Official D&D Sage Advice Compendium Updated

Hriston · Mar 2, 2019

Asgorath said:
Again, the rules are filled with sentences that have the structure "if X, Y", and often more specifically "If you X, you can Y". This is the way the rules describe a trigger condition, and the condition must be true before Y can happen. This is confirmed by the lead rules designer:

https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/995043696251842561

"If the existence of X is the condition for the existence of Y, X comes before Y."

This applies for every sentence in the rules that uses that structure. Again, note that I did not say X must be completed -- the condition must simply be true before Y can happen.

I’ve bolded above uses of the word before with which I disagree. Conditional statements (if X, then Y) are not statements of causality, so no specific temporal order between X and Y is required or even implied. Jeremy Crawford admitted as much when he tweeted, “My rulings, and the logic they rely on, are entirely within the context of D&D’s rules.” Needless to say, I don’t find this sort of circular reasoning to be very convincing. It isn’t necessary for “you take the Attack action” to be true before “you can use a bonus action to shove a creature...” It just needs to be true on your turn.

Asgorath said:
If I follow your logic, then as a Ranger with Natural Explorer I can say that there's no timing requirement for me moving stealthily at full pace, the rule just says I can do that. At some point in the future, the "if X" part of the rule will happen, and so that means I get the "Y" part whenever I like.

There is a timing requirement of gaining that benefit, though. It must coincide with “traveling for an hour or more in your favored terrain,” and if during that time it’s true that “you are traveling alone,” then it’s also true that “you can move stealthily at a normal pace.” You don’t have to travel alone before you move stealthily. It is sufficient that you travel alone at the same time.

DND_Reborn · Mar 3, 2019

Maxperson said:
Okay. Free was the wrong word.

That sounds really interesting. I may steal that to use some day.

Take it. Use the Cavalier archetype. We liked it for some of its features, but I am sure you could do cool things with others as well.

FrogReaver said:
When we are in a thread that disagrees with official rulings then citing another official ruling that people will disagree with isn't wise.

Shield Master serves as the best option to shove for a shield using character. Mentioning controversial TWF shield shenanigans doesn't change that.

I haven't heard many people other than you disagree with the ruling of keeping the AC bonus. However, in all fairness, if you don't like it one option we considered was reducing the AC bonus to +1 when the character used the shield to attack with as well as for defense.

LOL controversial shenanigans? Really? Ok, well, you can be stubborn about it if you want, but I think I've shown it to be a more versatile option with TWF/Dual Wielding than Shield Master. Believe me, I wish Shield Master did work more akin to TWF, so that after any melee attack you could shove as the bonus action. I'm sure many people have house-ruled it that way and someday maybe we will as well, but alas it is ultimately up to the DM for our table.

Hriston · Mar 3, 2019

FrogReaver said:
Even if you don't how else do you propose to shove while using a shield?

You don’t need a free hand to shove a creature. All you need to do it without the feat is make an attack.

Maxperson · Mar 3, 2019

dnd4vr said:
I haven't heard many people other than you disagree with the ruling of keeping the AC bonus. However, in all fairness, if you don't like it one option we considered was reducing the AC bonus to +1 when the character used the shield to attack with as well as for defense.

Before you brought up the feat, I was thinking that I would just create a buckler option in the shield category. It would have +1 AC and the light property. Before this discussion, I hadn't even noticed that there was no buckler/small shield.

LOL controversial shenanigans? Really? Ok, well, you can be stubborn about it if you want, but I think I've shown it to be a more versatile option with TWF/Dual Wielding than Shield Master. Believe me, I wish Shield Master did work more akin to TWF, so that after any melee attack you could shove as the bonus action. I'm sure many people have house-ruled it that way and someday maybe we will as well, but alas it is ultimately up to the DM for our table.

If you show him that he's wrong too much, he'll block and the thread will shorten by several pages. He has trouble with people challenging his "rightness."

