Reply to thread

Message

<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8964246" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Ironically, &quot;swift&quot; actions were actually a way to legitimately improve 3.5e's balance. Because if all you have are standard, move, and free actions, you're either asking for a huge investment (because Iterative Attacks are so important and eat up both Standard and Move actions), or you have to accept that a character can stack any number of free actions all at once without limit.The &quot;swift&quot; action idea, which (as far as I can tell) goes all the way back to at least 3.5e baseline* because it's part of the SRD, allows you to have something that is midway between those two things: it has the speed and lowered investment of a free action (something you can do basically any time), but is limited in the same way standard and move actions are limited.Swift actions went on to become Minor actions in 4e and, despite the linguistic song-and-dance 5e does to conceal it, still exist as Bonus actions in 5e. And both of those things are extremely useful, indeed critical to a number of mechanics in both editions.*Finding info online is hard because almost all SRDs switched to the 3.5e content. But from what I can find, &quot;swift&quot; actions didn't exist in 3.0 and were a new idea in 3.5, there to deal with balance issues caused by too many overpowered free actions or underpowered &quot;partial&quot; actions (which were removed in 3.5e.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8964246, member: 6790260"] Ironically, "swift" actions were actually a way to legitimately [I]improve[/I] 3.5e's balance. Because if all you have are standard, move, and free actions, you're either asking for a huge investment (because Iterative Attacks are so important and eat up [I]both[/I] Standard and Move actions), or you have to accept that a character can stack [I]any number[/I] of free actions all at once without limit. The "swift" action idea, which (as far as I can tell) goes all the way back to at least 3.5e baseline* because it's part of the SRD, allows you to have something that is midway between those two things: it has the speed and lowered investment of a free action (something you can do basically any time), but is limited in the same way standard and move actions are limited. Swift actions went on to become Minor actions in 4e and, despite the linguistic song-and-dance 5e does to conceal it, still exist as Bonus actions in 5e. And both of those things are extremely useful, indeed critical to a number of mechanics in both editions. *Finding info online is hard because almost all SRDs switched to the 3.5e content. But from what I can find, "swift" actions didn't exist in 3.0 and were a new idea in 3.5, there to deal with balance issues caused by too many overpowered free actions or underpowered "partial" actions (which were removed in 3.5e.) [/QUOTE]

Verification