Ready is defined as one of "the game's main actions"
I think it would be clearer to say that it appears on a list of the game's main actions.
And the reason for classifying it as an action is to incorporate it into the action economy and turn-taking framework. Just as 3E and 4e did. But this doesn't settle all the issues of rules interactions.
There are many ways of a casting a spell with a casting time of an action without using the Magic action. Ready a spell is one of these exceptions as clearly spelled out in the description.
I think you are trying to put an interpretive weight on the rules that they won't bear. They're simply not drafted with the necessary degree of precision.
For instance, here is the wording under Casting Time (from
DnD Beyond):
Most spells require the Magic action to cast, but some spells require a Bonus Action, a Reaction, or 1 minute or more. A spell’s Casting Time entry specifies which of those is required.
This implies - by the use of "but" - that a spell that takes 1 minute or more is different from most spells, which require the Magic action to cast.
But then, under the Magic Action, we get this (from
DnD Beyond):
When you take the Magic action, you cast a spell that has a casting time of an action or use a feature or magic item that requires a Magic action to be activated.
If you cast a spell that has a casting time of 1 minute or longer, you must take the Magic action on each turn of that casting, and you must maintain Concentration while you do so. If your Concentration is broken, the spell fails, but you don’t expend a spell slot.
So a spell that takes 1 minute or more to cast is, in fact, just a special case of requiring the Magic action to cast, and not an alternative to it.
I think it's pretty clear that the text under "Casting Time" is pointing us to the
Casting Time entry in each spell's description - which is typically "1 Action" (ie the Magic Action) but sometimes is one of those other things mentioned. Readying a spell doesn't change its Casting Time entry; rather, that entry is a constraint on being able to ready a spell: "
To be readied, a spell must have a casting time of an action" (also, notice the drafting sloppiness here: spells list their casting time as "1 Action", not "an action").
When, as per the Ready Action, a character
casts their 1 Action casting time spell as normal, do they perform the Magic Action? The rules aren't clear enough to entail an answer. But as per my post just above, I think the most straightforward ruling is that they do: this coheres best with (i) the fact that the casting time of these spells is described as the Magic Action, and (ii) the fact that Readying doesn't change that casting time, but rather is constrained by reference to it; and also coheres best with (iii) the overall apparent logic of Action Surge (both on its fact, and in light of the change of wording from 2014 to 2024), which is to be used for fighter-y things and not wizard-y things.
a Fighter can use the Attack action, not a magic action, to cast Hold Person (a spell with a casting time of an action), a Glamour Bard can cast Command (a spell with a casting time of an action) with a bonus action and not a Magic action, a Valor Bard can cast Truestrike (a spell with a casting time of an action) with the attack action not a Magic action, A Wizard can cast Greater Invisibility as part of a casting of Contingency without using a Magic action, a Sorcerer can cast Fireball (a spell with a casting time of an action) with a Bonus action and not a Magic action using Quicken spell.
I don't know 5e D&D especially well. But to me, these all look like variants on the Timeless Locket example that I posted upthread. When a Timeless Locket is used in 4e D&D, the action performed is a Minor Action for some purposes (eg the restrictions of the action economy) but a Standard Action for some other purposes (eg the potency/potentiality allowed within the action economy).
For instance, when a wizard
prepares a contingent spell, they "cast that spell—called the contingent spell—as part of casting Contingency, expending spell slots for both, but the contingent spell doesn’t come into effect." Due to the casting time rules, we know that the character is performing the Magic Action every turn for 100 turns (10 minutes). They also cast the contingent spells "as part of" that casting. The phrase "as part of" is not given a technical definition. Clearly it would be absurd to suppose that it requires a Magic Action
for action economy purposes, thus interrupting the casting of Contingency - ie it would be absurd to suppose that Contingency is impossible to cast. But I think it would be equally absurd to suppose that (for instance) a character who is under a curse that prevents them using the Magic Action to cast their own spells could nevertheless (say) use a Wish from a ring to cast Contingency, and then incorporate one of their own spells into that contingency "as part of" casting it because, in the action economy sense, they do not perform a Magic Action.
The rules just aren't drafted tightly enough to support that degree of fine parsing.
You seem quite sure you got the right reading and if it works for you and your table, go ahead!
It just seems super rules-lawyery to me, requiring a very careful parsing of each magic objects' verbiage each time you use them in order to juice out a quite specific interaction based on missing words, and not explicit rules. It adds nothing to the fiction nor the feel of the game, it says nothing about what actually happens, just a use of keywords to clip behind the wall or something like that. So I'll keep ruling that in order to use a magic item, you have to make a magic action, unless it is explicitly ruled out, and that the action surge is built to prohibit doubling up on magic, because I feel doing otherwise would be a good way for us to spend our gaming time reading rules, rather than playing.
I'm probably not quite as hostile as you are to reading the rules closely, but in this case I agree with you. To me it seems to be an attempt to read the rules with a degree of precision that they don't support. And when we step back to make sense of the overall logic of the rules, the idea that you can't
cast a spell in the straightforward way, but you can
cast a spell and then hold it's energy to be released when a trigger occurs, makes no sense in the fiction of the game.
