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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9722161" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Is it? The possibility of things like critical hits, fumbles, narration resulting in a changed situation of battle, altered priorities, etc. mean that I would not call it a totally closed form. Yes, it is closer to close-ended, but it is not totally so. Otherwise, there would--could--be one and only one narration for what rolling to hit meant on success or failure.Except that IS closed-form. There can only be one answer to that; yes, you can, or no, you can't. You have actually made that less open than even an attack roll.You have presumed GM pre-authorship by doing this. In other words, you have presumed the very thing you're trying to demonstrate something about. That's a pretty serious weakness for this argument.Surely we do in fact allow such things though? Like if someone wants to trip their target, that's going to be an attack roll, possibly with some kind of modifier to affect the success. Presumably, to respect the specialization of Battle Masters who actually do have a specific tripping maneuver, they would forgo their damage in order to get this benefit. (That's how I've run a number of similar such things: trained folks get their goodies AND their damage, the untrained get their goodies OR damage.) And that exact thing is precisely how Battle Master maneuvers work; the vast majority of them are something you declare after you have rolled to-hit, not before.Is that not how a Battle Master with some kind of magic training works? Consider a Ellaria, an Elf Fighter (Battle Master) 3/Wizard (Bladesinger) 6. With a single attack roll, she can elect to either perform any maneuver she knows (so long as she still has Superiority Dice left) or any of her cantrips that require an attack roll, since a 6th level Bladesinger can replace one of their two attacks from the Attack action with a cantrip of their choosing.Your claim is that an attack roll is necessarily one, and only one, specific action, every single time. That isn't true in general, because players often attempt a variety of things for which "an attack roll" is the best-fit mechanic. It also isn't true in several common but specific cases, like Battle Masters, who can (indeed, usually must) declare, after hitting with an attack, that they were using a specific maneuver. And it isn't true of Bladesingers (I just made the example more pointed by using a Battle Master multiclass), who can blend attack cantrips with their regular attack rolls just fine.So even with this allegedly basic mechanic, we can see that it actually has quite an open-ended spectrum! That would seem to lend a lot of credence--not necessarily a smoking gun, but perhaps the smell of spent powder--to gban007's argument that there is an important symmetry between the "can I read the runes, hoping they will be X?" and "can I attack the orc, hoping I will achieve X?"</blockquote>

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