DND_Reborn · Mar 3, 2019

Maxperson said:
Before you brought up the feat, I was thinking that I would just create a buckler option in the shield category. It would have +1 AC and the light property. Before this discussion, I hadn't even noticed that there was no buckler/small shield.

Yeah, I don't know why it was never included with the armors to have a buckler/small shield item. They were used a lot historically. We have a house-ruled buckler for +1 AC bonus that is Light I think. I would have to ask the DM, but the other character used a regular shield for his stuff, doing 1d4 as an improvised weapon (plus Str mod with TWF-style).

Ovinomancer · Mar 3, 2019

Hriston said:
I’ve bolded above uses of the word before with which I disagree. Conditional statements (if X, then Y) are not statements of causality, so no specific temporal order between X and Y is required or even implied. Jeremy Crawford admitted as much when he tweeted, “My rulings, and the logic they rely on, are entirely within the context of D&D’s rules.” Needless to say, I don’t find this sort of circular reasoning to be very convincing. It isn’t necessary for “you take the Attack action” to be true before “you can use a bonus action to shove a creature...” It just needs to be true on your turn.

You're right about "if X, Y" not implying causality, but wrong about timing. There's a very strong timing involved. But, first, we have to show why the statement isn't just "if X, Y" in the case of Shield Master, but "If and only if X, Y."

This is simple. You do not have a bonus action until some ability gives you one. In this case, when discussing the bonus action associated with Shield Master, there is only one way to get it, take the Attack action on your turn. If you do not do this, you do not get the bonus action to shove. Therefore, the correct structure, formally, is "if and only if", or IFF. So, the structure is, "IFF you take the attack action on your turn, you..." get the shove.

IFF statement require that X be true for Y to be true. So, timing-wise, if X is not true at a given moment, then Y is not true. Timing does exist. X may or may not cause Y, so no implied causality, but Y only exists when X does.

To move a bit forward, you've already acknowledged that there are points within your turn where it can be considered "before your action" and "after your action." You did this when you offered the Monk Flurry of Blow as an example of a bonus action with timing. When means, you acknowledge there is a point in your turn where you may not have taken your action. Since actions are discrete things (there is no declaration of actions step, there's no smearing of actions in the rules, the rules treat actions discretely, etc.), then there must be possible a state on your turn where "you take the Attack action on your turn" is not true. Therefore, you must first take the Attack action before you get the bonus shove.

And, yes, I understand you have a preference to treat actions as smeared and fungible in time, but that doesn't jive with your own offering of flurry of blows. If declaring an attack action is suitable for Shield Master because declaring is the same as taking, then so it must be for Flurry of Blows, only you're left having to explain where "after" your Attack action really occurs. Further to this, the rules clearly state that you may split your move up how you wish before your action and after your action, again showing that there is a before and after state available. Finally, "If you take the Attack action on your turn..." may initially appear English imprecise enough to read as "If you take the Attack action at any time during your turn..." this is counter-indicated by the complete lack of acknowledgement of this very imprecise interpretation. That you can choose to interpret it this way is you adding into the rules the "at any time" reading. You're welcome to it (I just remove the timing from Shield Master rather than redefine the way the rules are intended to work), but it's not RAW. The "at any time" conflicts with other timings in the game. Frex, if a creature has a Readied action to attack back if you attack, when does this resolve? Accordingly, if you declare the Attack action such that it's sufficient for the Shield Master feat bonus action trigger, then is that sufficient for the Readied action trigger? You've declared you will attack on your turn, you've earned the benefits of your feat's conditional bonus action, do you suffer the consequences of the Readied action?

Hriston · Mar 3, 2019

Asgorath said:
But someone has to translate from the natural language a player uses to describe what they'd like to do on their turn into actual game mechanics, right?

It’s the DM’s job to decide how the player’s action-declaration is going to be resolved. That’s where game-mechanics come in. If the action-declaration is to shove a creature, the relevant mechanic for resolution is a contested Strength check, not whether the shove uses an action or a bonus action. That actually doesn’t resolve anything.

