November's SAGE ADVICE Is Here!

November's Sage Advice column by WotC's Jeremy Crawford is up. This month deals with lightfoot halfing and wood elf hiding racial traits, some class features, backgrounds (you can have only one!), muticlassing, surprise rounds in combat, and more. Check out this month's Sage Advice here. The advice here has been added to the Sage Advice Compendium.

 

[CapnZapp]

I'm intrigued by the ruling confirming you can Dash more than once in a round. This allows for otherwise particularly fast characters to get a bit out of hand, IMO.

That's the only way for the spell expeditious retreat to make you actually move faster.

If you couldn't double-dash you would never move triple-speed, and any "bonus dash" would in practice only mean "you can move, dash and do something else too".

 

[CapnZapp]

It seems fundamentally flawed that the attack that starts a combat would fail to surprise its target. Would it be so bad if the character were surprised until the start of his second turn? I understand that this might grant TWO surprise attacks against a surprised target that rolled low on initiative, but WotC didn't seem to have any problem with Ambuscade. Plus, being surprised in an ambush is a bad thing. There's no reason the rules can't reflect that.

No the attack that starts the combat still surprises you.

What you really should consider "fundamentally flawed" is the phrasing of the assassin ability that requires the assassin to ALSO win initiative.

 

[CapnZapp]

Not sure why -- unarmed strikes aren't weapons, and thus even though monks can use Dex for the attack, it's not an attack with a finesse weapon.

It seems you're differentiating between "Monks get to use DEX for Unarmed Strikes" and "monks can use Dex for the attack".

I don't understand your objection to jackofalltirades post.

 

[CapnZapp]

In the instance of unarmed attack this seems like a really, really nitpicky difference that does nothing to contribute to either the balance or fun of the game.

Somebody must have asked Jeremy Crawford about the underlying reasons for spending so much time and effort on this, no?

 

[garnuk]

Could someone direct me to a comprehensive overview WHY the designers have decided these byzantine measures were needed?

I am having trouble motivating myself to bother with the errata since I don't see why all the headache-inducing complexity is needed.

I'm sure it's discussed in many places, but I beg of you, please don't just link to a 100 page thread.

I'm asking if there is a single article or post that intellegibly and concisely explains why all this "my fists aren't weapons except when they are" malarkey is needed, including a list of all the supposed loophole abuse that we're spared.

Thanks muchly in advance,
Zapp

I'm not aware of an individual article, but ive noticed the following loopholes from Twitter feeds etc.

1. If your hand is a weapon, then you can be duel wielding while nothing is in your hand. Or you can "have a weapon" while at the same time having a free hand open for somatic spell components. This creates some broken feat combinations things like duelist style.
2. Are the spells that enhance weapons or make a weapon magical. It would step on the monk's unarmed attacks are magical ability and make it a bad fit for the level it's currently applied to.
3. It allows a monk/rogue to use dex for their unarmed attacks but not get sneak attack damage because it's not a finesse weapon, and that seems off if it's a melee weapon using dex but not finesse.
4. It makes the weird situation where you can't use the two weapon fighting rule to punch twice cause your hands aren't light weapons, but a duel wielded feat allows you to do so.

5. It makes it appear that an unarmed attack is only a punch or a kick, instead of also including a shove or bodyslam, or chokehold etc. Causing people to needlessly be confused when they try to find the rules to make those attacks.
6. Jeremy Crawford uses the example that you can't silver your hand a lot when the discussion comes up. This seems to be the straw that broke unarmed attacks for him.
7. I believe it impacts the wizards ability to use their proficiency bonus to make unarmed attacks.

 

[Minigiant]

Could someone direct me to a comprehensive overview WHY the designers have decided these byzantine measures were needed?

I am having trouble motivating myself to bother with the errata since I don't see why all the headache-inducing complexity is needed.

I'm sure it's discussed in many places, but I beg of you, please don't just link to a 100 page thread.

I'm asking if there is a single article or post that intellegibly and concisely explains why all this "my fists aren't weapons except when they are" malarkey is needed, including a list of all the supposed loophole abuse that we're spared.

Thanks muchly in advance,
Zapp

I don't think there actual articles and post on it.
I believe there was a podcast or video somewhere where Mearls said they wanted unarmed strike to be in the domain of the monk and having it contained and confined mostly there, the risks of broken combos are lowered.

But you can see the intent once you make the "unarmed strike is a weapon" judgement, once all those spells, items, class features, race features, how wonky things can get if a new player or power gamer gets ahold of it.

 

[CapnZapp]

I don't think there actual articles and post on it.
I believe there was a podcast or video somewhere where Mearls said they wanted unarmed strike to be in the domain of the monk and having it contained and confined mostly there, the risks of broken combos are lowered.

But you can see the intent once you make the "unarmed strike is a weapon" judgement, once all those spells, items, class features, race features, how wonky things can get if a new player or power gamer gets ahold of it.

