible in the game.

If this new player plays a champion, for example, he'll pick up Extra Attack at level 5, and might have taken the Shield Master feat at level 4. It's totally straightforward to understand that "so if you attack this turn, you get to make two attacks plus a bonus shield shove." Even the newest player can understand that. What doesn't make any sense at all is "yeah, you can't make that shove until after the other two attacks. I mean, you can totally shove as one of those attacks, but then you still have the shove at the end." It doesn't make any sense, it wrecks immersion because you have to get out of the moment to parse the text in nit-picking gamist terms which are obviously ambiguous.

I think it's just as easy for a new player to understand shield master shove is a finishing move and go on about their business.

To me, one of the obvious clues that Jeremy is just pulling this out of his posterior is the whole "finishing move" assertion. This is pretty clearly not intended to be a finishing move, because you don't have to shove someone you've already attacked. Even according to Jeremy's new and not-at-all-improved advice on the feat, you can cut down an enemy before you move across the room, open a door, find a new target, and shove it with your shield without doing any damage. The only way that's a finishing move is that it finishes your turn. Either Jeremy has not idea what a finishing move is (not likely,) or he's just throwing turds at the wall to see which ones stick. Obviously the "finishing move" fewmet found a couple of people willing to repeat it (apparently with sincerity and not ironically) in this thread, but it is a ridiculous claim on its face.

This is a great point. Shield Master doesn't make sense as a finishing move because it doesn't actually require you to use it as a finishing move. So if you are not always using it as a finishing move then there is no in fiction reason you couldn't use it at another time. Very good point!

Wizards has gotten its messaging under control, so we shall apparently never again see Mike or Chris give opinions on rules interpretations. That's unfortunate in this instance, because I seriously doubt that Jeremy's revised Advice on Shield Master matches the original intention for the feat when it was written. Could I be wrong? Of course, it happens all the time, but it seems very unlikely to me that Jeremy simply forgot that he imagined that if means after, and that there was supposed to be a timing requirement. For two years!

I think JC just got muddled in the details. He wanted to make clear the X must come before Y thing which I still agree with (It's why I will argue with Hriston so strongly about his position being wrong). But In so doing JC inadvertently lumped attacks as part of the attack action.

The issue here isn't really the Shield Master feat and its bonus action shove. That's easily fixed with either a different interpretation of the rules or a house rule like mine that eliminates the need for the Attack Action altogether. "Bash and dash," I call it. The real issue for me is the direction that this change in the Sage Advice represents, specifically a willingness to sacrifice modeling believable action in the service of gamist overspecificity and hyper-literal parsing. I don't want to see the playability of future content compromised by the attitude this type of "official ruling" represents, an attitude that moves away from the improvisation and in-the-moment inspiration that makes D&D immeasurably superior to board games or computer RPGs.

As long as it's shield master shove is viewed as a finishing move then it's not a gamist over specific construction. It makes sense if that were the case. But reading shield master rules there is nothing that forces it to be a finishing move. So even though it may be in most situations it needs to be 100% or it does start to feel a bit gamist.

A hundred pages of discussion in this thread alone make it abundantly clear that there are several ways to read the Shield Master feat and the rules with which it interacts. Many of you seem to hold the belief that (despite the fact that he insists that he was wrong before) Jeremy Crawford's statements regarding the interpretation of this rule are The One True Way. As I see it, he's either wrong now or he was wrong before, and I'll take whichever one makes more sense to me. When you have more than one way to reasonably interpret a rule of D&D, the way that leads to arbitrarily locking a player character into an invariable pattern and restricting a player's ability to determine what his character can do on its turn is the wrong damn interpretation.

I think there's only 1 way to read shield master, that it must come after your attack action. I think there are multiple ways to interpret the relationship between attack actions and attacks, but when it comes to that I think one interpretation stands heads and shoulders above the rest.

 

[Lolek Bolinky]

This is great content, keep it coming!

 

[epithet]

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Personally, I don't have any problem with narrating the shield bash after the attack. The attack sets up the foe by unbalancing them enough for a skilled warrior to take advantage with a well-timed shield bash that sends the foe staggering or knocks them down. Ta-da!
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You raise some valid points, but the statement I quoted above seems only valid if you restrict the shield shove to a target you've already hit (or missed) with an attack on that round. That restriction doesn't exist. As I pointed out in the post to which you replied, you can (even according to Crawford's new and different Advice on the matter) shove someone in a completely different room from where you made your attack(s) to trigger the shove. Nothing is set up, no one is unbalanced--the shoved target need not even be aware of the triggering attack. The "finishing move" construction is just some BS he made up several years after the feat was originally published.

 

[Hriston]

I don't think anyone has said you get the bonus action shove because of the Attack action. That's... odd. You get the bonus action shove from the Shield Master feat, which conditions that bonus action on the Attack action. The Attack action isn't doing the granting work, the feat is, but the Attack action is the condition specified by the feat before granting the bonus action.

