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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9759821" data-attributes="member: 42582">The thing is, writing rules that are clear and precise is hard. Legislative drafters have years of technical training, comprehensive guidance manuals, a long tradition to draw upon, and still interpretive questions arise in relation to legislation all the time.It's not realistic, in my view, to hold WotC to the same sort of standard that we hold legislation to; and so a lack of certainty in the rules is inevitable. In retrospect, those of us posting in this thread can see that Action Surge might be clearer, for us, if it read "On your turn, you can take one additional action, except the Magic action or any action that would let you cast a spell." But (i) that additional disjunctive prohibition now makes it harder for the average player to read and interpret (it's not going to be obvious to them that its rationale is to preclude using Action Surge to use the Ready action to cast a spell), and (ii) that prohibition is now going to interfere with ways of casting a spell that are not meant to be prohibited, like castings that bundle a spell into an Attack action.Another possibility is to try and make the rules for Ready clearer. But as per my post upthread, this is the third edition where the rules for Ready are - when you try and read them closely - essentially garbled. It's not easy to write a clear rule for how to postpone your action, in an action economy and turn-by-turn-based game. 3E had to introduce the kludge of Partial Actions, and it's still pretty clumsy. 4e has actions that fall under multiple descriptions - Standard, Immediate Reaction, perhaps other, etc - simultaneously. 5e is trying to be less technical in its drafting than 3E and 4e, and so I think it's on surprise that its rules, as written, simply don't solve this problem.I personally think the answer to the question is pretty straightforward, but that requires stepping back to consider the overall rules logic, and the logic of the fiction that these rules are meant to be expressing. (I used this same methodology to resolve various issues that arose in 4e D&D.) It's true that this probably won't help a newbie DM, but nor will rules that are too complicated for them to parse (and the evidence is that WotC can't right rules to that degree of technical precision in any event).</blockquote>

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