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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Kinematics" data-source="post: 7388354" data-attributes="member: 6932123">Given some of the responses here, I think it's important to note that Mike was speaking in terms of design, not play.  Players will often need to think of things in terms of action economy (though the less you need to think in that way, the better).  However the designers should not fall into the trap of building the action economy.  (Those who are in charge of balancing the game, like Jeremy Crawford, are likely to put more emphasis on that, but their job isn't the same as design.)The designer should be focusing more on what the class/subclass/monster/whatever can do, not the action economy details of how it fits in with everything else.  You can't always get away from it (eg: all the bonus action limitations on expanding Rogue), but it shouldn't be the focus of the design, because that leads to designing a bunch of mechanics rather than a class, where the most important point is making something that lets a player feel like they're their character.So from the designer's perspective, yes, he's absolutely right.  Based on the goals they've set for crafting 5E, the designers should be focused first and foremost on the "thematic" side of things, and should not be building for the sake of mechanics.  That's not the same as saying that the action economy doesn't exist, or that it's not important in some aspects of gameplay, or that it's not important to other departments at WotC.On the other hand, that's probably a bit of a weakness as well.  Since the designers are trying to avoid the hard mechanics as much as possible when doing the design, they're likely to build stuff that's difficult to describe without something like, say, bonus actions.  And then they have to justify it, and the mechanics section has to figure out how to fit it in, and then years down the line the designers realize that what they jury-rigged back in the day becomes something that trips them up now that so much more is hanging from those ropes.  So it's a double-edged sword.  If they focus too much on the mechanics, the game becomes something that loses much of its flavor.  If they don't truly consider the mechanics enough, though, they build something that doesn't quite fit right, and they have to work around from then on.</blockquote>

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