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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sunseeker" data-source="post: 7671448">Sure, but everyone on the other side was, until now also neither right or wrong.  It makes sense as far as the weapon works in real life for it to work the way it is now clarified to do so.  The lack of clarity on the subject previously I felt was one of those nice "rulings not rules" places of 5th where if a table said a one-handed weapon didn't require an extra free hand to operate, that's how it worked and if another table said it did, then it did.  Now there's no choice.  RAW is that a one-handed crossbow requires two hands to operate (since you cannot be using your other hand for some other activity AT ALL), which aside from making no sense, making the weapon substantially worse than its two-handed counterparts.  Because somehow a one-handed weapon requires you to keep one hand free at all times, but you can still reload a two-handed weapon with...a hand that is in use for operating the weapon.There's really no reason to use a one-handed crossbow at all now if you can't keep your other hand free.  The Dueling feature never applied to it, you can't TWF with it and the Crossbow Expert feat is much less useful for it.  You're better off using almost any other ranged weapon in the book.The ruling is silly because it defies logic while attempted to enforce logic.  Okay, so a few cases of ultra-optimization have been prevented, big whoop a few table rulings could have easily prevented anyone attempting to do that.  We've lost creativity, flavor and fun and driven the system in a direction of "rules not rulings".  Personally I'd have been happier if they stayed silent on all but the most egregious issues (of which this is most certainly not) and simply said "While that may not have been our intention, we're happy to see people using the RAW in fun and enjoyable ways."But yes, by RAW I am now wrong.But, I don't really care since I won't apply this "sage advice" to my tables.</blockquote>

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