D&D 5E (2024) Bonus Action Conversion

[Zardnaar]

That’s a good path.

Maybe. Depends how far you go down it though.

As I said adds more complications, makes DMs job harder and increases the gap between optimizer and newbies.

Swift actions became minor actions became bonus actions. Mearls correctly identified they're actually optional.

Basically added late 3.0 or early 3.5 iirc

 

[James Gasik]

It's blasphemy, but I almost feel like something like Pathfinder 2e's "three action economy" would be a better fit for the game, though I'd implement it slightly differently than Paizo did, making it so that you can do up to three distinct things on your turn, but they have to be separate actions.

So you could drink a potion, move, and attack an enemy, but not attack an enemy twice or thrice without special permission to do so (either multiattack, or just buffing the damage on your attack).

 

[DrJawaPhD]

It's blasphemy,

I wouldn't call that blasphemy at all. It's a much better design, but 5e was already established with the Action, Bonus Action, Movement, and changing that framework was definitely off the table with the goal of keeping 5.5e "backwards compatible".

 

[Charlaquin]

It's blasphemy, but I almost feel like something like Pathfinder 2e's "three action economy" would be a better fit for the game, though I'd implement it slightly differently than Paizo did, making it so that you can do up to three distinct things on your turn, but they have to be separate actions.

So you could drink a potion, move, and attack an enemy, but not attack an enemy twice or thrice without special permission to do so (either multiattack, or just buffing the damage on your attack).

I don’t think it’s blasphemy at all, I think PF2’s 3-action economy is brilliant. It’s beautifully elegant, it’s highly versatile, and it opens a ton of design space by allowing you to design activities that cost multiple actions or even variable numbers of actions. It’s by far the most appealing part of PF2 to me.

 

[James Gasik]

I wouldn't call that blasphemy at all. It's a much better design, but 5e was already established with the Action, Bonus Action, Movement, and changing that framework was definitely off the table with the goal of keeping 5.5e "backwards compatible".

I typed out a long rant, but decided to delete it. It's not really the place, and it's not like it matters what I think. I'd get some likes, some replies from people who will say "well, actually, you're completely wrong", and for what?

Anyways, I think at this point I think I have my answers. Bonus actions are intended to be things you can only do once per turn, even if the majority of them aren't really broken if you could do them twice. Somehow this is different from actions, which the game is perfectly happy to expand or even allow you to take multiple ones, in a limited fashion.

Some bonus actions could be converted to actions, but the DM/GM can't commit to allowing universal conversion (or attaching a cost to them, ala ToV's Improviser Talent*).

This sort of thing was mostly fine in 2014, but 2024 has decided to improve the power of some Bonus Actions, and will likely continue to do so.

*So far, I've only found one "kinda sorta" neat thing you can do with Improviser in ToV, with the Kraken Barbarian subclass, but it loses it's luster quickly, and getting that Talent is a bit hard for a Barbarian to accomplish.

Anyways, thank you for the replies.

 

[pemerton]

I genuinely sometimes wonder whether WotC is actually designing a game meant to be played by people who will look at the rules and do what the rules demonstrate is useful.....or if they're designing a game expecting some hypothetical player which completely ignores what the rules reward and just does whatever random thing they feel like, every moment, without forethought.

Isn't it fairly apparent that they're designing for both?

A lot of people look to the PC build rules to provide a set of "descriptors" for their PC, which provide flavour and also, in some cases, provide a justificatory framework for leveraging that flavour into action descriptions.

I don't know if those who look to the rules as the actual rules in the same way they look at the rules of a boardgame or wargame are a minority or not, but I think it's pretty obvious that they're not a significant majority.

 

[Maxperson]

I typed out a long rant, but decided to delete it. It's not really the place, and it's not like it matters what I think. I'd get some likes, some replies from people who will say "well, actually, you're completely wrong", and for what?

Anyways, I think at this point I think I have my answers. Bonus actions are intended to be things you can only do once per turn, even if the majority of them aren't really broken if you could do them twice. Somehow this is different from actions, which the game is perfectly happy to expand or even allow you to take multiple ones, in a limited fashion.

Some bonus actions could be converted to actions, but the DM/GM can't commit to allowing universal conversion (or attaching a cost to them, ala ToV's Improviser Talent*).

This sort of thing was mostly fine in 2014, but 2024 has decided to improve the power of some Bonus Actions, and will likely continue to do so.

*So far, I've only found one "kinda sorta" neat thing you can do with Improviser in ToV, with the Kraken Barbarian subclass, but it loses it's luster quickly, and getting that Talent is a bit hard for a Barbarian to accomplish.

Anyways, thank you for the replies.

What if you allowed bonus actions to be used as actions, but the same bonus action can't be used more than once in a turn?

 

[James Gasik]

What if you allowed bonus actions to be used as actions, but the same bonus action can't be used more than once in a turn?

That would probably work, I mentioned something similar above when I thought about how better D&D would be if it had a "three actions" economy similar to Pathfinder 2e.

Then again, this is contingent on bonus actions becoming more powerful over time. I have no reason to believe that won't become the case going forward.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Isn't it fairly apparent that they're designing for both?

A lot of people look to the PC build rules to provide a set of "descriptors" for their PC, which provide flavour and also, in some cases, provide a justificatory framework for leveraging that flavour into action descriptions.

I don't know if those who look to the rules as the actual rules in the same way they look at the rules of a boardgame or wargame are a minority or not, but I think it's pretty obvious that they're not a significant majority.

I'm not sure it is possible to design for both. Because when you design for the former, you...genuinely stop caring about whether things might interact in genuinely undesirable--as in, harmful to the play experience--ways, because such interactions will only rarely occur, if ever. When you design for the latter, you do care about that, and you put a stop to it. I...don't really see how it's possible to have a middle ground there, where you both do and do not allow easily-abused rules to stay in the game.

More importantly, I'm also talking about things like how 3e was--apparently--designed under the expectation that all players would play it exactly the same way they played 2e. That's why they juiced the Cleric and Druid to Kingdom come, because they expected that every Cleric would spend 3/4 of their slots on healing people, rather than using them for the extensive list of powerful spells available to Clerics. That's why Natural Spell was a 6th level feat, rather than a capstone as it is in 5e. Etc.

There's a pretty major difference between designing a game under the presumption that everyone who plays it will only play one specific style, and designing it so that the incentives of play actually do line up with the intended playstyle rather than pointing diametrically opposite, as is so often the case in 3rd edition. 5e, being 90% 3e, has many of the same problems, just ever-so-gently toned down.