Three things.
1. The fact that the game constantly danced around whether or not you "have" an action or bonus action, which can be spent on certain things, or whether you simply "can take" an action and a bonus action.
It does no such thing. You have an action. You can, if an ability or specific rule allows it, use a Bonus Action. There’s no dancing, no obfuscation.
The circumlocution genuinely confused me until I realized they were trying to have their cake and eat it too, particularly because they frequently fail to use that circumlocution consistently.
2. The fact that there is no relationship whatsoever between bonus actions and "regular" actions. Why is it I cannot do do two things that are both bonus actions in the same round, that is, using my "regular" action to take a bonus action in addition to using my bonus action for that purpose? This has never been adequately explained to me by anyone.
So, if you accepted that you don’t “have” bonus actions, you just
may be able to take one due to a specific ability, this wouldn’t be confusing. I’m not sure why it is anyway, because it’s not especially weird to not be allowed to trade one type of action for another in a game.
Particularly egregious because there are in fact some actions which can also (in some contexts) be bonus actions, so there's no clear separation between them (e.g. a Quickened fire bolt is a bonus action, while fire bolt normally is a "regular" action, so you CAN sometimes do the same thing with both your "regular" action and bonus action. Or how Cunning Action lets Rogues Dash as a bonus action, while still being able to Dash as a "regular" action if they wish.)
Wait, how is it confusing that Quicken Action lets you use the Cast a Spell Action as a Bonus Action? Especially, how on earth does a sorcerer ability that explicitly changes the general rule when used confuse you about how the general rule works? Fire Bolt is a spell that requires an action to cast. That is a self contained rule. If you use Quicken Spell, then you are casting a spell with the Quicken Spell bonus action ability, using its specific rules that change how general Spellcasting rules work for a single specific instance.
I genuinely cannot fathom how that could ever confuse anyone.
3. The fact that there are Actions and there are actions, and some actions are Actions and others are Bonus Actions and others are something that rides along while you perform some other Action/Bonus Action without you specifically doing anything, and some are Free Actions or even Non-Actions. This bit was particularly confusing because it meant the game was using literally one single word to refer to "anything you can do in combat (and often many things outside it)" and, at the same time, the narrow category of "stuff that is a big deal to do and isn't a Bonus Action, Free Action, etc." I here have used the capitalization to distinguish the former (lowercase-a "action," which is anything you can attempt, more or less) from the latter (uppercase-A "Action," which is things like Cast A Spell or Attack), but nothing in the game helps cleanly differentiate the two, and as shown above one is often forced to insert a clarifying adjective like "regular" to indicate Actions as opposed to Bonus Actions etc.
You’re never forced to do that, because a given thing either requires an Action, Reaction, Bonus Action, or no action, and the specific rules being referenced will tell you which. I can almost see where you’re coming from with some of this but number 3 is just…I’m sorry but it seems like you were confused because you insisted on reading the rules through the lense of past editions, rather than just reading it straight and playing the game.
But now I have, because a bonus action is not an action.
Yes, it is.
It's literally identical to 4e's Standard, Move, Minor, except that your movement is your whole turn until you run out.* Like that is literally what it is. They just go out of their way to obfuscate that and make it seem like Minor Bonus Actions are this totally weird thing unlocked by something rather than a resource you always have but which may not always be useful to you. Like healing word is literally a Bonus Action because that power was a Minor Action in 4e.
And people tell me I'm being ridiculous when I say 5e goes out of its way to obscure anything it actually learned from 4e...
*And that is a big part of why it confused me so. I couldn't understand what they were saying because they kept inconsistently circumlocuting it and pretending like it was this whole new and different thing when it was literally just the same system as before with "you can move whenever you like during your turn."
But it’s just…you have an Action, and you have movement, which you can spend however you want during your turn. If a feature or specific rule says so, you can take a special kind of action called a Bonus Action.
That…is very simple. They didn’t go out of their way to obscure anything. BA and MinorA are different enough they changed the name, movement isn’t a move action (like seriously the whole dynamic of movement is different) it’s just an amount you can move while doing other things, and the Action could be called a Standard Action I guess but why? What is gained?
You’re taking the Cast a Spell Action, Attack Action, Dash Action, etc. it’s not obscure. At all.
