This is why I allow Bonus Actions to interrupt Actions, just like movement. If you can split-move-and-fire, then you can BA Shove in between your 1st Attack and and an Extra Attack. (Or in the case of Fighters, between any of their Attacks.) That seems to solve the vast majority of the issues and makes Shield Master make sense.
You absolutely can interrupt Actions with Bonus Actions, because there is no rule that you can't, and because Bonus Actions can be taken whenever they tell you they can. The prohibition on mid-attack shoving doesn't flow from a general rule that Bonus Actions can't be taken whenever they want (including in the middle of a multi-step Action), but rather from JC's interpretation of the specific trigger of Shield Master. He interpreted "if you take the Attack action" to mean "after you complete the Attack action", which is wrong and bad, and put us in this position. If you just accept that you "take" the Attack Action as soon as you make your first attack, then there's no problem with Attack, Shove, Attack as most people expect. Conventional thinking about other Bonus Actions, like TWF and PAM, already understand this to be true.
Yeah, as far as I’m concerned if a 20th level fighter attacks 1ce then they have by default “taken” the attack action. I mean, if they hadn’t, how did they attack?!? And Zshield Master in particular says “if you take the attack action” not “if you took the attack action.”
Exactly. If a 5+ fighter uses the Attack action to make a melee attack, they are explicitly allowed to then move around before taking another melee attack. We know that because there is a "Moving Between Attacks" section that makes it clear. So let's say they want to move away from an enemy after that first attack, and announce that they are going to "take the Disengage action" to do so safely... why can't they? Because they have already "taken the Attack action", even though it isn't yet completed!
There is no other verb than "take" that 5E offers for what a mid-Attack character has done to commit to Attack, they've "taken" it. Shield Master cannot be the only the place where "take" is read to have some other meaning than it has everywhere else. If they want to errata it to say "After you have completed the Attack action..." to come in line with the JC's opinion on RAI, great. But RAW, nah, it doesn't say that right now.
My DM ruled it as usable between attacks, mercifully. I try not to direct ire at JC much, but man... what an odd ruling. The feat is already full of half-meassures, why also make the first function nearly worthless?
I rolled really well on this paladin, and I'm excited for some feats to make things more flavorful and potent.
- The target must be no more than One Size Larger than you, and must be within 5ft of you.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove before using theAttack action to try to shove a creature within 5 ftof you with your shield. If you do, that creature hasAdvantageon its Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove in between attacks if you’re able to make multiple attacks with the Attack Action.
-The rest of the Shield Master Feat remains normal
- The target must be no more than One Size Larger than you, and must be within 5ft of you.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove before using theAttack action to try to shove a creature within 5 ftof you with your shield. If you do, that creature hasAdvantageon its Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove in between attacks if you’re able to make multiple attacks with the Attack Action.
-The rest of the Shield Master Feat remains normal
That the target can only be up to one size larger than you is already in the rules for shoving.
question on this: can you use the bonus shove on a different enemy from the one you attacked? i would have thought so based on raw but my DM ruled against it (but i doubt it was based on any knowledge of the actual rules...)
question on this: can you use the bonus shove on a different enemy from the one you attacked? i would have thought so based on raw but my DM ruled against it (but i doubt it was based on any knowledge of the actual rules...)
you can unless he says you cant
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I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
question on this: can you use the bonus shove on a different enemy from the one you attacked? i would have thought so based on raw but my DM ruled against it (but i doubt it was based on any knowledge of the actual rules...)
you can unless he says you cant
Yeah, i don't think the rules require that you only use the bonus shove on the target you've already attacked. Hopefully you can work it out with your DM!
Clarification about bonus actions: if a feature says you can do X as a bonus action if you do Y, you must do Y before you can do X. For Shield Master, that means the bonus action must come after the Attack action. You decide when it happens afterward that turn. #DnD
Clarification about bonus actions: if a feature says you can do X as a bonus action if you do Y, you must do Y before you can do X. For Shield Master, that means the bonus action must come after the Attack action. You decide when it happens afterward that turn. #DnD
Not quite.
This has been discussed in this thread and elsewhere. The response here isn't quite correct. In the case of shield master, RAW, the shove bonus action is enabled by taking the Attack action. There is nothing indicating that the Attack action must be completed before the bonus action is available and when a character has a bonus action available it can be taken at ANY time which would include between attacks of a character with Extra Attack.
Rules:
"If you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action to try to shove a creature within 5 feet of you with your shield." -Requires taking the attack action - not completing it.
