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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hriston" data-source="post: 7575594" data-attributes="member: 6787503">I think it might help to differentiate between having a bonus action to take and actually taking it. Comments along the lines of "you don't have a bonus action until [taking the Attack action] gives it to you" seem to be confusing the two things.Fair enough. None of this is a problem for me because, to me, "on your turn" can be read without bias as referring to your entire turn, and it can't be both true and false that "you take the Attack action on your turn," so the question is if you do or not.Flurry of Blows has additional language specifying when the bonus action must take place relative to the Attack action. Shield Master doesn't have that language. It would have been trivial to write, "After you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action...", if that was the intent. But, as the original ruling on the War Magic bonus action shows, it wasn't, unless the argument is made that Jeremy Crawford was wrong about the intent at that time, and only remembered or was reminded of what the original intent was later.Up thread, I brought up Step 2 of the basic pattern of play in response to [MENTION=6921966]Asgorath[/MENTION]'s statement that "the rules provide a framework for your character to act in combat." I don't subscribe to the idea that the rules are proscriptive with regard to players' action-declarations. They tell you what you can do, not what you can't. There's even a sidebar under Actions in Combat about "Improvising an Action". It states:Your character can do things not covered by the actions in this section, such as breaking down doors, intimidating enemies, sensing weaknesses in magical defenses, or calling for a parley with a foe. The only limits to the actions you can attempt are your imagination and your character’s ability scores. See the descriptions of the ability scores in the Using Ability Scores section for inspiration as you improvise. When you describe an action not detailed elsewhere in the rules, the DM tells you whether that action is possible and what kind of roll you need to make, if any, to determine success or failure.I agree that it's orthogonal to bonus action timing, and I'm not arguing for any inconsistency in interpretation between a player-facing vs a DM-facing reading of the rules. In my game, a shield master player is free to declare an attempt to shove a creature and then go on to take a full compliment of attacks afterwards by virtue of having the feat, and the DM is expected to rule in accordance with that reading of the feat and the bonus action rules in general. I was simply taking issue with the statement that a player needs a rule that says they can make this series of action-declarations in the first place.</blockquote>

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