Does Opportunity Action + MBA = Opportunity Attack?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes, but you still haven't addressed the nut of the issue DS, which is that the circumstances where they are actually used in practice tend to be IDENTICAL types of situations. There is a distinction here without a difference. I FULLY understand the action vs what is done with that action distinction, no matter how many times you try to tell me I don't, so can you just stop bothering to insult my understanding of the rules? It doesn't actually help your argument any. Given the HUGE number of times this confusing topic has shown up on EVERY board that discusses 4e rules I'm sorry but I can't possibly agree with you that it isn't confusing to a substantial segment of the 4e playing population. You can keep arguing it isn't confusing to YOU and maybe isn't confusing to YOUR players, but it QUITE obviously IS confusing to MANY others. There was just no fundamental reason why when the game was designed this kind of arbitrary difference had to be codified into the rules. ALL Opportunity Actions that result in Basic Attacks should have been treated equally. It would have made the distinction irrelevant in actual play and been more sensible and consistent for the players. It isn't a giant big deal but it is a source of annoyance and 4e tends to present these strange and annoying distinctions quite often. The oft maligned fact that non-STR based classes suck at OAs for instance is another relatively similar oddity that gets under a lot of people's skin.

 

[abyssaldeath]

Yes.
Any attack made as part of an opportunity action is an opportunity attack. There is ALSO a game element that is called and Opportunity Attack.


WotC, nowhere in ANY rules source distinguishes between opportunity attacks and Opportunity Attacks. Your making a distinction that doesnt exist in the rules.

Says you.There is only an action type called Opportunity Attacks. No where in the books does it say that Opportunity Actions that make attacks are opportunity attacks. That is completely made up. You are making up rules that do NOT exist. It even says on page 268 of the PHB that "one type of opportunity action that every combatant can take is an opportunity attack". That's it. There is no rule saying that any attack made as part of an opportunity action is an opportunity attack.

 

[fanboy2000]

No, actually I can't see why it is this way at all DS. It has BECOME codified as a meaningful distinction over time, it didn't START OUT as one.

I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. It's always been my understanding that an opportunity attack was a kind of opportunity action. I.e., that there were other (or would be other) opportunity actions that weren't opportunity attacks. IIRC, this was clearly stated in the rules quick reference that came with Keep on the Shadowfell. (Which is when I started playing 4e.)

The PHB also makes it clear that an opportunity action is an action type. (It's listed under action types with triggers, pg 268.) Also the "Actions in Combat" table on pg 289 in the PHB lists opportunity actions in the same manner it lists standard actions and move actions. That table lists Opportunity attack as an opportunity action.

This isn't a recent change. Sure, the Rules Compendium and Heroes of the Fallen Lands both use the power format for opportunity attacks, but they do that for grab and bull rush too.

That said, if a person is learning the rules at the table, it can be confusing because opportunity attacks are often the only kinds of opportunity actions PCs used. Sometimes I slip and still call them attacks of opportunity.

Any attack made as part of an opportunity action is an opportunity attack.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong. PHB1, pages 268 and 290. At no point does it say that an opportunity attack is any attack made using an opportunity action. In fact, it says the opposite. The only reference the PHB makes to opportunity attacks are to the opportunity attacks detailed on page 290.

WotC, nowhere in ANY rules source distinguishes between opportunity attacks and Opportunity Attacks. Your making a distinction that doesnt exist in the rules.

All the rules sources I'm aware of don't define opportunity attacks the way you do.

For all the flack Wizard's gets for it's errata, this hasn't really changed since the new edition came out.

 

[DracoSuave]

Yes, but you still haven't addressed the nut of the issue DS, which is that the circumstances where they are actually used in practice tend to be IDENTICAL types of situations.

There exists a sum total of one opportunity action in the entire game that has the trigger 'When an adjacent enemy leaves its square or makes a ranged or area attack' and the effect 'make a basic attack against that enemy.'

Every other opportunity action has either a different trigger, a different effect, or both... that means they are no more similiar than Combat Challenge is to the Shield ability.

There is a distinction here without a difference. I FULLY understand the action vs what is done with that action distinction, no matter how many times you try to tell me I don't, so can you just stop bothering to insult my understanding of the rules?

Then how can you claim they are confusable or even the same thing or even related?

They are as related as five dollars is to a five-dollar-milkshake. One is a currency, the other is one thing you can use that currency to buy.

It doesn't actually help your argument any. Given the HUGE number of times this confusing topic has shown up on EVERY board that discusses 4e rules I'm sorry but I can't possibly agree with you that it isn't confusing to a substantial segment of the 4e playing population.

And how is that confusion usually resovled?