"You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn, unless the bonus action’s timing is specified" -Bonus actions can be taken at ANY time if the character has a bonus action available.
So, in the case of shield master, make an attack, the bonus action becomes available and can be taken at any time if desired, including immediately after the first attack of an Attack action. Bonus action shove and then make any extra attacks granted by the attack action.
And if you want a JC quote saying the same thing ... https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1105183657877135360 ... though I don't consider anything outside of the Sage Advice Compendium as remotely "official". The responses are often JC saying in the moment how he might run it which may or may not agree completely with RAW and may change over the years.
I haven't read through this entire thread but I don't really agree with this interpretation or ruling that you can take a Bonus action before your action completes. The phrase "take an action" appears everywhere throughout the game but "complete an action" is a phrase that is practically never used. In my opinion, the common language used in the rules imply that "taking" an action means that the action is executed all the way through completion. In other words, actions are sequential, not nested.
There is a very specific detail about the manner in which certain actions may be executed that is described in the rules in Chapter 9 -> Movement and Position -> Breaking Up Your Move -> Moving Between Attacks: "If you take an action that includes more than one weapon attack, you can break up your movement even further by moving between those attacks". Extra Attack is mentioned as an example of a feature that would allow for this manner of execution of the Attack action. Note that this is a property of how movement works in the game -- it's not implied that this works for anything else within the action economy.
While the rules do not specifically say that actions cannot be nested or cannot overlap with each other, they really shouldn't have to. That would be inconsistent with the structure of how the rules are organized throughout the game. Just because the rules only say that you take an action "on your turn" and that you "You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn" doesn't mean that these things can be nested or overlapped with each other in my opinion. T hese statements are talking about the window of opportunity for when you can do these things and in which order you can do them in sequentially.
Here is a contrived example that I think might show how this can get out of hand: Suppose I am in a room and I need to keep the doorway ahead of me unblocked so that my companions can move through it on their turn. Above the doorway is a cage full of monsters that are making ranged attacks against us and could continue to attack through the doorway. There is a lever nearby that can be pulled -- it has a trigger in a middle position that lowers the cage to the ground which blocks the doorway but when the lever is pulled all the way the cage also rises back up to its original position. The lever is guarded by and is held in place by a hostile monster. Pulling the lever also drops another monster down from the ceiling, landing right next to the lever.
Here is what I want to do: Could I take the attack action and use one of my two attacks of my Extra Attack feature to kill the monster that was holding the lever (assume it was an unarmed strike) and then action surge to take an action to pull the lever. While in the middle of pulling this lever (but I haven't finished doing so yet) the cage is lowered to the ground level, putting the monsters inside within range of my fireball spell. While still pulling this lever I now use a Hasted action to cast fireball, killing the monsters in the cage. I now continue and finish executing my "pull the lever" action which sends the cage back up, unblocking the door. This results in a monster dropping from the ceiling next to me. As a bonus action I now shove this creature to the ground and THEN I use the 2nd attack from my Extra Attack feature of my original action to kill this monster?
Once you've done one attack, you've taken the attack action.
Imagine this: a Paladin has Extra Attack. He attacks a goblin, and 100 to 0s it in one swing.
The closest goblin is 20ft away and the paladin is out of movement and has no ranged weapons. But he does have spells. Can he use his action to cast Command at this 2nd goblin?
Yes/no? And why?
Well, despite the fact that he "can" attack an additional time when he takes the attack action, the attack action itself is the one attack. So he's already taken an action this turn. The Attack action. And so cannot take the Cast a Spell action.
And, because taking that first attack is proof positive that he has indeed taken the attack action already, he also could use a bonus action shove if he had Shield Master. (Should suddenly there be a valid target in range)
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I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
The Extra Attack feature let you attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn so to me you're still taking it after the first attack.
So my question is -- if we use your interpretation and just have an understanding that the general rules allows us to nest and overlap all aspects of our action economy (please see my crazy contrived example above) and to break up our actions and bonus actions into smaller parts whereby we can switch our focus back and forth between them -- do a little bit of this one and then a little bit of that one and then come back and do a little more of this one and so on back and forth until the action has been "completed" . . . then why does the rulebook go through all of the trouble to explicitly detail that you CAN break up your movement between actions or between attacks? They went out of their way to write two whole paragraphs under Breaking Up Your Move and Moving Between Attacks that explicitly allows movement to work that way. Why bother? Why not tear that section out of the book and just assume that it works that way anyways based on the lack of reference to this functionality throughout the rest of the rulebook as we're already doing with your implementation?