Asgorath said:
That could be the DM for an inexperienced player, or the player themselves. Otherwise, we're not really playing D&D anymore, are we?

I'm not too keen on the idea that shoving a creature without specifying whether it uses an action or a bonus action is not D&D. I think that assumes your priorities of play are the only correct ones.

Asgorath said:
What happens when I say "I'd like to fly over there, stealthily at full speed, and punch that Ancient Red Dragon in the face and kill it with a single blow"? The game's combat just doesn't work like that.

I agree, but I think we have different reasons for thinking this. My reason is I'm having a difficult time imagining the game where this is a genre-appropriate action-declaration. In other words, I think the problem you’re bringing up here is about a player having mismatched expectations. This is ideally addressed out of game, in a session 0.

Asgorath said:
- What grants me a flying speed? Without one, I can't fly.
- The rules say you have to move at a slow pace by default in order to use stealth.
- Punching the dragon involves making an attack roll, at the very least.
- My punch likely can't do enough damage to bring the dragon to 0 HP.

I'd say the DM has the final say in how the player's desires for what they do on their turn actually map to game mechanics, as part of the standard rule adjudication process. I can think of plenty of unreasonable things a player might want to do on their turn that are simply not allowed by the rules, and so in cases like that, the DM should simply say "no you can't actually do all that stuff on your turn".

On the other hand, given the proper context, I’d consider your action-declarations to be permissible. There are many sources in the game of the ability to fly, there’s no rule that prohibits sneaking at full speed in combat, and a player can certainly declare his/her character’s intention to hit and kill an opponent with an attack. As I’ve said, it’s the DM’s job to resolve the player’s action-declarations.

Li Shenron · Mar 3, 2019

Maxperson said:
By RAW actions have a duration. That duration is 1 action. A duration of 1 action is a length of time that is greater than instantaneous, because we know that spells that are bonus actions are exceptionally swift.

You've just declared that the Cast a Spell action, which takes 1 action worth of time, takes zero time and that bonus spells take even less than zero.

That makes no sense. Each action has a duration of 1 action. If it takes more rounds to do it, it just means that you have to use multiple Cast Actions on multiple turns, each taking 1 action in length, in order to complete the spell.

It's RAW. 1 action is in fact a unit of time in combat. Actions take 1 action to complete. That's the rules.

They take 1 action. Bonus actions are swifter than that. They didn't write in that actions are 2.4 seconds and bonus actions are .6, if that's what you are looking for. But they absolutely write actions as taking time and bonus actions as taking much less time.

The game does not define action types in terms of duration, and I don't think it's a good idea to start reasoning in such terms: it only leads players to ask for things that sound apparently reasonable but are not supposed to be done in the game such as taking 2 bonus actions instead of 1 bonus +1 action because "1 bonus action is swifter than 1 action".

The text which mentions bonus actions being "swift" is unfortunate, but really doesn't have any rule implications.

Everything works better in 5e if you stick to the only defined rules about action types which is about their scarcity, not their duration.

And then it also helps to think that everything in combat is more or less simultaneous , and sequentiality (of turns in a round, and of actions in a turn) is not a model for reality but only a tool for adjudicating the resolution of such actions without going mad in complexity.

Yardiff · Mar 3, 2019

Question: Is it known who wrote the Shield Master feat? And if so what the intent was for the bonus shove?

DND_Reborn · Mar 3, 2019

Yardiff said:
Question: Is it known who wrote the Shield Master feat? And if so what the intent was for the bonus shove?

I don't know who precisely wrote it, but from the SA/twitter stuff JC commented it was supposed to be a "finishing move" and increases dynamics with allies to act in concert or something.

Official D&D Sage Advice Compendium Updated

Hriston

Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Hriston

Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)

Maxperson

Morkus from Orkus

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Ovinomancer

No flips for you!

Hriston

Dungeon Master of Middle-earth (He/him)

Li Shenron

Legend

Yardiff

Adventurer

DND_Reborn

The High Aldwin

Similar Threads

Related Articles