D&D (2024) Mike Mearls “…it’s now obvious how to live without Bonus Actions”' And 6th Edition When Players Ask

With all due respect to Mike Mearls, he is wrong. The action economy in 5th Edition is beautifully designed, and I wouldn't change a thing about it.

 

[schnee]

Ugh... Fine...

Again, I'm not saying that you are wrong here. Just that you could be, and then it will be up to you to eat your words.

If you want to tell others they have to do something, then you should be prepared to do it yourself if you are wrong. Fair is fair.

You'd be absolutely right if I said 'I think a whole bunch of people who are resisting what he's talking about will eat their words later on.'

But I didn't.

I've been working in corporate environments for almost twenty years. I know how to sprinkle juuuust enough weasel words and 'could', 'maybe' and 'quite possibly' to allow me to wiggle out of almost anything.

And, because I think we're probably more in agreement than it seems, I feel like I should restate what I said in a clearer way:

I think many people in this thread are too attached to 'bonus actions', think it's fine the way it is, and don't think it can be improved. And they're getting kind of riled up about it. Not everyone, but a significant number. (It's even worse on Giant in the Playground.)

I think he will most likely crack the problem, come up with a more elegant design, and make the game a bit less fiddly and exception-based while keeping all the goodness we have now. (I've seen far harder logic and task flow problems cracked.)

And, if that happens, a lot of people that are dismissive or resistant now will be proven wrong. Because they were hassling him for having the audacity to try to improve the game.

If it doesn't, (which I'd bet against), oh well.

 

[Dausuul]

Exactly. A tight action economy keeps D&D from turning into a game of Magic where one guy's combo deck is going off. Don't get me wrong, I love a good combo deck, but D&D is the wrong game for that.

Mearls's proposal takes this into account. Hardwiring the bonus action into an associated regular action means you can't stack them; you only get one action, period.

The question is how this would work with stuff like Cunning Action or bonus-action spells. I'd be interested to see how that gets addressed.

Bonus actions are hacky and clunky. They should be tolerated only so long as no one has a better idea. Mearls has an idea; whether it's better or not remains to be seen, but he should at least explore it.

 

[pukunui]

Mearls's proposal takes this into account. Hardwiring the bonus action into an associated regular action means you can't stack them; you only get one action, period.

How would you hardwire something like Bardic Inspiration into another action? Which other action would it be? They made it a bonus action so that the bard could do more than just inspire someone on their turn, which was a big reason why bards were so weak in 3e. Sure, it doesn't always make sense in game, but it works in play.

Also, wouldn't you have to break the Attack action into a whole lot of smaller actions, one each for all the different things that let you do something extra when you would now normally take the Attack action? So like Mearls is saying with TWF, you'd just take a TWF action, instead of the Attack action + a bonus action. So then you'd probably have to make things like GWM provide its own attack action, so you couldn't stack the bonus attack from it with something else that provides something extra when you attack, and so on. The game would end up less simple.

 

[Lord Twig]

You'd be absolutely right if I said 'I think a whole bunch of people who are resisting what he's talking about will eat their words later on.'

But I didn't.

I've been working in corporate environments for almost twenty years. I know how to sprinkle juuuust enough weasel words and 'could', 'maybe' and 'quite possibly' to allow me to wiggle out of almost anything.

And, because I think we're probably more in agreement than it seems, I feel like I should restate what I said in a clearer way:

I think many people in this thread are too attached to 'bonus actions', think it's fine the way it is, and don't think it can be improved. And they're getting kind of riled up about it. Not everyone, but a significant number. (It's even worse on Giant in the Playground.)

I think he will most likely crack the problem, come up with a more elegant design, and make the game a bit less fiddly and exception-based while keeping all the goodness we have now. (I've seen far harder logic and task flow problems cracked.)

And, if that happens, a lot of people that are dismissive or resistant now will be proven wrong. Because they were hassling him for having the audacity to try to improve the game.

If it doesn't, (which I'd bet against), oh well.

Fine. Weasel out of it.

And personally I am not attached to the bonus action. I'm just not willing to get rid of it, just for the sake of getting rid of it. His current suggestion of "Just make a bunch if individual actions" doesn't sound like a good solution to me. Instead of learning a couple general rules, you will need to learn potentially hundreds of separate special rules, some with their own little corner case.

Here are so other suggestions.

1. Don't get rid of bonus actions, but reduce where not needed. Two weapon fighting seems like one of the biggest offenders*.
2. Make a clear list of actions and bonus actions. Include a chart in the book. Make space on the character sheet to list the action type.
3. Eliminate special exceptions. Do you really need to limit casters to a cantrip with a bonus action spell? I have yet to see a really broken combo. And it will just burn you spell slots faster.

*The real problem with removing the bonus action from two weapon fighting is that they added a style and a feat to boost it up to make up for the fact that it requires a bonus action. Now if you take it away it is unbalanced. If you just tone down the power of the style and feat you can get rid of the bonus action requirement and it is fine.

 

[Lord Twig]

How would you hardwire something like Bardic Inspiration into another action? Which other action would it be? They made it a bonus action so that the bard could do more than just inspire someone on their turn, which was a big reason why bards were so weak in 3e. Sure, it doesn't always make sense in game, but it works in play.