I think it might help to differentiate between having a bonus action to take and actually taking it. Comments along the lines of "you don't have a bonus action until [taking the Attack action] gives it to you" seem to be confusing the two things.

Well, I certainly can, but I can't justify your interpretation with the rules because it allows for future state conditions to be considered true or that the action economy on a turn doesn't work as the book explains it (discrete steps) but instead as an amorphous blob that can only be disentangled into discrete components once it's completed. The former breaks understanding of how conditionals work in general, much less the rules, and the latter isn't indicated at all and is, instead, counter-indicated by thee many references to before and after for many rule components for actions in combat.

Fair enough. None of this is a problem for me because, to me, "on your turn" can be read without bias as referring to your entire turn, and it can't be both true and false that "you take the Attack action on your turn," so the question is if you do or not.

I see that you want to read 'take the attack action on your turn' as a holistic statement that treats turns as zen koans, being both comprised of individual parts but also indivisible and able to be considered as a whole. But conditionals don't work like that, and the rule clearly show choosing what you do as ordered events. Your own example of a bonus action with timing says that you accept there is a possible 'after the attack action' portion of a turn for which that ability, monk's flurry of blows, operates off of, but you revert back to Attack actions only being discoverable at the end of the turn for Shield Master. You can't have it both ways, either the Attack action is at a point in your turn, and flurry of blows operates immediately after it, or it is not a point but something you assign after the turn is done to actions performed during the turn, in which can your example fails despite the fact that this is how your work Shield Master.

Flurry of Blows has additional language specifying when the bonus action must take place relative to the Attack action. Shield Master doesn't have that language. It would have been trivial to write, "After you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action...", if that was the intent. But, as the original ruling on the War Magic bonus action shows, it wasn't, unless the argument is made that Jeremy Crawford was wrong about the intent at that time, and only remembered or was reminded of what the original intent was later.

And, I get you're applying the maxim of player declares, GM assigns mechanics, but that doesn't alleviate the need to assign mechanics according to the rules -- ie, this line of argument is orthogonal to the issue of timing of feats because, accepted as 100% true, it doesn't change how the rules work. If you let the players have control over combat actions, it has to work the same was as the GM using those rules in response to player declarations.

Up thread, I brought up Step 2 of the basic pattern of play in response to [MENTION=6921966]Asgorath[/MENTION]'s statement that "the rules provide a framework for your character to act in combat." I don't subscribe to the idea that the rules are proscriptive with regard to players' action-declarations. They tell you what you can do, not what you can't. There's even a sidebar under Actions in Combat about "Improvising an Action". It states:

Your character can do things not covered by the actions in this section, such as breaking down doors, intimidating enemies, sensing weaknesses in magical defenses, or calling for a parley with a foe. The only limits to the actions you can attempt are your imagination and your character’s ability scores. See the descriptions of the ability scores in the Using Ability Scores section for inspiration as you improvise.

When you describe an action not detailed elsewhere in the rules, the DM tells you whether that action is possible and what kind of roll you need to make, if any, to determine success or failure.​

I agree that it's orthogonal to bonus action timing, and I'm not arguing for any inconsistency in interpretation between a player-facing vs a DM-facing reading of the rules. In my game, a shield master player is free to declare an attempt to shove a creature and then go on to take a full compliment of attacks afterwards by virtue of having the feat, and the DM is expected to rule in accordance with that reading of the feat and the bonus action rules in general. I was simply taking issue with the statement that a player needs a rule that says they can make this series of action-declarations in the first place.

 

[FrogReaver]

I think it might help to differentiate between having a bonus action to take and actually taking it. Comments along the lines of "you don't have a bonus action until [taking the Attack action] gives it to you" seem to be confusing the two things.

The RAW says that you only have a bonus action to take if something provides one. Shield Master only provides a bonus action to take if you take the attack action on your turn. So until you've taken the attack action on your turn how do you have a bonus action to take?

 

[Swarmkeeper]

This is a brilliant point. If you want to shove a target who is in a defensive stance ready for your attack, then it takes part or all of your full Attack action because it's harder to do. Once you've made your attack(s), the target could be off-balance enough that the extra juice from the Shield Master feat allows you to slip in a well-timed shove to knock them off their feet.

Except that point does not take into account that you can attack one enemy, move, then bonus action shield master shove another enemy.

 

[epithet]

Dude, lower your voice; hitpoints are right there.

