D&D 5E (2024) Bonus Action Conversion

[DEFCON 1]

I would not call 4E good edition of d&d, but that it added good additions to D&D as a whole.
and 5E designers feared everything from 4E that they threw away the baby with the bathwater.

Good additions that you like. But there are things in 5E that you probably like that didn't come from 4E. And there are probably things you didn't like in 4E that are representative in 5E. There's no rhyme nor reason to what things that were adapted in some form from 4E to 5E that some of (general) you are happy about, and some of (general) you are upset about.

So WotC cannot take any of (general) your singular opinions on the matter as gospel. Because everything you, Horwath, think were good adaptations of 4E material into 5E are loathed by a goodly number of other players out there. So whose opinion on the matter is right? Which means all WotC can do is get a general sense of what many players seem to be okay with... and then write a game they themselves are for the most part happy with. And it'll include some things each individual player likes... and something they don't.

But even then... none of those designers will be completely happy with what they finally decide upon either. Because their individual needs aren't always going to be served based on having to compromise as well (for all the reasons a group of people who work for a company have to do). And this we all well know, because of @mearls comments himself about Bonus actions that triggered this whole conversation in the first place!

 

[Horwath]

Good additions that you like. But there are things in 5E that you probably like that didn't come from 4E.

yes, ofc, I can really speak for myself. Or maybe quote some dubious polls.

And there are probably things you didn't like in 4E that are representative in 5E.

dont really like general proficiency advancement bonus, it's better than 4E, but still, would rather like 3E bonuses more.
Not total amount but variety in amount of bonuses.
And I start to hate advantage/disadvantage more and more.

There's no rhyme nor reason to what things that were adapted in some form from 4E to 5E that some of (general) you are happy about, and some of (general) you are upset about.

So WotC cannot take any of (general) your singular opinions on the matter as gospel. Because everything you, Horwath, think were good adaptations of 4E material into 5E are loathed by a goodly number of other players out there. So whose opinion on the matter is right? Which means all WotC can do is get a general sense of what many players seem to be okay with... and then write a game they themselves are for the most part happy with. And it'll include some things each individual player likes... and something they don't.

no one can please everyone...

But even then... none of those designers will be completely happy with what they finally decide upon either. Because their individual needs aren't always going to be served based on having to compromise as well (for all the reasons a group of people who work for a company have to do). And this we all well know, because of @mearls comments himself about Bonus actions that triggered this whole conversation in the first place!

Don't understand his hind vision now...
he had it for more than 10 years before 5E;

Swift action was in 3E
Minor action in 4E
Bonus action in 5E,

it's the same action with different name.


now, most of Bonus action things can be implemented into Action, why did they decide to put so much stuff into Bonus action, I do not know.

Especially Rage, that should have been free action or part of Attack action.

 

[DEFCON 1]

now, most of Bonus action things can be implemented into Action, why did they decide to put so much stuff into Bonus action, I do not know.

Especially Rage, that should have been free action or part of Attack action.

Presumably it's because that's what the design team as a whole decided was the best option at the time, despite what any individual designer may have preferred. That's compromise. That's what groups have to do.

If someone doesn't wish to compromise, they need to design on their own and not publish anything through another person or company, nor advertise their stuff through someone else. They have to do everything on their own.

They just shouldn't expect to sell anything though if they do that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

now, most of Bonus action things can be implemented into Action, why did they decide to put so much stuff into Bonus action, I do not know.

Especially Rage, that should have been free action or part of Attack action.

I mean, that one is simple enough. They want greater flexibility in how you can make use of those ride-along actions.

Consider something like healing word. In order to circumlocute around the bonus action cast time, you would have to do something like this: "You can cast this spell any time you take an Action or use your movement, so long as you are not silenced, but if you cast this spell during your turn, you cannot cast any spell that uses a spell slot with your Action, nor can you cast this spell if you have already cast any spell that requires a spell slot." You might be able to trim that down with careful editing, but there's only so far you'll be able to take it....

And now every spell that was a Bonus Action cast time has to be written with that extra text. In other words, you've just ballooned the length of the spells chapter by easily another 5-10 pages just from having to keep repeating this over and over...not to mention all of the spells that don't initially require a Bonus Action, but use one for continuing the spell's benefits (e.g. witch bolt; basic casting is Action, but getting the d12 lightning damage on subsequent turns is a Bonus Action).

All that, instead of just having the teensy bit of "complexity" of the Bonus Action, and saying that that's the category for ride-along stuff that you can only do a bit of, but you can do it while you do any other proper Action-y things that tickle your fancy.

Or if you want something pithy:

There are lots of things where it makes sense that doing X takes up all of your attention/time.

There are lots of things where it makes sense you can do them basically anytime.

But there are a fair number of things where neither of those make sense: it shouldn't eat up your whole attention, but it also shouldn't be free-use-whenever.

Turns out, having a clean, straightforward box to put category-3 things into is actually really, really useful as a design tool. Hence why every single WotC edition has had them, as did PF1e, and PF2e switched to a three-actions-per-round system to functionally achieve the same goal in a different way. Three-action things are what 3e would have called a "Full-Round Action", and the fact that you have three actions a turn means one of those can be spent on a ride-along action without it eating up the whole of your turn, and thus achieving the same end by a slightly different means.

If every character JUST has one singular Action they can use, you're always going to be bumping into things that would be really really nice as ride-along actions, but utterly terrible/worthless as "this is all you do during your turn".

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But there are things in 5E that you probably like that didn't come from 4E. And there are probably things you didn't like in 4E that are representative in 5E.

For the former, exceedingly rare, but occasional, e.g. the fact that 5e finally broke from the supremely horrendous BS established in 3e, where Fighters and Barbarians suck at skills for no reason except "because they're Big Stupid Fighters".

