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<blockquote data-quote="FireLance" data-source="post: 1958745" data-attributes="member: 3424">When feather fall and quickened spells are the only immediate and swift actions around, it isn't necessary to use special terms. However, once people start getting creative and inventing other special abilities - the ability to put up a mental defence immediately when you are mentally attacked out of your turn, for example, or other spells that can be cast quickly or even out of turn - the terms become useful.Effectively, &quot;swift action&quot; becomes shorthand for &quot;using this ability is a free action, but you cannot use this ability in the same round as you use another ability which is also a free action, but has the same restriction.&quot; It's kind of like how &quot;undead traits&quot; becomes shorthand for &quot;immune to critical hits, immune to poison, disease, stunning, death effects, etc.&quot;Terminology happens. Terminology is also supposed to make things easier, and personally, I think that &quot;swift action&quot; and &quot;immediate action&quot; do. They aren't difficult concepts to grasp, and they help make it easier to define new rules and game effects.As for the extra attack from Cleave, I personally would love it if WotC comes up with new terminology for it which makes it clearly impossible to Cleave off an AOO, but that's the subject of another long, hotly-debated thread. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink&nbsp; &nbsp; ;)"&nbsp; data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="FireLance, post: 1958745, member: 3424"] When [I]feather fall[/I] and quickened spells are the only immediate and swift actions around, it isn't necessary to use special terms. However, once people start getting creative and inventing other special abilities - the ability to put up a mental defence immediately when you are mentally attacked out of your turn, for example, or other spells that can be cast quickly or even out of turn - the terms become useful. Effectively, "swift action" becomes shorthand for "using this ability is a free action, but you cannot use this ability in the same round as you use another ability which is also a free action, but has the same restriction." It's kind of like how "undead traits" becomes shorthand for "immune to critical hits, immune to poison, disease, stunning, death effects, etc." Terminology happens. Terminology is also supposed to make things easier, and personally, I think that "swift action" and "immediate action" do. They aren't difficult concepts to grasp, and they help make it easier to define new rules and game effects. As for the extra attack from Cleave, I personally would love it if WotC comes up with new terminology for it which makes it clearly impossible to Cleave off an AOO, but that's the subject of another long, hotly-debated thread. ;) [/QUOTE]

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