Also, wouldn't you have to break the Attack action into a whole lot of smaller actions, one each for all the different things that let you do something extra when you would now normally take the Attack action? So like Mearls is saying with TWF, you'd just take a TWF action, instead of the Attack action + a bonus action. So then you'd probably have to make things like GWM provide its own attack action, so you couldn't stack the bonus attack from it with something else that provides something extra when you attack, and so on. The game would end up less simple.

I think the idea is to go back to 4th edition powers. So yeah, GWM would be its own action, or power. Then you have the two weapon power, the flurry of blows power, the bonus spell/cantrip power, etc. And then you would just write each action/ability/power onto your character sheet, or have a card with it printed on it, and you have all you need to know!

Of course that is silly, because you could just write down that something is a bonus action or a regular action on the sheet and you would save yourself some time.

As an aside, I will admit that I have run into a player that sits there and tries to figure out if he can somehow get a bonus action on his turn, like he is wasting it if he doesn't do something with it. I blame this on a hold over from 4th edition. After the 3rd round of this it is blatantly obvious that he has no bonus action and he should just end his turn, but he doesn't. Everyone else didn't use a bonus action! (Except the Rogue, and he just uses it to move.) Just take your one action and move on!

But that is not a problem with bonus actions, that is a player problem. I'm sure he will get it eventually.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Bonus actions are hacky and clunky.

I fundamentally don't understand this complaint. Like, at all. You're doing one thing on your turn, plus a discrete bonus thing. What more elegant way is there to frame that? Smashing together the two things into one "action" seems a lot more hacky and clunky to me. Cunning Action would need to read something like, "As an action, you can attack, dodge, disengage, dash, cast a spell, or use an item, and then also dodge, disengage, or dash as part of the same action". And I'm probably forgetting a couple of standard actions rogues like to do in combination with Cunning Action, all of which are cleanly allowed when you just make Cunning Action a bonus action.

 

[pukunui]

I think the idea is to go back to 4th edition powers.

Yeah, no. I don't want to go back to 4e powers.

Bardic Inspiration is the only bonus action ability that has ever felt even remotely wonky to me. Even the bonus action spell / cantrip thing makes sense if you think about it in terms of the number of words / gestures required to cast a given spell. Perhaps bonus action spells and cantrips only require a single, monosyllabic word and/or simple gesture, whereas a levelled spell would have more and/or longer words, as well as more complex gestures. Casting one of the latter takes up the same amount of time as casting one of each of the former.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Oh, gods, no! I do not and will not buy a .5 edition of 5th edition D&D - I didn't buy 3.5, and stopped buying 4th edition when they came out with the Essentials material, which was 4.5 without admitting it. If it's really that broke, make a 6th edition, don't sell me what I already have with a few tweaks along the lines of "Hey, 'Animals' and 'Beasts' are two creature types in 3e - let's drop one of them and dump 'em all in one category for 3.5, disregarding that previous books players might want to use employs the distinction." Leave my core books alone, and if you want to fiddle with the Ranger or whatever, release a supplement! (And besides, isn't that the plan already?) I had 3e, and when 4e came out it was a new rules set (I'm disregarding the fluff here, and solely considering game mechanics), so it was worth buying whereas 3.5 was too close to what I already had, game-mechanically, while being just different enough to be only semi-compatible - the worst of both worlds, IMO.

To be fair, 4E Essentials was totally compatible with all previous material. By the criteria you're stating here, it was not "4.5 without admitting it".

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Bardic Inspiration is the only bonus action ability that has ever felt even remotely wonky to me. Even the bonus action spell / cantrip thing makes sense if you think about it in terms of the number of words / gestures required to cast a given spell. Perhaps bonus action spells and cantrips only require a single, monosyllabic word and/or simple gesture, whereas a levelled spell would have more and/or longer words, as well as more complex gestures. Casting one of the latter takes up the same amount of time as casting one of each of the former.

A lot of bonus actions are implicitly things that you're doing at the same time as your other action, just with other parts of your body. Like, two weapon fighting: it's not that you're attacking with one hand, and then attacking with the other hand super-fast before your turn ends. Both attacks probably take about the same amount of time, but you're performing them near-simultaneously. Or Cunning Action: you're good enough with fancy footwork that you can perform it while also doing something with your hands.

Bonus action spells seem to be a partial exception to this observation. If the rule were straight-up "you can't cast a spell as both a regular action and a bonus action", it would make sense: a bonus action spell plus, say, a sword attack means you can multitask and swing your sword while still reciting an incantation and maybe making a gesture with your off-hand. But being able to cast cantrips sort of throws a wrench in that model. Maybe if it were instead something like, you can't cast two spells in the same round if their components overlap? So you could cast a purely verbal spell and a purely somatic bonus spell (or vice versa), because your hands are doing one thing while your voice is doing another.

 

[pukunui]

Both attacks probably take about the same amount of time, but you're performing them near-simultaneously.

Sure, and casting two really short, quick spells one after another can still fit into that paradigm. You can point a finger and shout "Freeze ray!" and "Bamf!" near-simultaneously too. But can you shout "Bamf!" while also pointing and chanting the words to the fireball spell? I guess not.