I know of nothing present in 5e that was present in 4e and which I disliked. Not one singular thing. If you can provide a suggestion, I'm all ears. In large part because almost nothing from 4e actually DID show up in 5e. Things that have a superficial similarity did. Almost nothing actually got translated into the new language of 5e.

Like......it would be like talking about, say, two programs, one written in C#, the other written in (say) Rust or whatever. Porting a feature from one to the other would not be trivial by any means, but it certainly could be done--and done with enough fidelity that the end user might not necessarily know that the underlying programming language had changed. 5e did not do that. 5e is an entirely brand-new program with an entirely brand-new set of features, of which only a very VERY small proportion have actually been translated from 4e. The vast majority have simply been given the barest hint of superficial similarity, when their actual function is unrelated or, more commonly, diametrically opposed. Hit Dice are the poster child there, but scaling cantrips is another (as much as I like that they scale better than 4e ones did, them being caster-only completely invalidates the whole point of at-wills, which was that they were an awesome, solid fallback option that ALL characters had access to, above and beyond your incredibly boring ordinary, aka Basic, attacks.)

To continue the two-different-languages program comparison, it'd be like if both of them had an Image Converter, but in the C# program that means being able to mutually inter-convert between 17 different image file formats, while the Rust program's "Image Converter" converts images into textual descriptions of the image. Yes, it's called an "Image Converter", and it does change images into a different format....but it does literally nothing the C# program did.

 

[CreamCloud0]

but AEDU format went too far, everything, especially in PHB1, was mostly the same, all classes were 90% the same.

i might not of played 4e but this is something i still find hard to believe, as people have said, the structure might of been the same but it was the powers themselves that differentiated the classes.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

i might not of played 4e but this is something i still find hard to believe, as people have said, the structure might of been the same but it was the powers themselves that differentiated the classes.

For a lot of people, it seems that the fact that the structure is the same means that whatever you do with that structure is the same.

Why they don't then decry the Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, and Wizard as being "samey", I will never know.

 

[DEFCON 1]

i might not of played 4e but this is something i still find hard to believe, as people have said, the structure might of been the same but it was the powers themselves that differentiated the classes.

At at the very beginning of the lifecycle of 4E... many classes were indeed different in the powers they had access to and how they used them. I remember my first 4E campaign, which used all 8 original classes, felt really good and the characters all felt different (granting that with my manner of playstyle, character differentiation comes mainly from the personalities the players bring to their PCs via roleplay and not the mechanics themselves.) But what ended up ultimately being the problem (in my opinion) is that as time went on... every single splatbook or online Dragon issue that created more and more powers for the classes-- in order for those powers to be different from the ones the classes already had-- many new ones began treading on the toes of the ones other classes had. So duplication (especially for the 8 classes in the first PHB) began to water down the walls between them.

Now this wasn't necessarily a terrible thing, because unless you were using the D&D Insider Character Builder you just could choose to not read or use those products when letting players make characters (as much as DMs are normally able to stop their players from wanting to use splatbooks). But those using the Character Builder had a harder time of it, because all new powers written for Dragon and the splatbooks got put into the DDI CB automatically, so anyone using DDI and letting their players use it couldn't filter out powers they didn't want to be used. And as a result, even just looking at something like the Fighter-- a class that ended up having like five times the number of powers they had started with in the PHB-- pretty much resulted in them having powers that pushed, pulled, slid, marked, close'd, bursted, etc. exactly like many of the other classes did because it was the only way to give the Fighter new powers they didn't already have. Which meant ultimately that the poers themselves were no longer the thing that differentiated the classes... it was the flavor of them that would make them different... and unfortunately more often than not flavor got relegated to a single line of italicized text.

Now this in and of itself was not insurmountable... considering that 5E has more than enough abilities and features that get duplicated across all the classes-- access to specific spells being one of the most obvious. The bigger difference though I think (not that my opinion means a whole lot) is that 5E uses different formats of acquisition that are flavored differently... whereas every 4E duplication of power came from the AEDU format, where flavor could feel like it took a backseat (depending no the person playing). So I suspect that it might be easier for a player to suspend disbelief of how a 5E Wizard's Fireball gained via study in their spellbook, would be different than a Cleric who gained Fireball because their god's Domain gave it to them. Granted... those flavor differences for some people won't seem like differences at all (just because they are both spells called 'Fireball' if nothing else)... but 5E does have the advantage over 4E in that it's format is more reminiscent of all the other editions in the past, meaning that more players are more likely to have already already done the heavy lifting in that suspension in all the decades previous. 4E was only given the one shot at it unfortunately.

 

[Horwath]

For a lot of people, it seems that the fact that the structure is the same means that whatever you do with that structure is the same.

Why they don't then decry the Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, and Wizard as being "samey", I will never know.

honestly, I they all can be merged into "mage" with feat slots(invocations, blessings) to pick features that will make you focus on certain type of spells or playstyle.
the you can pick metamagic or skill expertise or extra attack.

in 3.5e you at least had a difference between spontaneous and prepared casting slots.

 

[...m...]

All that, instead of just having the teensy bit of "complexity" of the Bonus Action, and saying that that's the category for ride-along stuff that you can only do a bit of, but you can do it while you do any other proper Action-y things that tickle your fancy.

...i feel if they'd simply been named a special action instead, three-quarters of the common confusion, misinterpretation, and controversy never would have manifest: they're a fine design tool if implemented consistently...

...if we can disabuse both players and designers of the notion that bonus actions are simply additional quick mini-actions which everyone gets as part of their standard action economy, most of its problems go away; unfortunately that ship has long-since-sailed deep into the corpus of fifth-edition content, commentary, and community...