I always assumed you take the required action if you use ready. If you ready an attack, you take the attack action when the trigger occurs.
Clearly that’s the case, yes. Except in the specific case of using Ready to cast a spell, in which case there are other instructions in the text, which tell you to simply cast the spell as normal, and release it later as your Reaction.
For a spell you can just use the magic action immediately instead of when the trigger occurs.
Again, that doesn’t make any sense because you only get one Action per turn, and you’ve already used it on the Ready Action.
I think see see where the disconnect is coming from though. Because “Action” is both the name of a resource and the name of the category of thing you spend that resource on, we’re walking away with two different interpretations of what the Ready Action is
doing, mechanically. You’re parsing it as Ready allowing you to you spend the action (using a lower-case a here to distinguish the resource from the thing you spend the resource to do) in response to a specified trigger, on a specified Action, rather than on your turn, at the additional cost of a reaction (again, lower case r because I’m talking about the resource).
Under the above interpretation, it makes sense that you wouldn’t think of Ready as
really being an Action in and of itself, as well as why the idea that you wouldn’t have an action resource available to spend on Magic wouldn’t even occur to you, because you’re not thinking of Ready as a thing that costs an action, but as a special rule that lets you spend that resource at a nonstandard time. Likewise, the above interpretation never even occurred to me until just now, because it breaks the fundamental structure of the action economy as I understand it. It’s, like, a completely alien way of looking at the action rules to me.
The way I see it, you can’t ever spend actions (the resource) outside your own turn. The only way you can ever act off turn is with a Reaction (uppercase R here), which always has a specific trigger, and an effect you can spend your reaction (the resource) to perform when the trigger occurs. The Ready Action is a real, discrete Action, the effect of which is essentially to create a bespoke Reaction that you can only use until the start of your next turn. You spend your action on your turn to choose a trigger, and an Action, whose effects this special Reaction allow you to spend your reaction replicate. But, in the specific case of casting a spell, the Action that you normally use to do this also comes with additional restrictions and resource costs that other Actions don’t. So, the Ready Action carves out a specific exception to how it (the Ready Action) normally works. You have to “cast the spell normally,” which is to say, you have to obey the casting restrictions for the spell like those set by the required components, and you spend the additional resources at that time, the spell just doesn’t take effect yet. Then the trigger allows you to spend your reaction to “release” the spell, which is to say, choose your targets and apply the effect. At no point are you really taking the Magic Action, because the Magic Action is a completely different thing with different rules for how to resolve it. And you certainly can’t be spending your action on the Magic Action when you’ve already spent it on the Ready Action.
I think my interpretation is cleaner and more consistent with the fundamental structure of D&D 5e’s action economy. I guess that goes without saying, because if I didn’t think that, it wouldn’t be my interpretation. But, I think that might be a more nuanced way to express what I mean by saying “I think it’s RAI.” I don’t pretend to know the designers’ intent, and I do find
@Seramus ’s reasoning for why they don’t think it was specifically
intended to work that way convincing. It’s just that, I can’t see any way the
alternative interpretation
could be intended because it just… isn’t how the rules work in my understanding. It’s not so much that I think the designers went out of their way to provide a way to cast a spell with Action Surge. Rather, I think that casting a spell with the Ready Action when you use an Action Surge is a natural consequence of
the system as a whole working exactly the way it’s intended to work. And I don’t imagine this is something the designers would put any effort into trying to “fix” because it isn’t really
contrary to the intended design in any way that matters. You still can’t spend the action (resource) that Action Surge grants you to cast a spell. That you can use it to set up a way to use
another resource to cast a spell doesn’t seem like a problem in any way. It comes at an additional cost, it eats your concentration, and it carries a risk of being disrupted, so it’s not really reproducing the thing the change to Action Surge was designed to prevent. It’s doing a different, similar, but meaningfully less powerful thing.
Now, if someone disagrees with me on how meaningful that difference is, I can completely understand that. That’s perfectly reasonable and I wouldn’t begrudge anyone ruling that this can’t be done at their table. What I object to is the assumption that a player who interprets it as I do must be “rules lawyering” to try to exploit some tricksy wording loophole. It doesn’t look like a loophole to me. It looks like the system operating smoothly and according to the way it was made to operate. That the interaction may not have been anticipated doesn’t, to me, automatically mean it must be counter to intent.
Am I making any sense?
