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Message: <blockquote data-quote="epithet" data-source="post: 7575280" data-attributes="member: 6796566">I think most designers building rules that are easy for new players to understand try to keep in mind that while the game might not be emulating a fantasy world, it is modelling it. Thus, trying to have your rules make sense and carry a level of verisimilitude helps the new player get into character and understand the range of what's possible in the game.If this new player plays a champion, for example, he'll pick up Extra Attack at level 5, and might have taken the Shield Master feat at level 4. It's totally straightforward to understand that "so if you attack this turn, you get to make two attacks plus a bonus shield shove." Even the newest player can understand that. What doesn't make any sense at all is "yeah, you can't make that shove until after the other two attacks. I mean, you can totally shove as one of those attacks, but then you still have the shove at the end." It doesn't make any sense, it wrecks immersion because you have to get out of the moment to parse the text in nit-picking gamist terms which are obviously ambiguous.To me, one of the obvious clues that Jeremy is just pulling this out of his posterior is the whole "finishing move" assertion. This is pretty clearly not intended to be a finishing move, because you don't have to shove someone you've already attacked. Even according to Jeremy's new and not-at-all-improved advice on the feat, you can cut down an enemy before you move across the room, open a door, find a new target, and shove it with your shield without doing any damage. The only way that's a finishing move is that it finishes your turn. Either Jeremy has not idea what a finishing move is (not likely,) or he's just throwing turds at the wall to see which ones stick. Obviously the "finishing move" fewmet found a couple of people willing to repeat it (apparently with sincerity and not ironically) in this thread, but it is a ridiculous claim on its face.Wizards has gotten its messaging under control, so we shall apparently never again see Mike or Chris give opinions on rules interpretations. That's unfortunate in this instance, because I seriously doubt that Jeremy's revised Advice on Shield Master matches the original intention for the feat when it was written. Could I be wrong? Of course, it happens all the time, but it seems very unlikely to me that Jeremy simply forgot that he imagined that if means after, and that there was supposed to be a timing requirement. For two years!The issue here isn't really the Shield Master feat and its bonus action shove. That's easily fixed with either a different interpretation of the rules or a house rule like mine that eliminates the need for the Attack Action altogether. "Bash and dash," I call it. The real issue for me is the direction that this change in the Sage Advice represents, specifically a willingness to sacrifice modeling believable action in the service of gamist overspecificity and hyper-literal parsing. I don't want to see the playability of future content compromised by the attitude this type of "official ruling" represents, an attitude that moves away from the improvisation and in-the-moment inspiration that makes D&D immeasurably superior to board games or computer RPGs.A hundred pages of discussion in this thread alone make it abundantly clear that there are several ways to read the Shield Master feat and the rules with which it interacts. Many of you seem to hold the belief that (despite the fact that he insists that he was wrong before) Jeremy Crawford's statements regarding the interpretation of this rule are The One True Way. As I see it, he's either wrong now or he was wrong before, and I'll take whichever one makes more sense to me. When you have more than one way to reasonably interpret a rule of D&D, the way that leads to arbitrarily locking a player character into an invariable pattern and restricting a player's ability to determine what his character can do on its turn is the wrong damn interpretation.</blockquote>

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