NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7560903" data-attributes="member: 6796566">You do love your absolutes, Max.The way the game was written and clarified was, for several years, that you could take your Shield Master shove whenever you wanted to. Now, Crawford has decided that he must have been drunk and in line at the grocery store when he tweeted that, and just didn't notice it for a long time after.For me, there's something important about the way you have to explain a thing to a new player. You tell a player "ok, for a fighter at your level with that feat, you get two melee attacks and then an extra shield bash you can use to shove someone back or knock him down."The player replies, "Great, I want to knock him down first, because I remember from the wolves last time that Prone sucks!""Oh, sorry," you have to say, "you can't do that. You have to make both of your regular attacks first, then try to knock him down."Your player has a reasonable question. "Why? That doesn't make any sense.""Because," you respond with a sigh, "that's just what the rule says."If the only answer you can come up with is "it's just what the rule says," it's a crap rule. All of Jeremy's justifications for this current Sage Advice ruling on this unchanged rule are, in my opinion, really tenuous. It goes to show, I believe, the limited value of Sage Advice, which is to provide an arguably consistent set of rulings and interpretations that a DM can fall back on if he's not comfortable making a ruling or interpreting a rule himself. Your best bet is always to interpret a rule in a way that makes sense to your and your party and fits with the game you're playing at your table, but if that's not something you are comfortable with you can look up the Sage Advice, which has as its primary virtue a reasonable level of internal consistency with other Sage Advice interpretations.I think the best way to interpret the rule is that the Attack action does the same thing that every other action does in combat--it gives you something you can do. When you take the attack action, you can make one or more attacks. You don't have to, and if something stops you you don't get to. It's just like Dash. Why? Because it is better and simpler to be consistent with similar rules than to be consistent with your interpretation of similar verb clauses and prepositional phrases.</blockquote>

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