"RTFB"

You can keep arguing it isn't confusing to YOU and maybe isn't confusing to YOUR players, but it QUITE obviously IS confusing to MANY others. There was just no fundamental reason why when the game was designed this kind of arbitrary difference had to be codified into the rules. ALL Opportunity Actions that result in Basic Attacks should have been treated equally.

Why? They are different things. Opportunity Attack refers to an explicit trigger followed by a basic attack. Other things with different triggers that end in a basic attack are not meant to be opportunity attacks, because they're NOT THE SAME THING AND NOT INTENDED TO BE.

Then you'd have Opportunity Actions that result in attacks that are not basic attacks being confusing on top of that. THAT would be obtuse.

Moreover, you can't 'get a bonus to opportunity actions' because 'opportunity actions' don't have numbers involved. It's like saying 'I have +1 to my warhorse.' What does that even mean? Nothing. It's nonsense, in the context of the rules.

Lastly, what sort of action does this thing take in the action economy? Obviously not an immediate action, because you want it to be taken more than once per round. So you have to name it something. But what? Well, the most common type is opportunity attack, so you could name it after that, in the same way that you name the action most commonly used to move a 'move action' regardless if it actually involves movement....

....so... opportunity action... for this rules construct that you've created a vacuum for just so the rules... would be... less obtuse...

WAIT THAT'S WHAT YOU HAVE NOW

'But Draco, I'd call it something else, like a 'reactive action' (great, immediate reactions will get confused with that) or an 'interrupting action' (same thing) or a 'swift action.'

Fine, I just solved the problem for you. Go through all your books that have 'opportunity action' written in them, replace it with 'swift action' and see if that solves the problem. Cause really, if the entire thing is a matter of nomenclature, you can solve that by changing the name.

Done. Was that so hard?

It would have made the distinction irrelevant in actual play and been more sensible and consistent for the players.

It's not the rule being obtuse in that instance.

It isn't a giant big deal but it is a source of annoyance and 4e tends to present these strange and annoying distinctions quite often. The oft maligned fact that non-STR based classes suck at OAs for instance is another relatively similar oddity that gets under a lot of people's skin.

Non-Dex classes suck at initiative. That doesn't make the game broken.

Yes.
Any attack made as part of an opportunity action is an opportunity attack. There is ALSO a game element that is called and Opportunity Attack.

No, Opportunity Attack is explicitly defined. Only things that are explicitly defined as opportunity attacks are opportunity attacks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There exists a sum total of one opportunity action in the entire game that has the trigger 'When an adjacent enemy leaves its square or makes a ranged or area attack' and the effect 'make a basic attack against that enemy.'

Every other opportunity action has either a different trigger, a different effect, or both... that means they are no more similiar than Combat Challenge is to the Shield ability.

Really? Name me all these other Opportunity Actions that are NOT just a trigger for an MBA. ALL of the ones I can think of entitle you to an MBA. There really is no other kind. Maybe you can dig up an example, but the truth is the entire mechanic has been used very little and if an Op Action DOES do something else, so what? It really doesn't change my point one iota.

Why? They are different things. Opportunity Attack refers to an explicit trigger followed by a basic attack. Other things with different triggers that end in a basic attack are not meant to be opportunity attacks, because they're NOT THE SAME THING AND NOT INTENDED TO BE.

I don't think you've ACTUALLY READ a word I've written!

Then you'd have Opportunity Actions that result in attacks that are not basic attacks being confusing on top of that. THAT would be obtuse.

Moreover, you can't 'get a bonus to opportunity actions' because 'opportunity actions' don't have numbers involved. It's like saying 'I have +1 to my warhorse.' What does that even mean? Nothing. It's nonsense, in the context of the rules.

Lastly, what sort of action does this thing take in the action economy? Obviously not an immediate action, because you want it to be taken more than once per round. So you have to name it something. But what? Well, the most common type is opportunity attack, so you could name it after that, in the same way that you name the action most commonly used to move a 'move action' regardless if it actually involves movement....

Again, you simply haven't actually read what I've written. WE, you and me, understand all of this. The point is when someone is directed to make an MBA as an Opportunity Action pretty much every player I've ever played with has logically assumed that this MBA is considered an OPPORTUNITY ATTACK!!!!! This is ENTIRELY a logical and reasonable assumption since it certainly SEEMS LIKE it should be the case, but no, a whole different set of conditional bonuses apply for whatever mysterious and unfathomable reason that has nothing to do with the game. OBVIOUSLY if an Opportunity Action allowed you to do something that was NOT an attack (and you will still have to dig up an example, I can find NONE) then it wouldn't be an attack and ATTACK bonuses wouldn't apply to it!!! DUH!!!! Nobody has an issue with what kind of ACTION it is, they have an issue with the fact that there is a pointless differentiation between "Opportunity Attack" and "Opportunity Action that just happens to be an MBA (just like an Opportunity Attack is)".