To me, just because the rulebook doesn't specifically address something or doesn't explicitly say that something cannot be done -- that doesn't automatically mean that it can be done. Rules can't be written that way -- we can't possibly list all of the ways that something doesn't work. We look to the rules to see how it does work. And to me, a specific exception or perhaps more of a specific feature was written that describes what can be done with movement. The fact that similar wording doesn't exist with respect to actions and bonus actions is evidence that it does NOT work that way, not the other way around.
In my opinion, an action or a bonus action is a block of activity that is taken and completed before the next block of activity. It is a discreet amount of effort that is taken to accomplish a task and these tasks are accomplished and completed sequentially. We often use phrases such as "if you want to do that you have to use your action". It seems a lot more complicated to say "Ok, as long as you use your action you can go ahead and do a little bit of that and then do a little more of it a bit later and then some more of it some time after that and eventually you can accomplish the task in that manner. But only one action was taken to do that." I think that's pretty weird and is very unlikely to be the intended way that the game is supposed to function. It's a turn based game. One creature gets a turn. At that time tasks are performed until the action economy is used up. Then it's the next creature's turn and they perform some tasks. And so on. Boom, boom, boom, it's very methodical. I do this and I do this and I do this, ok who is next? Ok my turn, I do this and this, who is next?
Once you've done one attack, you've taken the attack action.
Imagine this: a Paladin has Extra Attack. He attacks a goblin, and 100 to 0s it in one swing.
The closest goblin is 20ft away and the paladin is out of movement and has no ranged weapons. But he does have spells. Can he use his action to cast Command at this 2nd goblin?
Yes/no? And why?
Well, despite the fact that he "can" attack an additional time when he takes the attack action, the attack action itself is the one attack. So he's already taken an action this turn. The Attack action. And so cannot take the Cast a Spell action.
And, because taking that first attack is proof positive that he has indeed taken the attack action already, he also could use a bonus action shove if he had Shield Master. (Should suddenly there be a valid target in range)
And there's the meat of the 13 pages of discussion right there. It will not be hard for you to find dozens of arguments both supporting and contradicting your position.
Another indication to me that Extra Attacks all still occur during the Attack action is the existance for more specific Moving Between Attacks rule.
Normally, you can break up your movement on your turn, using some of your speed before and after your action. but if you take an action that includes more than one weapon attack, you can break up your movement even further by moving between those attacks.
Just ask your DM. The entirety of all books in 5th edition come down to that sentence. The rules vary, ask your DM.
I've had one DM say you can shove at any time but must attack on the same turn, one say you can only shove after the attack, one say yo ucan split them up, and one tell me, "Just take Telekinetic it's better anyway", which is a whole other thing...
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This is why I allow Bonus Actions to interrupt Actions, just like movement. If you can split-move-and-fire, then you can BA Shove in between your 1st Attack and and an Extra Attack. (Or in the case of Fighters, between any of their Attacks.) That seems to solve the vast majority of the issues and makes Shield Master make sense.
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You absolutely can interrupt Actions with Bonus Actions, because there is no rule that you can't, and because Bonus Actions can be taken whenever they tell you they can. The prohibition on mid-attack shoving doesn't flow from a general rule that Bonus Actions can't be taken whenever they want (including in the middle of a multi-step Action), but rather from JC's interpretation of the specific trigger of Shield Master. He interpreted "if you take the Attack action" to mean "after you complete the Attack action", which is wrong and bad, and put us in this position. If you just accept that you "take" the Attack Action as soon as you make your first attack, then there's no problem with Attack, Shove, Attack as most people expect. Conventional thinking about other Bonus Actions, like TWF and PAM, already understand this to be true.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Yeah, as far as I’m concerned if a 20th level fighter attacks 1ce then they have by default “taken” the attack action. I mean, if they hadn’t, how did they attack?!? And Zshield Master in particular says “if you take the attack action” not “if you took the attack action.”
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Exactly. If a 5+ fighter uses the Attack action to make a melee attack, they are explicitly allowed to then move around before taking another melee attack. We know that because there is a "Moving Between Attacks" section that makes it clear. So let's say they want to move away from an enemy after that first attack, and announce that they are going to "take the Disengage action" to do so safely... why can't they? Because they have already "taken the Attack action", even though it isn't yet completed!