More seriously, your opinions about what constitutes fictional fidelity with actions is your opinion. It's not the design basis for the game designers (who will be using thier own). D&D is chock full of mechanics that require resolution before being described in the fiction; you're just used to them and no longer notice.
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Having thought about this a little more, it strikes me that it is true that D&D has some gamist elements that are there just because we're used to them. Hit points, however, are an example of something a bit different. Hit points are gamist and bad, but there's not really anything better that has emerged to replace it. I think the same cannot be said of Vancian casting--the spell point variant rule in the DMG is a lot less gamist, and I'd switch to it in a heartbeat if it was supported by Fantasy Grounds. Some bad gamist elements remain in the game because they're the least-worst alternative. This is a game, after all, and some gamist elements are to be expected.

I guess the issue really comes down to unnecessary and arbitrary gamist interruptions. Hit points serve the arguably necessary function of tracking the wear-and-tear an adventurer sustains, and of representing the increased toughness of a veteran campaigner. They aren't arbitrary, but are assigned or generated based on a system that makes a real effort at being consistent and predictable for almost everything in the fictional world that can be damaged. What function does the timing requirement of Shield Master serve? It cannot be, as has been urged a few times in this thread, to prevent "near-permanent advantage" for characters with high athletics bonuses, because that circumstance is already granted by two-weapon fighting without a feat. With a fighting style and a feat, the bonus action attack applies full damage and the character has half the defensive benefit of equipping a shield! If the master of two-weapon fighting doesn't require a nerf for having the possibility of "near-permanent advantage" from high athletics, then why is it necessary to restrict the shield master? If it is not necessary, and if that consideration is not consistently applied, then the restriction becomes completely arbitrary.

Hriston's background on the War Magic feature above, in addition to Crawford's recent tweets regarding two-weapon fighting, provide some valuable context. It really appears that Crawford is just making stuff up in an effort to create a set of consistent and universal rulings, but the example of two-weapon fighting demonstrates that he's not likely to accomplish that. He would, in my opinion, be better served by returning to his older approach and advising rulings on individual rules that makes sense for those rules, without feeling overly pressured to create a Grand Unified Theory of rules interpretation.

 

[FrogReaver]

Having thought about this a little more, it strikes me that it is true that D&D has some gamist elements that are there just because we're used to them. Hit points, however, are an example of something a bit different. Hit points are gamist and bad, but there's not really anything better that has emerged to replace it. I think the same cannot be said of Vancian casting--the spell point variant rule in the DMG is a lot less gamist, and I'd switch to it in a heartbeat if it was supported by Fantasy Grounds. Some bad gamist elements remain in the game because they're the least-worst alternative. This is a game, after all, and some gamist elements are to be expected.

I guess the issue really comes down to unnecessary and arbitrary gamist interruptions. Hit points serve the arguably necessary function of tracking the wear-and-tear an adventurer sustains, and of representing the increased toughness of a veteran campaigner. They aren't arbitrary, but are assigned or generated based on a system that makes a real effort at being consistent and predictable for almost everything in the fictional world that can be damaged. What function does the timing requirement of Shield Master serve? It cannot be, as has been urged a few times in this thread, to prevent "near-permanent advantage" for characters with high athletics bonuses, because that circumstance is already granted by two-weapon fighting without a feat. With a fighting style and a feat, the bonus action attack applies full damage and the character has half the defensive benefit of equipping a shield! If the master of two-weapon fighting doesn't require a nerf for having the possibility of "near-permanent advantage" from high athletics, then why is it necessary to restrict the shield master? If it is not necessary, and if that consideration is not consistently applied, then the restriction becomes completely arbitrary.

Hriston's background on the War Magic feature above, in addition to Crawford's recent tweets regarding two-weapon fighting, provide some valuable context. It really appears that Crawford is just making stuff up in an effort to create a set of consistent and universal rulings, but the example of two-weapon fighting demonstrates that he's not likely to accomplish that. He would, in my opinion, be better served by returning to his older approach and advising rulings on individual rules that makes sense for those rules, without feeling overly pressured to create a Grand Unified Theory of rules interpretation.

Or adopt the action comes first and then the attacks/effect... that's a Grand Unified Theory that makes everything in the game function as it should.

 

[Hriston]

The dude cited you the rule that all but connected the dots for you and you just dug in your position further. If you had an open mind his quote would have been persuasive.

@Asgorath's quotes don't back up the claim that combat actions are game-features. They say that a class or special feature, or other ability can provide options for your action in addition to the actions listed under Actions in Combat, like the Attack action, but there are no dots here for me to connect that say that a combat action is a feature of the game.

 

[Asgorath]

@Asgorath's quotes don't back up the claim that combat actions are game-features. They say that a class or special feature, or other ability can provide options for your action in addition to the actions listed under Actions in Combat, like the Attack action, but there are no dots here for me to connect that say that a combat action is a feature of the game.

To be super pedantic, the thing that grants you the bonus action is the Shield Master feat, based on the condition that you take the Attack action first. Are you going to claim the feat itself isn't a "special ability, spell, or other feature of the game" as well? This feels like the weakest argument made so far, and by a huge margin.