Non-Dex classes suck at initiative. That doesn't make the game broken.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The fact that the rogue for whatever reason suddenly can't do squat with his OA whereas he's supremely deadly with his dagger the entire rest of the time is a whole different thing. Characters with low dex don't EXPECT to be good at getting a jump on people. They are always consistently operating at the same level of performance in this respect, not toggling between deadly and incompetent depending on who's turn it happens to be. It is these weird inconsistencies in the way things apply from a game world perspective that piss people off.

I just think they missed a (relatively minor and in the grand scheme of things fairly inconsequential) opportunity to make the game a BIT more consistent by having the same modifiers always apply to any Basic Attack made as an Opportunity Action. The EASIEST way to accomplish that would have been to declare an MBA made with an Opportunity Action to be the definition of "Opportunity Attack" from the start. This does not confuse anything or create any void in the rules whatsoever. It could also have been accomplished with more careful wording of individual bonuses so they always applied in the two situations. Either way it would have been a small but measurable improvement in the game.

 

[DracoSuave]

Really? Name me all these other Opportunity Actions that are NOT just a trigger for an MBA. ALL of the ones I can think of entitle you to an MBA.

1) Every Shaman ever.

2) Pre-errata Blurred Step. I both won and lost a bet over that guy. This one even answers the 'Opportunity Action that doesn't involve an attack' challenge! 2 for 1!

I didn't even need to crack open a book, right there's two, and they're both ubiquitous at-will class features to boot! Every member of those classes has an answer that satisfies your challenge.

One of those was certainly in development before the PHB came out.

Any other requests?

The EASIEST way to accomplish that would have been to declare an MBA made with an Opportunity Action to be the definition of "Opportunity Attack" from the start. This does not confuse anything or create any void in the rules whatsoever.

Except... you've just removed opportunity attacks themselves, i.e. what we define as an opportunity attack. By making 'Opportunity Attack' into 'An attack made with an opportunity action' you've then removed the 'Thing triggered by moving or using ranged/area stuff adjacent to your enemy.' So you HAVE TO FILL THAT VOID.

So you have this new thing, you call it, I dunno, Reactive Strike. Name doesn't matter. So now you have some things that generally affect opportunity actions, and specific things that affect this Reactive Strike thing. Now, you might want to have things that ONLY affect reactive strike, because you don't want them for general use by, say, shaman spirit boons, or whatever. You might claim this is inelegant, but that's simply not true--sometimes you want specific powers to get bonuses that general powers do not. The martial power source has an entire section of MP2 devoted to this concept.

So... you have some abilities that key off of reactive strike, and others off the general opportunity action. And... you might have some triggered attacks that you want to key off the first example that aren't reactive strike.... so the elegant way is to simply say 'You may reactive strike when (new trigger)'

So... to recap what happens after you change the system:

You have things that key off of opportunity actions.
You have things that key off of the specific opportunity action that triggers from moving/ranged/area in range
You have things that also benefit from the above but are not that specific trigger.

In other words, the exact same situation you have now. You have: Opportunity action-keyed rules, opportunity attack-keyed rules, and every trigger for an opportunity action in the game can -elegantly- decide which categories apply to it simply by adding or omitting 'as an opportunity attack' to their text. That's how it works NOW. Everything intended to work with the same stuff as opportunity attacks DO, simply by keying directly off opportunity attacks, rather than opportunity actions. (Heavy Blade Opportunity, for example)

This is important, because it's clearly intended (as an example) that Fighters don't get a bonus to ALL opportunity action-class attacks... just the opportunity attack itself. But... there are alternative ways to trigger, and effects of, opportunity attacks, and they're explicitly defined.

This has nothing whatsoever to do with it. The fact that the rogue for whatever reason suddenly can't do squat with his OA whereas he's supremely deadly with his dagger the entire rest of the time is a whole different thing.

As a nitpick, most melee rogues are Strength-secondary. OAs are hardly a problem for them.

More importantly, many fighters are better at planning their attacks than sneaking attacks in as a matter of reaction. Why must they automatically be equal at both simply because they happen to be good at one?


What it comes down to tho is this lauding of 'consistancy' in all things like it's a design goal... it's not. The design goal involves simple rules, with complexity coming from specific exceptions to those rules.

Exception-based design is diametrically opposed to the concept of universal consistancy. Consistancy and exception are antonyms.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

1) Every Shaman ever.