There is no other verb than "take" that 5E offers for what a mid-Attack character has done to commit to Attack, they've "taken" it. Shield Master cannot be the only the place where "take" is read to have some other meaning than it has everywhere else. If they want to errata it to say "After you have completed the Attack action..." to come in line with the JC's opinion on RAI, great. But RAW, nah, it doesn't say that right now.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
My DM ruled it as usable between attacks, mercifully. I try not to direct ire at JC much, but man... what an odd ruling. The feat is already full of half-meassures, why also make the first function nearly worthless?
I rolled really well on this paladin, and I'm excited for some feats to make things more flavorful and potent.
My House Rule on this.......
SHIELD MASTER FEAT:
- The target must be no more than One Size Larger than you, and must be within 5ft of you.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove before using the Attack action to try to shove a creature within 5 ft of you with your shield. If you do, that creature has Advantage on its Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check.
- You may use a Bonus Action Shove in between attacks if you’re able to make multiple attacks with the Attack Action.
- The rest of the Shield Master Feat remains normal
If you want sugar coating, go buy a dessert....
That the target can only be up to one size larger than you is already in the rules for shoving.
Disregard
sorry for necroing this thread :-D
question on this: can you use the bonus shove on a different enemy from the one you attacked? i would have thought so based on raw but my DM ruled against it (but i doubt it was based on any knowledge of the actual rules...)
you can unless he says you cant
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
Yeah, i don't think the rules require that you only use the bonus shove on the target you've already attacked. Hopefully you can work it out with your DM!
Per Jeremy Crawford:
https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/994993596989300736
Clarification about bonus actions: if a feature says you can do X as a bonus action if you do Y, you must do Y before you can do X. For Shield Master, that means the bonus action must come after the Attack action. You decide when it happens afterward that turn. #DnD
Not quite.
This has been discussed in this thread and elsewhere. The response here isn't quite correct. In the case of shield master, RAW, the shove bonus action is enabled by taking the Attack action. There is nothing indicating that the Attack action must be completed before the bonus action is available and when a character has a bonus action available it can be taken at ANY time which would include between attacks of a character with Extra Attack.
Rules:
"If you take the Attack action on your turn, you can use a bonus action to try to shove a creature within 5 feet of you with your shield." -Requires taking the attack action - not completing it.
"You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn, unless the bonus action’s timing is specified" -Bonus actions can be taken at ANY time if the character has a bonus action available.
So, in the case of shield master, make an attack, the bonus action becomes available and can be taken at any time if desired, including immediately after the first attack of an Attack action. Bonus action shove and then make any extra attacks granted by the attack action.
And if you want a JC quote saying the same thing ... https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/1105183657877135360 ... though I don't consider anything outside of the Sage Advice Compendium as remotely "official". The responses are often JC saying in the moment how he might run it which may or may not agree completely with RAW and may change over the years.
I haven't read through this entire thread but I don't really agree with this interpretation or ruling that you can take a Bonus action before your action completes. The phrase "take an action" appears everywhere throughout the game but "complete an action" is a phrase that is practically never used. In my opinion, the common language used in the rules imply that "taking" an action means that the action is executed all the way through completion. In other words, actions are sequential, not nested.
There is a very specific detail about the manner in which certain actions may be executed that is described in the rules in Chapter 9 -> Movement and Position -> Breaking Up Your Move -> Moving Between Attacks: "If you take an action that includes more than one weapon attack, you can break up your movement even further by moving between those attacks". Extra Attack is mentioned as an example of a feature that would allow for this manner of execution of the Attack action. Note that this is a property of how movement works in the game -- it's not implied that this works for anything else within the action economy.
While the rules do not specifically say that actions cannot be nested or cannot overlap with each other, they really shouldn't have to. That would be inconsistent with the structure of how the rules are organized throughout the game. Just because the rules only say that you take an action "on your turn" and that you "You choose when to take a bonus action during your turn" doesn't mean that these things can be nested or overlapped with each other in my opinion. T hese statements are talking about the window of opportunity for when you can do these things and in which order you can do them in sequentially.
Here is a contrived example that I think might show how this can get out of hand: Suppose I am in a room and I need to keep the doorway ahead of me unblocked so that my companions can move through it on their turn. Above the doorway is a cage full of monsters that are making ranged attacks against us and could continue to attack through the doorway. There is a lever nearby that can be pulled -- it has a trigger in a middle position that lowers the cage to the ground which blocks the doorway but when the lever is pulled all the way the cage also rises back up to its original position. The lever is guarded by and is held in place by a hostile monster. Pulling the lever also drops another monster down from the ceiling, landing right next to the lever.
