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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7716967" data-attributes="member: 996">I guess neither alternative exactly displays crystalline perfection.  ;(5e's action economy kinda shakes out to sorting actions into three buckets - OK, 6:  move, action, bonus, object-interaction, just no action-economy 'cost' (Second Wind, for instance), and the off-turn Reaction (Ok and concentration is sorta another action type all by itself).  What ends up critically important is not so much how many of each action you get in a round (1), but what all is in each bucket.  So if two completely different and un-related things both use a bonus action, you can't do both of them in the same turn, but if one is an object-interaction and the other an action, you can do them simultaneously (for instance).  Thus you have issues like 'needing too many reactions' because you have several things to do that all consume that action-economy resource, while maybe having nothing much to do with you bonus action, say.It's not terribly intuitive what the critical resource is, and it will vary with the build - you can even optimize around getting the most of each available action if you want, I suppose.  The complexity is ultimately similar to what was in 4e (Standard, Move, Minor, Free, OA, Immediate, not-an-action) or even 3e (Full, Standard, Partial, Move, 5'-step, Swift, Free, Immediate, AoO, not an action), just some of it's brushed into corners where you may not notice it at first.  Even so, it's at least a defined, not entirely inconsistent sort of complexity.  But, ultimately, it shakes out to the important question not being 'which action takes longer/is more important' but 'do two things take the same action or not.'  If you have two option that take an action, you can't do them both, if you have two options that take a bonus action you can't do them both - but you can do one from column A and one from column B.  'Opportunity' cost, I suppose, is more important than 'action economy' cost.  In contrast to 3e/4e where you could generally trade actions up and down the scale, or even start an action in one round and finish it in the next, making the 'economic cost' more critical.  FWIW.Anyway, going to the defined-combo-action instead of Action + Bonus model would just further limit options.  Instead of being able to take a bonus action with one of several Actions or an action with one of several bonus actions, you take a specific special Action that does a typical action thing, plus the bonus action thing.  It moves the complexity around, because you probably end up with a lot of such defined actions.  Instead of one Cunning Action class ability, you have an Attack-and-Disengage-Cunningly Ability, and an Attack-and-Hide-Cunningly Ability, abd a Dash-and-Dash-again-Cunningly Ability, etc...</blockquote>

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