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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7717117" data-attributes="member: 71699">At this point I'm not ready to agree with that mechanical analysis. Let's take your Bardic Inspiration example. Forcing Bards to expend a spell slot on every occasion that they want to inspire an ally profoundly reduces the number of times they can influence the narrative per day. And every time they do, it has to be two pronged: they either need to influence the narrative in two ways (the spell effect, the inspiration effect), or they throw away the spell. The potential to cost more resources in turn typically means an effect has to be stronger in order to be as useful in play, leading to spikier game balance. We can colour our mechanical choices with the fluff of our choosing of course, but for me some Bards are not singers, they are musicians, and some are both: whether their mouth is free or not is irrelevant to Bardic Inspiration (and in fact that's what the current rule says in the first sentence).Mechanically, a structure like Bonus Actions that allows players to combine different effects in the same turn, flexibly, yields richer gameplay at lower design and learning cost. Once we start stitching effects together we pay a greater overhead for fewer usable cases. Where you say "lazy" design I would say "efficient" design. Also potentially more materially costly to players because the more each possible combination is separately cased, the more splatbooks you need to enumerate all the combinations.</blockquote>

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