Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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We kind of already know how the rules work, but the bizarre part is that the "proofs" for it are all over the place and not in the rules book, we're talking about a sentence in an article in dndbeyond on Weapon Masteries, the Conversion guide to SRD 5.2.1 and a comment on Treantmonk's YT video about an allegedly chat a 4th person had with Jeremy Crawford [redacted].
To be clear, the current interpretation that most people accept, that we're intended to make 3 attacks at Lv.4 with Dual Wielder & Nick is most certainly a solid reading of the rules. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with it, just saying that this other interpretation is also possible, a correct reading of the official rules as written. The only way that we know better about the mechanics intentions is because of all these outside proofs from other places.
The point of this post isn't really to question the intended rules but to point out this ambiguity in the rules, reiterate that WotC should fix these texts on the errata and present a long, detailed explanation, with examples, of how their rules work. That is what people paid for when they bought the books, rules that should work.
So, as we know, the "Two-Weapon Fighting" rules are now found/bound to weapons with the Light Weapon Property:
Light: When you take the Attack action on your turn and attack with a Light weapon, you can make one extra attack as a Bonus Action later on the same turn. That extra attack must be made with a different Light weapon, and you don’t add your ability modifier to the extra attack’s damage unless that modifier is negative.
There is nothing saying here in the Light Weapon Property that this extra attack, that can be used as a Bonus Action, can be done only once on your turn. According to how it's written, if one were to make two or more attacks with their Attack Action, they should be eligible to more extra attacks as well, and the only thing limiting these attacks is the fact that "you" only have one Bonus Action on your turn.
But then, comes in, The "Dude", Nick:
Nick (Weapon Mastery): When you make the extra attack of the Light property, you can make it as part of the Attack action instead of as a Bonus Action. You can make this extra attack only once per turn.
According to this, if we use a "Nick Weapon" as the other light weapon (I know I'm assuming here we should use the Nick Weapon for the Nick Attack), we can do that extra attack as the result of the first attack with a Light Weapon as part of the Attack Action "for free" instead of using our Bonus Action.
In this other interpretation, you are only limited to how many "Light Weapon Extra Attacks" you can make by the number of Bonus Actions you have (1), and you can "pull" one of those extra attacks as part of the Attack Action if you attack with a Nick Weapon, and you can only benefit from the Nick Weapon Mastery once on your turn.
So, according to RAW, even at Lv.1, a "player" with a Handaxe and a Scimitar with the Nick Weapon Mastery should be able to:
#1- Attack with the Handaxe (Light), triggering the extra attack that can be used as a Bonus Action or "for free", with a Nick Weapon (once per turn).
#2- If he uses the Nick Weapon, because the "Nick Attack" is also an attack with a Light Weapon that is part of the Attack Action, this attack should trigger another extra attack that can now only be used with a Bonus Action.
#3- The last extra attack is made with the Handaxe and uses the Bonus Action.
The catch here is, when they say "You can make this extra attack only once per turn", what does "this" mean. If they mean that you can make only one extra "Light Weapon Attack" per turn or if it's only one "Nick Mastery Extra Attack" per turn. I understand that both readings are possible.
I was inclined to think that the "this" was referring to the "Nick Attack" since it's written in the Nick Weapon Mastery. If they wanted to say that the extra attack from the Light Weapon Property can be used only on your turn, I imagine they should have written it there.
Personally, I would have also added that the "Nick Attack" can't trigger another Extra Light Weapon Attack, to prevent so many attacks until Lv.5, but it doesn't really matter because we already know the intended rules seem to require the Dual Wielder Feat (from those unofficial outside sources).
I'm not sure what are the rules for posting the rules content here but the relevant part of Dual Wielder Feat is just the Enhanced Dual Wielding:
Enhanced Dual Wielding: When you take the Attack action on your turn and attack with a weapon that has the Light property, you can make one extra attack as a Bonus Action later on the same turn with a different weapon, which must be a Melee weapon that lacks the Two-Handed property. You don't add your ability modifier to the extra attack's damage unless that modifier is negative.
The Enhanced Dual Wielding text is basically almost exactly the same as the text from the Light Weapon Property, with the only difference being it now allows you to use "any one-handed weapons (No 2H, but you can use a Versatile weapon in 2H . . . ). Again, based on the normal, average reading of the text, I don't see anything in it that would make Dual Wielder required for that extra attack as a Bonus Action.
BTW, the irony that you need at least 3 weapons if you want to take full advantage of your "Dual Wielder" Feat, assuming you'll be using one Nick Weapon, because you would be nuts to not to.
I'll be honest, we could start discussing now the minutia, things like the text from Two-Weapon Fighting Style saying "When you make an extra attack as a result of using a weapon that has the Light property,... ", using the indefinite article "an", implying there can be more than one extra attack from the Light Weapon Property, or if the texts imply that that the Dual Wielder Feat is it's own thing, different from the Light Weapon Property attacks, but, honestly, this is exactly what I don't want to do.
