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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 7868928" data-attributes="member: 6802765">I feel the complication comes from the fact that BB and GFB are the only spells where a portion of their effect (the melee weapon attack) is required to preceed the successful casting of the spell (or else the spell fails and isn't successfully cast). Lots of D&D rules are abstract, and some spells (e.g. Shield) have a retroactive effect, but having the effect of successfully casting Booming Blade also be a requirement for successfully casting it is taking things a bit far, in my opinion. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I agree that if it's impossible in 5e to clearly indicate a spell-specific exception to the Cast a Spell rules, then the lack of clarity in Booming Blade could indeed be evidence that the developers were trying to express an exception that they didn't give themselves room to express.I don't think it would be enough evidence to persuade me that they didn't also (paradoxically) intend for the melee weapon attack to be an effect of the spell, but I can't be entirely sure I would feel the same way if we didn't have the benefit of the tweets. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I agree that 5e does not consistently stick to natural language. Since they apparently wanted to stick to natural language, I'm usually willing to give extra weight to those interpretations that don't require assuming a new technical definition. But it's not a lot of extra weight, simply because there are so many examples of where they didn't use natural language.Personally, I think the effort to try to use natural language went too far. It would have been clearer if they'd acknowledged where they weren't using natural language and then being explicit about the technical definitions they were using. Addressing the complaints about 4e could have been better handled by limiting the number of technical terms, rather than trying (and necessarily failing) to avoid technical terms outright.</blockquote>

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