Here is what I want to do: Could I take the attack action and use one of my two attacks of my Extra Attack feature to kill the monster that was holding the lever (assume it was an unarmed strike) and then action surge to take an action to pull the lever. While in the middle of pulling this lever (but I haven't finished doing so yet) the cage is lowered to the ground level, putting the monsters inside within range of my fireball spell. While still pulling this lever I now use a Hasted action to cast fireball, killing the monsters in the cage. I now continue and finish executing my "pull the lever" action which sends the cage back up, unblocking the door. This results in a monster dropping from the ceiling next to me. As a bonus action I now shove this creature to the ground and THEN I use the 2nd attack from my Extra Attack feature of my original action to kill this monster?
Taking the attack action is one attack.
Once you've done one attack, you've taken the attack action.
Imagine this: a Paladin has Extra Attack. He attacks a goblin, and 100 to 0s it in one swing.
The closest goblin is 20ft away and the paladin is out of movement and has no ranged weapons. But he does have spells. Can he use his action to cast Command at this 2nd goblin?
Yes/no? And why?
Well, despite the fact that he "can" attack an additional time when he takes the attack action, the attack action itself is the one attack. So he's already taken an action this turn. The Attack action. And so cannot take the Cast a Spell action.
And, because taking that first attack is proof positive that he has indeed taken the attack action already, he also could use a bonus action shove if he had Shield Master. (Should suddenly there be a valid target in range)
I'm probably laughing.
It is apparently so hard to program Aberrant Mind and Clockwork Soul spell-swapping into dndbeyond they had to remake the game without it rather than implement it.
The Extra Attack feature let you attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn so to me you're still taking it after the first attack.
So my question is -- if we use your interpretation and just have an understanding that the general rules allows us to nest and overlap all aspects of our action economy (please see my crazy contrived example above) and to break up our actions and bonus actions into smaller parts whereby we can switch our focus back and forth between them -- do a little bit of this one and then a little bit of that one and then come back and do a little more of this one and so on back and forth until the action has been "completed" . . . then why does the rulebook go through all of the trouble to explicitly detail that you CAN break up your movement between actions or between attacks? They went out of their way to write two whole paragraphs under Breaking Up Your Move and Moving Between Attacks that explicitly allows movement to work that way. Why bother? Why not tear that section out of the book and just assume that it works that way anyways based on the lack of reference to this functionality throughout the rest of the rulebook as we're already doing with your implementation?
To me, just because the rulebook doesn't specifically address something or doesn't explicitly say that something cannot be done -- that doesn't automatically mean that it can be done. Rules can't be written that way -- we can't possibly list all of the ways that something doesn't work. We look to the rules to see how it does work. And to me, a specific exception or perhaps more of a specific feature was written that describes what can be done with movement. The fact that similar wording doesn't exist with respect to actions and bonus actions is evidence that it does NOT work that way, not the other way around.
In my opinion, an action or a bonus action is a block of activity that is taken and completed before the next block of activity. It is a discreet amount of effort that is taken to accomplish a task and these tasks are accomplished and completed sequentially. We often use phrases such as "if you want to do that you have to use your action". It seems a lot more complicated to say "Ok, as long as you use your action you can go ahead and do a little bit of that and then do a little more of it a bit later and then some more of it some time after that and eventually you can accomplish the task in that manner. But only one action was taken to do that." I think that's pretty weird and is very unlikely to be the intended way that the game is supposed to function. It's a turn based game. One creature gets a turn. At that time tasks are performed until the action economy is used up. Then it's the next creature's turn and they perform some tasks. And so on. Boom, boom, boom, it's very methodical. I do this and I do this and I do this, ok who is next? Ok my turn, I do this and this, who is next?
And there's the meat of the 13 pages of discussion right there. It will not be hard for you to find dozens of arguments both supporting and contradicting your position.
"Not all those who wander are lost"
Another indication to me that Extra Attacks all still occur during the Attack action is the existance for more specific Moving Between Attacks rule.
Normally, you can break up your movement on your turn, using some of your speed before and after your action. but if you take an action that includes more than one weapon attack, you can break up your movement even further by moving between those attacks.
Just ask your DM. The entirety of all books in 5th edition come down to that sentence. The rules vary, ask your DM.
I've had one DM say you can shove at any time but must attack on the same turn, one say you can only shove after the attack, one say yo ucan split them up, and one tell me, "Just take Telekinetic it's better anyway", which is a whole other thing...