The devil is in the details. It is the specifics of "all those" effects I'm after.

And it doesn't have to be a WotC-sanctioned piece just because I used the word "article".

In fact, it could be a regular forum post, much like Garnuk's

 

[Flamestrike]

I can understand their ruling for "no surprise once combat has started" since that is simple.

OTOH, to me it's trivial to add "you can still be surprised during combat, making you unable to act against your surpriser. You can still take actions you would have taken otherwise, actions directed at those foes that haven't surprised you."

If you're fighting goblins, and my Orc surprisingly jumps out to swing an axe in your face in round 3, to me it isn't difficult to tell you that in round 4, you can keep fighting the goblins, but you can't take any action against the Orc, since he surprised you.

Effectively, you lose your action, but against the Orc only.

So if you tell me you attack the Orc, I say no. If you tell me you run away, I ask you "is it because of the Orc?". If you say yes, I tell you you can't. If you say "no it's honestly because there's too many goblins" I might believe you and allow it. This works because you the player and I the DM aren't competing against each other.

If, on the other hand, you say "I keep zapping goblins" that's perfectly okay and not something the Orc can stop. The fact the Orc surprises you does not prevent you from taking that action, since it was something you would do if the Orc weren't there.

Again, writing down a rule to cover this is something I accept the designers don't want to do.

This presupposes what surprise 'is' though.

In DnD surprise is clearly inferred to be 'caught totally off guard' - and not just attacked by a hidden foe (there are seperate rules for that).

Youve basically been caught with your pants down.

Once combat begins, you're aware, alert to danger and the adrenaline is pumping so no more surprise. You can take reactions normally.

Bear in mind, all your rule does is remove the ability of enemies to take reactions (which they cant do against a hidden foe anyways seeing as they usually need to be able to see something to react to it). It also pumps Assasin rogues up to a massive degree - a buff they certainly dont need.

 

[Flamestrike]

No the attack that starts the combat still surprises you.

What you really should consider "fundamentally flawed" is the phrasing of the assassin ability that requires the assassin to ALSO win initiative.

The ability is clearly balanced around that caveat.

You sneak up on a foe unobserved, all you have to do is beat his passive perception DC with your (likely) insane stealth check result. He's almost certainly not searching for you.

Once that's done, you launch your attack, and the inititive check (a test of his reflexes v yours) is the only thing that saves him from double damage attack (although he is still gonna cop a sneak attack no matter what).

Think of the initative check as an opposed dex check to see if you can react quickly enough before you get stabbed in the heart.

It makes Assasinate not a simple case of auto trigger as long as you can beat a triflingly low passive perception. You also have to strike quicker than your foe can react.

 

[JohnLynch]

I'm not aware of an individual article, but ive noticed the following loopholes from Twitter feeds etc.

1. If your hand is a weapon, then you can be duel wielding while nothing is in your hand. Or you can "have a weapon" while at the same time having a free hand open for somatic spell components. This creates some broken feat combinations things like duelist style.
2. Are the spells that enhance weapons or make a weapon magical. It would step on the monk's unarmed attacks are magical ability and make it a bad fit for the level it's currently applied to.
3. It allows a monk/rogue to use dex for their unarmed attacks but not get sneak attack damage because it's not a finesse weapon, and that seems off if it's a melee weapon using dex but not finesse.
4. It makes the weird situation where you can't use the two weapon fighting rule to punch twice cause your hands aren't light weapons, but a duel wielded feat allows you to do so.

5. It makes it appear that an unarmed attack is only a punch or a kick, instead of also including a shove or bodyslam, or chokehold etc. Causing people to needlessly be confused when they try to find the rules to make those attacks.
6. Jeremy Crawford uses the example that you can't silver your hand a lot when the discussion comes up. This seems to be the straw that broke unarmed attacks for him.
7. I believe it impacts the wizards ability to use their proficiency bonus to make unarmed attacks.

I don't get how using Dex on a non-finesse weapon is more confusing then making melee attacks with a weapon that isn't a weapon.

A monk-rogue is not going to be able to use sneak attack because unarmed strikes aren't finesse weapons. why aren't unarmed strikes weapons? Because we have 3 editions of "screw you unarmed strike" worth of tradition to uphold.

seriously. Unarmed strikes deal 1 point of damage unless you take a feat, then you get to deal d4 damage. This is as bad as a dagger but it costs you a feat to make it that bad.

The only cogent argument seems to be the schroedinger's empty hand issue. Except taking a fighting style that gives you your offhand damage to your bonus attack would almost always be better.

I'm sure an optimiser could find some really weird edge case that makes unarmed strikes as good as a short sword or maybe (with enough investment) a one handed Longsword. But I'm sure they could find a lot of stuff that's equally broken but doesn't require we contort ourselves into a pretzel to try to disallow.