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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 4709120" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think the fundamental problem is that WotC changed course in midstream. From what I can see the original interpretation of the rules was supposed to be that a free action was essentially like an opportunity action which could be used at any time as opposed to actual opportunity actions, which have a trigger of some kind. And the difference between these and interrupts was supposed to be that an interrupt actually COULD be used during another action, assuming its triggering conditions were met.Unfortunately they weren't very good at sorting out exactly what should be which and there turn out to be a bunch of corner cases and overlooked or awkward problems with the whole concept. Thus they obviously had to decree that an OA could happen DURING another action, a move, otherwise it was pretty much worthless. They also seem to have rather schizophrenically defined both 'free action' and 'no action' and never really clearly differentiated THOSE either. Then came along the fundamental worthlessness of things like the wand, orb, and staff feature actions unless THEY could also be in essence interrupts. It could probably all in theory be sorted out, if they wanted to issue 500 errata or something. I think the long and short of it is that there are actions which need to be able to happen during other actions in order to make sense or be useful. Whatever they happen to be called it appears that the WotC line at this point is basically "you can take these actions during other actions". That doesn't extend to things like interrupting your move action to take your standard action, there is just no justification for that. Sure, it might be NICE, but it isn't the only way to sort out things, it would just be giving players new freebie capabilities, whereas the other type of rules reinterpretation is needed to make the rules WORK as intended.Perhaps some day we'll get a 4.5e that fixes all this kind of thing, but until then it seems best to just relax the rules lawyering function a bit and work with it. Implement feature actions should be interpreted to operate in an interrupting manner. Of course if you find a situation where that can be abused, then just forbid that abuse by house rule. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that this is exactly what you are going to find happening in 'official' 4e events too.</blockquote>

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