Sometimes part of me thinks that there must be some sick #&R!$%s at WotC that must enjoy giving us these buckets of scraps and watching us go at each other trying to figure out how it's all supposed to fit together. They probably don't, though. I guess it's probably the corporation’s fault that things end up this way.
We shouldn't have to dissect every single excruciating minutiae just to figure out the basic mechanics. If we have to do that, we're better off house ruling something else that makes sense on our table. It may not be the best, but it beats this madness. These rules should be simple enough so that even children should be able to read, right?
P.S.: little nitpick: In these texts, they keep writing "once per turn", but to make things clearer they should be writing "once on your turn", because they know we only have a Bonus Action and an Attack Action on our turn. Instead of deceiving some rogues into thinking they'll be able to squeeze two opportunity attacks and another chance to deliver their sneak attack out of this until they catch their mistake, just write "on your turn".
I think you’re confusing things by referring to “the Nick attack” and then treating it as different from the extra attack from the Light weapon property. The “Nick attack” IS the “extra attack from the Light weapon property” and is “this extra attack” that can only be made once per turn.
Yes, this is correct. Nick doesn't give you a new attack; it's modifying the extra attack you get from the Light property, which it explicitly says can only be made once per turn.
Dual Wielder gives you a second way of making an attack as a bonus action. Normally you can only do one of the two on a turn, because you only have one bonus action per turn. If you have the Nick weapon mastery, that one doesn't use up your bonus action, so then you can do both on the same turn.
These rules are not written particularly well, but they're not actually ambiguous.
pronouns: he/she/they
Yep. Nick is the key, and it says:
When it says "this extra attack", we must ask which extra attack it is referring to, and the answer is "the extra attack of the Light property", because that's the only extra attack mentioned in Nick.
Some people argue that it means the specific attack that you made as part of your attack action due to Nick, but any specific attack can inherently be made only once, so that reading is arguing that that entire sentence is merely tautological. (That reading also has very bad mechanical consequences.)
The thing is, these aren't the "proofs". Everything can be derived from the text of the PHB, and was before we got the external confirmation. It just requires careful attention to how the abilities are written. (Which is poor rule-writing practice.)
What they do do is convince some people who are sure that their reading is actually the correct one. Virtually no rules text is so clear that nobody can misread it, and if you don't like the correct reading, it's very easy to convince yourself that that reading is incorrect.
Yes, as I've said, I'm not discussing the main interpretation, we know it's as solid as it can be with these poorly written rules. My point is that the rules become, for all practical purposes, ambiguous enough because they are not well written, leading many average readers to read them and, understandably, understanding them this other way, or even weirder ways.
Again, the average person shouldn't have to buy the Oxford Modern English Grammar in a bundle with the other rulebooks to be able to understand it's basic mechanics. Regardless of the specific wording used, it's just hard to believe that these convoluted "Two-Weapon" Fighting mechanics is the best thing they could come up with and then couldn't find the words to clearly describe how they work, nor have tried to fix it since then.
Again, I'll insist that, in the way that these rules were written, they are ambiguous enough for the average reader to interpret them either way, and I have no desire to further discuss the grammar details that could determine how right or wrong these interpretations are, because I refuse to waste my time and energy by trying to fix something that for which there's no excuse to be broken (poorly written) in the first place.
Given that your justification for your position involves 1,300 words spread across over a dozen paragraphs, I think we can rule out this being something the "average person" would conclude. I've played with "average people" who've taken Nick and none have come to this conclusion.
Nick says
Let's atomise this without getting into semantics
"When you make the extra attack of the Light Property" - simple, this only fires when you're making an extra attack and that extra attack must come from the Light weapon property rule
"you can make it as part of the Attack action instead of as a Bonus Action" - cool, I know that the Light rule let's me make an extra attack as a Bonus Action, Nick just moves it to be part of the attack that triggered Nick
"You can make this extra attack only once per turn." - Gotcha, I can't trigger Nick on a Light Attack multiple times per turn because "this attack" is clearly referring to the attack I moved using Nick
Your approach ignores that last clause, attempting to take a second Light attack even though Nick says you can't do that.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
@Kchaka I think your thread is more or less similar to Is Dual Wielder Necessary?
A lot of people have had similar doubts about Light, Dual Wielder and Nick in the past. As an example of this:
I think that's why Your Guide to Weapon Mastery in the 2024 Player's Handbook purposefully clarified that;
Now it's true that without Nick Mastery, you could theoretically make more than one extra attack of the Light Property if you could take several Bonus Action on your turn but i don't think there's any way to do so to this date.
Nor, I think, is there likely to ever be in first-party books. The balance issues would be hairy.
Yeah, one consequence of WotC's current "no redundancy in language ever" approach is that there's a lot of stuff out there that's very clearly intended (for balance reasons) to be limited to one use per turn, but that don't actually say that because they require the use of a bonus action.
pronouns: he/she/they
Yeah and if it was there would likely be crazier stuff you can do than this!