2) Pre-errata Blurred Step. I both won and lost a bet over that guy. This one even answers the 'Opportunity Action that doesn't involve an attack' challenge! 2 for 1!

I didn't even need to crack open a book, right there's two, and they're both ubiquitous at-will class features to boot! Every member of those classes has an answer that satisfies your challenge.

One of those was certainly in development before the PHB came out.

Any other requests?

And as I say, they really don't change the argument one bit because nobody has an issue with "other kinds of Opp Actions that aren't MBAs." Nor have they ever. It is the bizarre way that bonuses to Opp Attacks don't apply when an MBA is used during an Opportunity Action that doesn't happen to be a standard OA. They are STILL the same thing from any in-game perspective, but somehow a rather obtuse rules construct causes you to have to treat them differently, and the difference CAN sometimes be fairly material.

And again it really doesn't matter when they were in development. I find it exceedingly unlikely that rectifying that inconsistency would have had any appreciable impact on any of the PHB2 classes. At worst it might have required a whole word or two to be changed before the book was finalized. I really doubt anyone at WotC was incapable of that. I think it just simply wasn't a consideration. I suspect if you could talk to Mike Mearles right now and ask him if he thinks ignoring these little inconsistencies was a good idea when 4e was being developed he'd tell you "no, it wasn't" because it DID irritate a lot of players, and continues to do so.

Thus my original comment which provoked you to such an irate reaction in the first place, it was just not a good game design decision. It wasn't handled well. It is part of a more extensive thing that wasn't handled well. RPGs SHOULD strive to make every equivalent in-game situation work in a mechanically consistent manner. It improves people's perception that the game rules consistently handle the game world and avoids confusing players even if they aren't rules experts.

 

[tentfox]

It is obtuse because there is a difference between opportunity attack and Opportunity Attack. All they needed to do was call opportunity action something else, like pudding action, and then there would be a pudding attack and an Opportunity Attack. The rules would be the same and the confusion would be gone.

 

[FireLance]

IMO, the distinction between opportunity action and opportunity attack is quite clear.

That said, I do think that there is some potential for confusion between an opportunity attack and a melee basic attack made as an opportunity action since an opportunity attack is also a melee basic attack made as an opportunity action, and for many characters, the only way to make a melee basic attack as an opportunity action is to make an opportunity attack. Terminology-wise, "opportunity attack" might also seem to be a contraction of "melee basic attack made as an opportunity action". All of these might lead someone to the incorrect conclusion that all melee basic attacks made as opportunity actions are opportunity attacks.

As mentioned, the key to distinguishing opportunity attacks from other melee basic attacks made as opportunity actions is to look at the trigger. The Essentials fighter's battle guardian power, the property of the Moradin's Blessing of Iron divine boon (DMG2), and the Repel Charge (PH3) and Allied Opportunity (MP2) feats all allow melee basic attacks to be made as opportunity actions, but they have different triggers.

EDIT: On the issue of trigger conditions, one interesting point of note is the Champion of Order paragon path's In Defense of Order ability, which broadens the trigger conditions for making an opportunity attack. Fortunately, as far as I know, that is the only ability that adds to or otherwise changes the trigger conditions for making an opportunity attack.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

EDIT: On the issue of trigger conditions, one interesting point of note is the Champion of Order paragon path's In Defense of Order ability, which broadens the trigger conditions for making an opportunity attack. Fortunately, as far as I know, that is the only ability that adds to or otherwise changes the trigger conditions for making an opportunity attack.

Well, there are other things that modify them as well, like Polearm Gamble and Beast Defender.

Really, it isn't the terminology that is confusing to people. It is just the way for whatever reason certain Opportunity Action MBAs confusingly lose out on bonuses that apply to OAs. It lacks any real logic in terms of what is going on in the game that there is this fairly arbitrary distinction.

Really it all goes deeper than OAs. In 4e there are all kinds of situations where bonuses are tied to the mechanics of a situation instead of being tied to the things the players mainly care about, the in-game narrative. Instead of bonuses that are say tied to the type of creature you're fighting or its characteristics etc they are tied to what type of action mechanics are being used etc, which is a mechanical construct. Personally I think this was a mistaken design philosophy. It leads to a game that is both detached from the narrative and just comes across to a lot of players as a mass of jargon and numbers that gets in the way of RP. I'm not convinced that the majority of it is really necessary in gamist terms either. You can have a perfectly good mechanically solid game in which the character gets bonuses to hit things because they're say giants and that character hates giants and took the "kill giants better" feat. There is a smattering of that kind of stuff in the game, but it is far outweighed by stuff that is driven entirely by pure unadorned mechanics.