Bonus Actions in D&D 5e ~ Good design, Terrible Writing

hey kids this is ivan how you doing well this video is about something different than i thought it was going to be today and time after time when i'm examining 5th edition dungeons and dragons as i'm reading it as i'm preparing to run it as i'm playing it one of the things i keep on running up against is very often i'll find parts of the system that i like that i feel that are well designed and at the same time i find them obscured or hidden or ruined by really really poor writing and you know over and over again to my dismay i find out that the book is fairly bad is explaining how the game works and it can present things in a very confusing manner and this is one of those things that to me is unacceptable for a game period but you know not to harp on this but i'm going to harp on this a little bit you know for the role-playing game that's the most visible that has the biggest budget by far for a lot of these things to come out you know just with really poor editing really poor proofreading um really poor reading for like you know uh how comprehensible is this how well this is explain things not so great so let's give the example so i was actually going to start talking about the battle master version of the fighter and comparing some of those abilities to some of the abilities you can do in combat but i got lost down this rabbit hole and part of what i got lost on was i looked at two weapon fighting briefly in the regular combat section and so it says when you take an attack action and attack with a light melee weapon that you're holding in one hand you can use a bonus action to attack with the different light melee weapons you're holding and et cetera et cetera and so for a second i was thinking to myself because it'd been a while since i read another part of the book well where's this bonus action come from because it says you can use a bonus action to attack on the different light malay weapons so i went back and i'm looking i'm trying to figure out where the heck this thing comes from is it the action surge the fighter gets no that's an extra action and i feel like it really is no no it's actually a bonus action how does bonus actions come about well read bonus actions various class features spells and other abilities let you take an additional action on your turn called a bonus action the cunning action feature for example allows allows a rogue to take a bonus action you can take a bonus action only when a special ability spell or other feature of the game states that you can do something as a bonus action you otherwise don't have a bonus action to take you can only take one bonus action on your turn so you must choose which bonus action to use when you have more than one available okay and it explains a little bit more like some of the restrictions and what have you but go for this again really because i think it's really really important various class features spells and other abilities let you take an additional action these grant you a bonus these things can grant you bonus action and it says a little bit differently you can take a bonus action only when a special ability spell or other feature of the game states that you can do something as a bonus action what does say for two weapon fighting that says i can use a bonus action didn't say it granted me a bonus action this sounds like splitting hairs but what i decided to do is go look through the entire three book set and and see how exactly they present this sort of thing and i came up with some very interesting answers as i started going down that rabbit hole which got me a little bit dismayed now you know i can first say that something like two weapon fighting just a harp on that for one second well it's it's not a class feature it's not a spell and it's not an ability okay so it's not a special ability it's not a spell or other feature of the game it's i guess it's maybe it's another feature of the game and the bonus action is you know created because you're holding a weapon in both hands with a flashlight that's what actually happened that created that that moment so i looked at the different ways they uh let you know that a bonus action happens and there's quite a few of them interspersed throughout all three books and sometimes they say my favorite is you can do something as a bonus action when condition x is happening you can do something as a bonus action it's very clear very to the point explains and and instantly makes me realize okay well this situation has caused me to have this bonus action bonus action so i can do blank as a bonus action it says that 88 times in all three books my second favorite one is you can use a bonus action grant or use the bonus action granted by blank once again they say a little bit differently but it's very very clear that aha this is where this bonus action has come from so there's three times they said that so there's a total of 91 times in the text in these three books that that's how they explain it that's what do they say otherwise they say using a bonus action five times uh or you can use a bonus action like i just read into weapon fighting use a bonus action where's suppose an action come from i understand it comes from that but terrible writing and say that 46 times then they can also it's also says you can take a bonus action where or taking a bonus action so they say that 11 and two times so you add all those up together the using a bonus action you can use a bonus action you can take a bonus action or taking a bonus action and i end up with 64 times they say it that way that's 41 percent of the time in the text that they tell you this bonus action is showing up in a very confusing manner that's not consistent with the language i should have been using all the time which is you know when this happens as a bonus action you can do this it you know and it may sound like it's semantics i'm splitting hairs no i'm not it's like english dude do you speak it and it's your job when you write books like this to be able to convey the information to the person that picks this book up to be able to figure out well how does this actually work and if you're doing a lousy job doing that if i've done this for a long long time since 1981 and if i have to go back and forth and listen to the book back and forth ah finally figured out what about the new person it's just not cool not not cool the way that it's written now about the mechanic working i kind of dig it i mean you know they they've divided up the um what happens in around what can you do in a combat round you can move you can take an action there's a bunch of things they list as actions like attacking casting a spell dashing which is moving like double move disengaging so so somebody can't have an opportunity to attack against your disengaging like a fighting retreat uh dodging which means you're just you know you're not attacking at all but what you're doing is you're going full defenses and you're making people attack you at disadvantage uh helping you can aid another person um hiding you can try to hide uh reading writing in action searching for something which made me laugh a little bit because rounds are six seconds long and you know we used to take 10 minutes to search a room but you know i'll get to that at a different time um also what else can you can do things called reactions which are just kind of like instinctive things they're not quite like saving throws saving throws are something you could do as well they don't explicitly say in there but that's something that unfortunately will happen to you from time to time during combat when somebody does something nasty to you many times you save which is kind of a reaction itself but these are just things that you you know instinctively kind of do so they're not decisive actions let's see the bonus actions which we talked about um and you can also use an object which i found very very interesting here's the examples which just they make me laugh some of them are very um obvious and some of them i scratch my head at this you're using an object if you normally interact with an object while doing something else such as when you draw a star as part of an attack when an object requires your action for use um you take the use use an object action this is why you use use more than one object your first use of an object is free after that if you want to use a second object then you have to that's what you're doing with your action you're not attacking or doing something else so here's examples draw or she the sword open or close the door withdraw a potion from your backpack when you're attacking and moving at the same time pick up a dropped axe take a bobble from a table remove a ring from your finger stuff some fruit into your mouth very useful during combat plant a banner in the ground fish a few coins from your belt pouch drink all the ale in a flagon throw a lever or switch pull a torch from a sconce take a book from a shelf you can reach extinguish a small flame dot a mask very useful in this day and age pull the hood of your cloak up and over your head or put your ear to a door very not a great idea to do it in combat kick a small stone turn a key in a lock tap the floor with a 10 foot pole or hand an item to another character you know and so these things are all kind of things you can do for free you can also talk really briefly to somebody else but i like the way they they divvied all that up they kind of put it in different hierarchies of what these actions are and they i'll talk about the different actions another time and for the most part i find them to be fairly intuitive and fairly well designed and i find the the bonus action economy to be fairly well designed very often it gives you this idea that logically you can do this when this happens as a bonus action you may do this but man the writing is really sloppy in like you know 41 of the time it you know is is unclear and you know to make matters worse the actual definition of bonus action you know doesn't let you know that sometimes it's not going to be a class feature or a spell or other ability it's simply going to be something like you have a weapon in each hand or you know is this another feature of the game to have a weapon in both hands no i think that's kind of a circumstance so crappy writing in the definition of what a bonus action is or what you know what allows a bonus action to happen and then a large percentage of time really crappy writing in terms of you know letting you know that this circumstance has you know created a bonus action okay kids that's what i say about that have a good day

Channel: ivanmike1968

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Id: uWDMZ6HNAeY

Length: 10min 1sec (601 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020