Sage Advice Compendium Update 1/30/2019

[epithet]

I think it was Mike Mearls who lamented about the bonus action.

Mike Mearls said that if he had it to do over again, he would have just made the bonus actions part of your action instead, presumably like the Extra Attack feature. When he thought about it some more, as I recall, conceded that the bonus action structure served as a useful limitation. It's been a while since I saw that Happy Fun Hour, so I might be misremembering certain details. He had mentioned it initially, I think, in a tweet, but I'm not sure.

 

[Asgorath]

Mike Mearls said that if he had it to do over again, he would have just made the bonus actions part of your action instead, presumably like the Extra Attack feature. When he thought about it some more, as I recall, conceded that the bonus action structure served as a useful limitation. It's been a while since I saw that Happy Fun Hour, so I might be misremembering certain details. He had mentioned it initially, I think, in a tweet, but I'm not sure.

This is correct, he said that after thinking and talking about it more, he really just didn’t like the way they did TWF. Bonus actions as a whole were fine, but he felt that TWF probably should’ve just been part of the Attack action.

 

[FrogReaver]

In all those cases, the attack(s) are part of a well-defined thing in the rules, though. Your Cast a Spell action might involve you casting a spell that involves a weapon attack. That doesn't mean you get to declare you'll cast a spell, make a weapon attack for... reasons, and then later in your turn actually resolve the spell itself. You start your turn with movement and an action. If some feature gives you a bonus action with no timing requirement, cool, you have a bonus action as well (e.g. Rogue's Cunning Action). You don't also get free weapon attacks you can make at any point you like, those attacks come from some part of the combat rules. I'm not suggesting the only way you get to make an attack is with the Attack action, I am suggesting that you have to actually take an action to be able to do something on your turn (*aside from bonus actions with no timing requirement).

Finally a maybe good point. I don't have the books in front of me. What is the actual wording of say booming blade?

 

[epithet]

Finally a maybe good point. I don't have the books in front of me. What is the actual wording of say booming blade?

The actual wording is "As part of the action used to cast this spell, you must make a melee attack with a weapon..."

That's not the same as "With this action, you make a..."

 

[FrogReaver]

[MENTION=6921966]Asgorath[/MENTION]

Booming Blade

As part of the action used to cast this spell, you must make a melee attack with a weapon against one creature within the spell’s range, otherwise the spell fails....

So booming blade in our interpretation wouldn't allow you to use the cast a spell action and then attack and then finish the spell. It explicitly places the attack within the action used to cast this spell.

However you inadvertently found a decent piece of evidence to show actions aren't always instantaneous. The action required to cast the booming blade spell has a duration that's long enough to make an attack. I would say good job but I doubt you realize the importance of this finding. You'll just come back and say "duration" isn't important...

 

[FrogReaver]

So thinking on the booming blade example. It also shows attacks are possible to be included as parts of actions.

 

[Maxperson]

See what I mean?

By the way, you do know that disintegrate was changed in the last round of errata, don't you? It's just that you keep talking about what disintegrate "unequivocally says" and, in your earlier post, "RAW says that..." when you're actually talking about what it used to say.

What's the new PHB language?

And it's not really relevant if it changed. My point about RAW being clear, but people wanting to twist it still remains. It's crystal clear in my PHB.

If it was unambiguous, there wouldn't have been a difference between what was written and what was intended, would there?

Sure there would. Just because you get what you wanted to say wrong, doesn't mean that it doesn't clearly say the wrong thing.

Instead, ambiguity in the rule lead to some people finding an interpretation that led to a ridiculous result, and (of course) loudly proclaiming that it was the only correct way to read the rule. Jeremy Crawford, who as I mentioned has a serious weakness for a silly semantic argument, was powerless to resist until he actually changed the wording of disintegrate in the latest errata, bringing that chapter finally to a close... or so I thought.

The change had nothing to do with people twisting RAW and claiming ambiguity in order to save the druids, and it had everything to do with RAW saying in a crystal clear manner something that the designers didn't intend. RAW very clearly killed wild shaped druids with disintegrate and that wasn't what they intended, so they changed it.

 

[epithet]

What's the new PHB language?
...

The errata is:

[New] Disintegrate (p. 233). The last
sentence of the second paragraph now
reads, “The target is disintegrated if
this damage leaves it with 0 hit points.”

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm persuaded to change my opinion one more time. The rules are incomplete and/or inconsistent. So play it however is most fun because any interpretation you try to choose leads to a great big helping of inconsistency, misleading rules and contradiction.

Have fun everyone, I now realize the futility of 5e rules discussions!

 

[Asgorath]

I'm persuaded to change my opinion one more time. The rules are incomplete and/or inconsistent. So play it however is most fun because any interpretation you try to choose leads to a great big helping of inconsistency, misleading rules and contradiction.

Have fun everyone, I now realize the futility of 5e rules discussions!

The rules may appear incomplete or inconsistent to you, but that's simply a result of you stretching the meaning of the words beyond their breaking point and adding things that aren't there or ignoring the words that are there. The rules have always seemed very consistent and coherent to me in general, because I always try and just do the simplest thing based on the words in the book. In the past, there have been some official rulings that made no sense to me, but those have now been addressed. If I ever have questions about how a particular rule is supposed to work, there's inevitably a section on it in the Sage Advice Compendium already.

In any case, as I said, I'm done debating this with you either way. Follow your bliss and play the feat however you think is best for your table.