Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="El Mahdi" data-source="post: 6609267" data-attributes="member: 59506">I understand your disconnect.  Let me try to explain it this way:Action/resource economy is an important factor of combat, whether D&D or real-life; the idea being that one can only do x-amount in a certain amount of time and only has x-amount of mental focus.Once someone is engaged in melee combat with an opponent, one is committed to defending oneself.  Your opponent is actively attacking...continuously.  You cannot simply walk away or they will hack you down.  There is no calling time.  They want to kill you.  And unlike the player's view of combat as turn based, the actual combat taking place between the characters has no such artificial structure.  From the character's perspective, the fight, though it contains natural ebbs and flows, is continuous with escape a dangerous endeavor; one requiring a controlled retreat.A controlled retreat...a disengagement...requires shifting one's mental focus to finding that opening to disengage.  Whether it's creating a misdirect in order to generate an opening, waiting for a natural break in the action, attacking with the purpose of forcing your opponent to shift focus to defense (in order to create an opening), or simply a quick focused lunge/jump/quick-step away from the opponent while maintaining defense, it requires a focus and economy of action that precludes doing other actions at that time.  It uses up a measurable portion of the finite focus and time available during a round.The reason why one doesn't get to cast a spell while disengaging is the same reason why one can't make an attack while disengaging.  You have already decided to end the engagement.  Further attacks or spells meant to actually harm, rather than misdirect or shift your attackers focus, are contrary to that mental shift.  You're either engaged in the fight and actively attempting to injure your opponent, or you're not.  Taking a middle approach is inconsistent with and too complicated for the game's rules, and even in real-life would almost certainly get you killed.  Focus is everything in a fight.  Split focus means death.Remember also that a melee attack roll in this situation is not a singular representation of an actual attack, but instead an abstract representation of your cumulative attacks made throughout a round of engagement.  The cumulative chance that your attacks inflicted injury on your opponent during that period of time.Multiple attacks and parries and feints and movements and etc., are occurring throughout the entire round.The Disengage action models the focused attempt to disengage from an opponent and that activity.  In game terms, the expenditure of an action resource is traded for the ability to disengage without triggering a concerted attack.  One can ignore that if you want and attack while moving away (or cast a spell) anyways, with the intention of doing harm, but the opponent is still in a position to attempt a counterattack as one did not focus on disengaging (thus an Attack of Opportunity).Cheers.<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=":)" /></blockquote>

Verification