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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lichmaster" data-source="post: 8999680" data-attributes="member: 6683330">I'm not convinced about your interpretation of Flowing Form, or of maneuvers in general.About actions, the rules open with:"On your turn, you typically have an action, a bonus action, and your movement".Regarding combat maneuvers in general, we have "Many combat maneuvers are used alongside making an attack, but some have their own action costs."Many combat maneuvers cost an action and specify that you take the attack action, allowing you to make use of Extra attack and granting different rider bonuses to these specific attacks. Flowing form instead costs an action and grants you the dodge action plus one attack per target that misses you until the beginning of your next turn. In both cases, you take an action to activate the maneuver, and the maneuver specifies what happens next, in some cases triggering another action, but you in fact benefit from one action only. The maneuver acts as a modifier to the basic, underlying action, be it either the attack action or the dodge action.Your interpretation is problematic because it lets you trigger a maneuver without spending its corresponding action cost, and if the maneuver grants a specific action, you implicitly exceed the limit of 1 action/bonus action per turn, which is in general very explicitly (and carefully) stated instead. For instance, the Haste spell specifies:"Until the spell ends, the target’s Speed is doubled, it gains a +2 bonus to AC, it has advantage on Dexterity saving throws, and it gains one additional action on each of its turns. This action can be used to make a single weapon attack, or to take the Dash, Disengage, Hide, or Use an Object action"The wording of the spell explicitly states that an additional action is given, and exactly what it can be used for.So in general I think the designers put a cost on some maneuvers in terms of actions/bonus actions or none precisely to balance the action economy expenditure with the specific maneuver in question. An alternative could have been, for each maneuver, to say something like "When you take the X action, ...", but I guess that would have caused some other issues, for instance due to the fact that some classes can take some actions but resolve them as bonus actions (like a rogue with its cunning action), thus again implicitly breaking the action economy.</blockquote>

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